Work, damned hard work, and the occasional young officer who got in the way. That’s the Alcan project that dominated Chester Russell’s memory. “We was running cats. We was doing our thing, and the other fellows doing the culverts and the bridges, and… We never looked back. We just kept going.”
Young Lieutenants Another Officer Squared Away
Interviewer Brown summed it up. “Pedal to the metal. We’ve got a road to build. Let’s get her done.”
Besides the bulldozers, Chester remembered mostly hand tools. They had the old two-man chain saws, but they didn’t have many and they didn’t work that well.
When a young officer got in the way, the soldiers could deal with that. Chester remembered a story. “I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I’m pretty positive it was.”
Soldiers working on the Liard River Bridge cut trees for pilings from the surrounding woods, and the young officer in charge rushed them out in frigid cold at the crack of dawn, while he sat in camp drinking coffee. They could have waited until later in the day when the weather warmed and easily harvested all the trees they needed.
Disgusted, the soldiers headed out one day and they notched an entire grove of trees. They just took their axes and cut deep notches at the base of the trunks. When the young officer finished his coffee and ambled out to check on their progress, he walked to the middle of the grove. The axemen “all started yelling: ‘Timber!’ (laughs)
Interviewer Brown. “You guys play hard, don’t you?”
Chester laughed again. In truth the men had the junior officers “over the barrel”. It’s hard to punish men already working on what amounted to a cold weather chain gang. “They couldn’t get us in any worse than what we was already in.”
In the end most of the officers turned out to be good, but the soldiers knew how to “course correct” the ones who didn’t measure up.
Cool story, and a little ironic to our times, we as the older ones want to work but politics among other things try to tie our hands…..but some how we manage….😎
You have summed it up nicely
As a familiar saying goes:”Never send a boy to do a Man’s Job.”
A favorite among the seasoned elders of my day.
Sadly, some of the 90 day wonders, in some cases, had to learn the hard way.
As a former 90 day wonder, I couldn’t agree more.