American Experience (1988–…): Season 17, Episode 4 - Building the Alaska Highway - full transcript
The creation of the 1,500-mile Alaska-Canada Highway.
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November 20, 1942.
On a remote vista
in Yukon Territory,
several hundred men braved
bitter cold temperatures
to mark the end of an ordeal
few people thought possible...
The completion of the 1,500-mile
Alaska Highway.
The building of the Alaska
Highway represented
one of the great triumphs
of the U.S. Army in 1942.
They needed a high-profile,
high-energy,
big, dynamic project that said,
"We'll do anything we have to do
to defend North America."
Born out of the shock
of Pearl Harbor,
the Alaska Highway was
a first step
in America's defense strategy...
A vital military supply line
during World War II.
Over 10,000 Army engineers were
rushed to the far Northwest.
Their mission was
to blaze a road to Alaska
in less than a year.
They battled mountains, muskeg
and mosquitoes
on a front that stretched
across miles and miles
of rugged, subarctic terrain.
We were in wilderness.
That's where the road was...
Wilderness.
Uncharted...
nobody had been there before.
We kept the tractors going
as much as we could.
It was... it was tough.
It was actually a fight
for survival
against the weather.
For a brief moment,
their heroic efforts uplifted
a nation in need of good news.
But soon other war stories
overshadowed
the triumph in the North,
and the victory was quickly
forgotten.
December 1941.
30-year-old Ruth Gruber,
a journalist from New York,
was on a fact-finding expedition
for the U.S. secretary
of the interior
to help promote
Alaska Territory.
Eight months into her far-flung
travels, Gruber found herself
a part of an urgent military
mission in the Bering Sea.
I was on a Coast Guard cutter.
We were searching for Japanese
fishing canneries
that we suspected were spying,
when word came that Pearl Harbor
had been attacked,
and it was really
a frightening moment.
We didn't know how soon
the Japanese would decide
it was time to attack Alaska.
FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT
We are now in this war.
So far, the news has been
all bad.
We have learned
that our hemisphere is not
immune from severe attack,
that we cannot measure
our safety
in terms of miles on any map
anymore.
In the weeks
following Pearl Harbor,
Americans feared that Japan's
march across the Pacific
would continue to the west coast
of North America.
People who thought
they were secure,
who thought that in fact
the world war was never going
to affect them directly,
all of a sudden now are living
with the realization
that the bombs could come
the next day,
that the next Pearl Harbor
could be Vancouver,
it could be San Francisco,
it could be Los Angeles.
Alaska sat particularly
vulnerable.
The territory's Aleutian Islands
were only 750 miles from Japan's
closest military base.
The Aleutian Islands
stretched out invitingly
toward a shrewd
and daring enemy,
and Japs in Alaska would be
a direct threat
to the west coast of America
and also to the interior.
At the beginning of 1942,
the United States had some
20,000 troops
stationed across Alaska.
Of the Army's 12 bombers
and 20 fighters,
only half were ready
to meet an attack.
Alaska's defenses were woeful.
The officer commanding
the Alaska Defense Command
was sending wires back
to Washington saying,
"If the Japanese come here,
I can't defend Alaska.
I don't have the resources."
As a quick solution,
the Army Air Force rushed
two squadrons
of bombers and fighters
to the territory
by way of
the Northwest Staging Route.
The series of airfields in
Northwest Canada were designed
to ferry military aircraft
and supplies
from the Lower 48
to Alaska Territory.
The airfields were in a very
primitive state of construction
and not all of them were
operational.
The combination
of lack of navigation aids,
untrained pilots, bad weather
and bad luck resulted
in most of those planes crashing
before they got to Alaska.
It was a real fiasco.
For the Americans it became an
immediate and pressing issue...
"What do we do
to defend Alaska?"
It was extremely vulnerable.
Very quickly the idea
of a highway to Alaska emerged
as a major element in the entire
North American strategy
for the defense
of the far Northwest.
On February 11, just two months
after Pearl Harbor,
President Roosevelt approved
the construction
of a highway to Alaska.
With sea lanes under attack
and air passage unreliable,
the secretary of war declared
that a land route to Alaska
was imperative
from the viewpoint
of national defense.
Military planners decided
to connect the air bases
of the Northwest Staging Route.
Roosevelt certainly saw a need
to secure an air corridor
to Alaska.
And that's what the highway was
primarily designed to support.
The decision meant that the road
would have to be blazed
across 1,500 miles
of remote subarctic wilderness
and through the rugged
Canadian Rockies.
The terrain had not been mapped,
and it would be like going
from Washington, D.C.,
to Denver, Colorado,
with no maps.
You just kind of knew
about where it was,
and in the process
you're building a road.
The War Department snapped
into action,
assigning the monumental job
to the Army Corps of Engineers.
The order was deceptively
simple:
build a road to Alaska
as fast as possible
and before the arrival
of the next winter,
about eight months away.
The Corps rushed over 10,000 men
north on troop trains
loaded with some of the 250,000
tons of equipment, materials
and supplies
the mission would require.
The battle plan called
for seven engineering regiments.
Three would be made up
of African-American soldiers.
Once in place, the engineers
would attack the wilderness
from several fronts, joining the
long road section by section.
It was a hastily conceived plan
hatched in Washington
by officers with no experience
working in arctic regions.
The American government
had to reassure
the people of North America
that the continent was safe,
and that putting a couple more
ships on the West Coast
wasn't going to do it.
They needed a high-profile,
high-energy,
big, dynamic project that said,
"We'll do anything we have to do
to defend North America."
Now a key part
of protecting Alaska
would fall to soldiers armed,
not with tanks,
but with bulldozers.
There were people who said,
"This can't be done,
certainly not in a year."
There was no certainty
that they would find a buildable
route through the Rockies.
They didn't know whether they
could get it through or not.
They really did not know.
In March, the engineers began
arriving in the far North.
As his ship pulled into Prince
William Sound, Hayward Oubre,
a university-trained artist
from New Orleans,
caught sight of Alaska.
When you first behold
the beauty and nature in Alaska,
you are overwhelmed.
It was in April, the snow was on
the ground, I had my parka on,
and I said, "Praise God.
I've never seen
a landscape so beautiful."
John Bollin had quit
his dry cleaning job in Virginia
to enlist in the Army.
Our first look at Alaska
was in Skagway.
To see a mountain close up,
and to go up it,
it's a thrill of a lifetime.
And you get to wherever
you think the top is,
and there's more snow up there
than you ever seen.
For other soldiers,
like Henry Geyer,
a truck driver from Pittsburgh,
the first day hinted
at hardships to come.
It was 30, 40 below zero,
and you were going
from California,
Fort Ord
and that kind of weather,
up into snow and ice,
and so it wasn't...
it was no picnic.
The first day we were there,
our food was freezing
in our mess kits
and we had to unload the train,
the trains were coming in
with supplies and people.
From there on in, it was just
struggle and organizing.
Fred Mims, a South Carolina
bus driver before the war,
served as a lieutenant
in the Quartermaster Corps
attached to the highway project.
In charge of supplying
the troops,
the Quartermaster Corps
had issued
effective cold-weather gear
like down sleeping bags,
fur parkas and lambskin caps.
But the rubber boots and woolen
gloves the soldiers got
were no match
for the extreme cold.
"There were many cases
of badly frozen feet,"
reported one officer.
"Tractor operators were found
along the road
"sitting by their parked
equipment and crying violently,
so great was the cold."
Most of the soldiers
sent to the North
had a lot to learn
about road building.
Chester Russell,
from Kingsburg, California,
who had worked the rodeo circuit
before being drafted,
suddenly was told
he would be driving
a 19-ton D-bulldozer.
I ended up as a swamper... what
they call a swamper... on a D-8.
A D-8 tractor...
I'd never seen one before.
At 21 years old,
I wasn't prepared,
I'll guarantee you.
I'll guarantee you
I wasn't prepared.
The units that served
on the Alaska Highway
had less experience
with the heavy equipment
than would have been desirable.
So they had some
on-the-job training to do
in difficult circumstances.
I got assigned to the
maintenance of the bulldozers,
and my first actual experience
with the bulldozers
was after we got there.
My degree was
in metallurgical engineering.
I was more comfortable with
a microscope in a laboratory
than I was with a bulldozer
or some of the other tools
of highway-building.
My responsibility was to take
care of the heavy equipment.
Most of the equipment
I had never seen.
Being an asphalt and a concrete
city boy,
I didn't know nothing
about this heavy equipment.
When we went up there,
we learned on the job...
And in a hurry.
My job was to try
to organize the supplies
that were coming in in crates.
We had just mountains
of big crates of canned goods.
We were pretty well confused
about the stuff,
because most of our people
didn't know the difference...
A number 2 can of beans
and a number 10 can of beans.
We had to organize
and find out how to do that.
It took a while to get started.
The engineers overwhelmed
small towns
like Dawson Creek,
British Columbia,
where the arrival
of one regiment
tripled the town's population
almost overnight.
No one knew what was going on.
We didn't know anything about it
until the troop trains
started coming and the equipment
and the Army vehicles,
and it was just amazing.
This is an outfit of a thousand
men, several hundred trucks,
dozens and dozens
of bulldozers and cranes
and other pieces
of heavy equipment
and literally hundreds of tons
of supplies...
Everything from gasoline
and diesel fuel
to food and spare parts.
It was very exciting.
There was American soldiers
everywhere.
It made us a great deal
more aware of the war.
They were building this highway
to protect us.
We felt very involved.
In April, shocking news from the
Philippines reached the North.
Nearly 80,000 American
and Filipino troops
had surrendered in Bataan.
Officers on the highway decided
to start work right away,
even though they had no route
through the Rocky Mountains.
On April 11, 1942,
construction officially began
on the Alaska Highway.
Of the 11,000 men sent north,
nearly 4,000 were
African American.
As throughout
the segregated U.S. military,
white and black engineers
on the Alaska Highway project
were kept apart.
Black soldiers worked under
the command of white officers.
Faced with a shortage of troops
after Pearl Harbor,
the secretary of war
had forced the Army
to assign black engineers
to the mission.
The Army had a policy
at the time
that was based
on the supposition
that blacks would not function
well in extreme cold climates,
and so there was a...
a kind of de facto ban
on sending black units to
anyplace like Alaska or Canada.
The employment
of African-American troops
on the Alaska Highway was seen
by some in the Army, I'm sure,
as an experiment.
Not everybody thought
it was the best choice.
Many white officers had doubts
about the character and ability
of black soldiers.
"The Negro is careless,
shiftless, irresponsible
and secretive," described
a military study.
"He is best handled with praise
and by ridicule."
This study came from
the Army War College.
It's a finishing school
for officers
who are going to have, uh...
successful careers,
and this is what
they were being taught.
And so you can imagine
the kinds of stereotypes
that the officers entered
this experience with
and how difficult it was
for the black troops.
In the minds of
most senior white officers,
black troops were not as capable
in terms of their technical
efficiency and ability
to use the equipment.
There was an expectation
that they would do poorly.
While it today sounds
very prejudiced,
it was generally felt that
the African-American troops were
a little lacking in
the necessary qualifications
of intelligence and background
and training
to do as well
as a corresponding Caucasian.
Almost anything that they did
was likely to be
severely scrutinized.
These men were
under enormous pressure.
People who've not traveled into
the northwest of North America
have absolutely no idea what
the engineers faced in 1942.
When they started
this construction,
they knew virtually nothing
about the area.
The suggestion
that you will build a highway
through 1,500 miles
of this territory
without really understanding
what you're doing,
and you'll simply say, "You must
get it done in a year."
It's an arrogant act
in one sense,
and it's also
a very courageous one.
In the rush to get
the Army engineers north,
some regiments arrived
before their equipment,
forcing the men to begin
clearing the path by hand.
At Charlie Lake, near
Fort St. John, British Columbia,
officers, eager to press ahead,
decided to ferry some
of their construction equipment
to a new position.
What they had done... they had
constructed a raft-type thing.
They took two pontoons
and put a road section
between the two pontoons.
And with that, they could
load heavy equipment on it
and take it about 12, 14 miles
up the lake.
May 15th.
Storm clouds menaced
over Charlie Lake
as the men launched
the makeshift raft.
To the people who lived
around Charlie Lake,
they knew they shouldn't
be on the lake
when the conditions
were like that.
And how come the soldiers were
allowed to be out on the lake
when the conditions were such?
They had a special outfit
that's supposed to know
what they was doing.
But they overloaded
these pontoon boats.
They had a weapons carrier, and
they had a D-4 Caterpillar on it
and a bunch of food supplies.
I was within a hundred yards
of the shore of the lake,
and somebody came
running back up
and said something had happened
to the units.
A sudden squall had engulfed
the barge.
The waves started coming
over the front of it,
and they'd turned
to go to shore.
One of the Caterpillar tractors,
I think,
slid sideways a little bit,
and it caused it to capsize
and turn over.
And all of them went down
in the lake.
Well, the thing sank in seconds.
I mean, it just went right down.
The hypothermia
in the first part of May
would happen very, very quickly.
A local trapper witnessed
the accident
and made three desperate trips
in his rowboat
to try and rescue the men.
There were five men saved,
but there were 12 drowned.
It was quite a shock
to all of us,
and everybody felt bad about it.
It was a bad start.
We was out searching
for the bodies.
It's not a happy thought,
but we just... we just went on.
That's... that's the way it was.
Two weeks later,
on June 3, 1942,
what Americans had feared since
Pearl Harbor became a reality,
when the Japanese attacked
North America at Dutch Harbor
in the Aleutian Islands.
American casualties topped 100.
The Aleutians were a very
important part of Alaska
for the war.
And if you look at a map,
you see the Aleutian Islands are
separated from the mainland,
and they go this way.
And it's like a dagger
pointing right at Japan.
And that's why it was so clear
to some of us
that the Japanese would come up
and try to invade
through the Aleutians.
In less than a week,
Japan seized two islands
at the far reaches
of the Aleutian chain.
Foreign forces had captured
American territory
for the first time
since the War of 1812.
With Japanese troops encamped
on Alaskan soil,
the war in the Pacific
had come to the doorstep
of North America.
We were afraid that the Japanese
were going to come through
into Alaska.
I mean, we didn't know
what we were dealing with.
Maybe our lives were
on the line, too.
All of a sudden, they were
the front lines of the war,
as opposed to being
in the back corner
of an international war effort.
And it gave them
a sense of purpose.
They were saving democracy.
They were saving North America.
Warmer weather brought
new problems for the engineers.
Spring rains created
miles of mud,
and by the start of June,
the Corps had completed
only 95 miles of road...
Plus major sections
of the proposed route
for the Alaska Highway
crossed large stretches
of wet, decayed vegetation
called "muskeg."
This fella told Sergeant King,
"You better watch that muskeg,
because it'll get you."
Sergeant King,
he was patting his old .45,
and he said, "That's all right."
He says, "I've got my .45.
I'm not afraid of it."
We learned what muskeg was
for sure, I'll guarantee you.
Muskeg is basically
a frozen wetland.
Constructing over muskeg is
an extreme challenge.
In the wintertime,
you can simply run across it.
It's frozen; it's hard;
it's not too much of a problem.
But in the summertime,
it starts to thaw,
and you end up
with a large shallow lake.
Think of thawing muskeg
as a big sponge.
If you put weight on it,
the water squishes out
and everything sinks,
and you end up having
a very difficult time
getting across that terrain.
The muskeg
the engineers encountered
ranged from small, shallow bogs
to swamps several miles long
and over 25 feet deep.
And if you'd get
a tractor in it,
it'd just sit there and vibrate.
If you leave it running,
then it'd just vibrate till
the darn thing buries itself.
As soon as the ground thawed,
we really had
stick-in-the-mud problems.
Crews used bulldozers
and dynamite
to clean out
shallow sections of muskeg,
but deeper pools could swallow
the dozers whole.
The Corps decided
the best way to deal with
muskeg was to go around it.
Survey teams hugged hillsides
and dramatically bent the road
in a series of wild zigzags
to avoid muskeg bogs.
If you'd run into conditions
that was... you couldn't go on,
you moved right or left,
one or the other.
You... you moved.
It looked like we didn't know
what we were doing,
because sometimes
we'd head off one way
and head off another way
and finally end up going through
the most favorable route,
not the best,
but the most favorable.
When the engineers couldn't go
around the muskeg,
officers ordered the men
to "corduroy" the road.
They laid down trees
along the roadway,
and then put logs
across those trees,
transverse to the roadway,
and then put the fill
on top of that.
And in effect it floated
the roadway across the muskeg.
Laying down corduroy takes
an awful lot of labor,
because it's all hand.
You cut the trees down, lug 'em
over, place them in position,
and go back and get more trees
and do the same thing.
As much as the officers wanted
to punch the highway
through in a hurry,
dealing with muskeg and mud
drastically slowed things down.
By the end of June,
after three months of work,
the engineers had constructed
360 miles of road.
The Army knew it had
about four mths left
to build at least 1,100 more
miles before winter arrived.
In time, aided
by a change in season,
the outlook
for the mission improved.
After months of frustrating
aerial reconnaissance,
a survey team
finally had discovered
a way through
the Canadian Rockies.
On the ground, as temperatures
rose and the mud began to dry,
the engineers picked up
the pace.
During the month of July,
they would blaze
over 400 more miles of road.
The greatest problems
that the engineers faced on the
highway was overcoming nature.
We were in wilderness.
That's where the road was.
Wilderness.
Uncharted.
Nobody had been there before.
The only thing we saw was
nothing but trees.
And trees upon trees upon trees.
And then to be told
that you're going to put a road
through that...
A lead bulldozer,
flanked by two others,
tore into the dirt
and knocked down trees
to create a 60-to 90-foot swath.
Behind these front units,
the bulk of the regiment
widened, straightened
and graded the road,
and using the timber at hand,
built culverts and bridges.
They basically cleared
the vegetation off the roadway,
pushed it to the side, and then
took the soil alongside the road
and pushed it up into the middle
and made ditches on each side.
Their effort was not
to make a full highway,
but really more of a trail that
was two trucks wide, basically,
and get it done very quickly.
There were often days
where the survey crews would be
maybe ten miles ahead
of the first
clearing bulldozers.
And they would be exploring
two or three possible valleys
as to where the road would go,
knowing that they had to find
a route that could be built,
because the bulldozers were
right behind them
and they were not about to stop.
The black soldiers
on the highway...
Who had been written off
as "careless," "shiftless"
and "irresponsible"...
Held their own.
It was thought
that they couldn't learn
how to operate complicated
construction equipment,
like bulldozers
and things like that.
We were able to overcome
what we did not know
by trial and error.
One African-American regiment
constructed a 300-foot bridge
across the swiftly flowing
Sikanni Chief River
in just three and a half days.
The bridge would stand longer
than any other built
that year on the highway.
"We can't afford
to lose our own personal pride,"
a sergeant said,
"by slipping up."
They believed
in their heart of hearts
that by fulfilling
this military obligation,
when they returned home
as civilians
they would be treated
differently,
their children, their families
would have a different life,
and all of the hardship and
suffering that they experienced
would somehow be vindicated.
Work on the road was tough
for both black and white troops,
and the 20 hours of daylight
during the arctic summer
made the job
even more exhausting.
I hated it.
You didn't have
a special time to...
not like punch in a clock,
you know, like eight hours.
You worked until you dropped.
In the summer, the sun was up
all the time.
We were on 12-hour shifts.
Half of the company was in
the morning and half at night.
We worked all the time,
seven days a week.
We was working so hard
that by the time
you got through at night,
you rolled your sleeping bag out
underneath a tree
or in the bushes,
and you crawled in it
and sacked out.
Seldom did we ever put a tent up
and tie all
of the corners together.
Usually you put 'em up just
enough to hold them together,
because they were only going
to be there for the night.
The next day the cooks
would have to tear them down,
load them up,
and move them up the road
as close to the front
as they could move.
It was slave labor,
is what it was.
We weren't prisoners, but
wanting to get the job done,
we done most anything to do it.
You had to do the job.
You didn't like it.
So you figured that you might
as well enjoy it,
because otherwise
you'd have gone nuts.
We didn't have any fresh foods
issued for several months.
We lived on Spam
and Vienna sausage.
Spam...
was the delicacy of the...
of the soldiers.
We ate it with joy.
Pancakes was the... that was
the number one on the list.
We ate pancakes three times
a day there, for about a month.
At the Cat camp, we had to carry
our lunch with us.
The cooks never got to us.
We mainly had
World War I rations
that'd come in a little tin can.
We didn't have to worry
about doing any dieting.
We got so sick and tired
of the chili con carne,
we would send truckloads
of chili con carne
down to the Indian village
and trade it off for fish.
And they said... "We trade,
but no more chili con carne."
They got tired of it themselves.
Like most things on the highway,
personal hygiene was
an improvisation.
God, you should've seen
some of the tubs
that they made out of 50-gallon
drums and things like that,
because we didn't have
any bathrooms
or anything like that, you know.
We bathed in some
of the... the streams, too,
but, I'll tell you,
that water was cold.
Summer brought more challenges.
Temperatures soared
into the 90s,
dust clouds choked the air,
and then came the season's
most hated enemy:
mosquitoes.
There was just droves of 'em.
We were issued those campaign
hats with the brims like so
and pulled the nets down over
and fastened 'em
around your neck.
If you didn't have
a mosquito net on,
you'd get bites all over you.
You had mosquitoes
that dive-bombed you.
They'd dive like the Japanese
with the dive-bombing.
They'd dive and hit you.
That's true.
You couldn't fight 'em off,
there's no way.
The mosquitoes
would just eat you up.
You'd have just been welts
all over your body.
You couldn't take a shirt off.
You couldn't even roll
your sleeves up.
If the palms of gloves were
wore out, you still wore 'em,
because they'd keep the back
of your hands from being bitten.
Far away from towns, with few
opportunities for leave,
the men also fought
the pain of isolation.
There was nobody.
There was absolutely nobody.
As far as... young sweetie pies
up there,
I never seen...
we never seen a lady.
In fact, it's probably a good
thing there wasn't any up there.
I got married
while I was in the service,
and I wanted to get back
to my wife.
Now, why would I want to be up
there into the wilderness,
you know, nothing up there
to see.
Let's face it.
We were completely isolated
in most cases.
At the beginning we were near
some Indian villages,
but most of the time
we were completely isolated.
The importance of this need
to hold on to Alaska
had precedence
over everything else.
It overcame the isolation,
the long hours,
the tedium of repetition
day after day
of doing the same thing.
War raged in the South Pacific
throughout the summer of 1942.
In battle after battle,
American losses mounted.
With Japanese forces
still lodged in the Aleutians,
the threat to North America
remained close at hand.
We had to head them Japs off,
and in order to do it, we had
to keep the tractors going
as much as we could.
We had to, to get it through.
Now that it had a promising
amount of road completed,
the War Department decided
to show off the highway.
For the first time,
reporters were allowed to visit
the restricted military project.
Americans began reading about
the Alaska-Canada Highway...
"Alcan" for short...
And the heroic engineers who
were waging a war in the woods
to defend the nation.
1942 was not a great year
for the U.S. Army,
but one thing it could do
and could do very well
was to conquer
the North American wilderness.
So, putting through a highway
was important to the nation
in maintaining morale.
The August 31st edition
of Time magazine
hyped the highway
as a job for Paul Bunyan,
but in reality,
the project was stalled.
With 460 miles left to go,
a new problem made it unlikely
the road would be finished
before winter.
The engineers
had struck permafrost.
Permafrost is simply
ground that's been frozen
two or more years.
The temperature
of the permafrost
was about 30 degrees Fahrenheit.
And when the Corps of Engineers
removed the vegetation
off the ground,
they found a hard surface,
but it changed
the surface temperature
of about three
degrees Fahrenheit.
And so it was now above
the freezing temperature,
and then thawed very rapidly.
And as it thawed,
it changed in character
from a hard surface
for them to drive on,
to mud, in which they
of course got stuck.
The road building method
that had allowed the engineers
to build over 800 miles in two
months suddenly had failed them.
Work on the northern portion
of the highway stopped.
The engineers
and construction workers
entered the far Northwest in
a state of incredible naiveté.
Very few people
had any experience
with constructing highways
in cold weather areas;
the scientific information
on building across permafrost...
Virtually nonexistent.
The Army engineers scrambled
to find a solution.
Since they could not go
around the permafrost,
they needed to keep
the ground frozen.
It took them six weeks
of trial and error
to figure out how to deal
with permafrost.
To protect the ground,
the engineers decided
to sideline the bulldozers
as they cut down trees by hand
to immediately insulate
the surface with corduroy.
The Army engineers
were problem solvers.
In combat you have to come up
with a solution
to whatever problem
you're facing
very quickly and efficiently
in order to move
the war effort forward.
They had not known
about permafrost,
but they were able to adapt
what they knew
to the problem at hand.
Their solution worked,
but reduced construction
to only a mile a day.
At the start of October,
the temperature began
to drop sharply.
Permafrost was no longer
their biggest problem.
What would be one of the coldest
winters on record had arrived.
With only 166 miles left,
two regiments...
One black, one white...
Struggled to close the last gap
of the highway.
- Working in the cold climates...
- 40 and 50 below zero...
Is always a very real challenge.
Any time you're working
in the cold,
men and equipment move slower,
the logistics become
more difficult.
The metals that they had
at 40 below zero
became very brittle
and broke very, very easily.
The equipment that we had
was not designed
for sub-zero weather.
Trucks we had to keep running
24 hours a day.
If you didn't,
you'd have to get underneath
the truck with a blowtorch
and heat up the transmission
and the rear axle
before it would move.
At 40 below zero, skin froze
in a matter of seconds.
It was actually
a fight for survival.
On one occasion, I spilled
some gasoline on my clothing,
and it evaporated.
And I went to pull my coat off,
it pulled the flesh off, too.
Minor mistakes can be deadly.
If your vehicle breaks down
in the Arctic,
walking a few miles
can actually cost you your life.
Mile by mile,
the two regiments pressed on.
Each day, their bulldozers
growled closer and closer.
At 4:00 p.m. on October 25th,
just south
of the Alaska-Canada border,
the engineers closed
the last gap of the highway.
In less than eight months,
the United States Army
Corps of Engineers
had conquered
a forbidding wilderness
and built
the first overland route
from the continental United
States to Alaska Territory.
The 1,500-mile
military supply line
was hailed as an unprecedented
engineering feat.
The Alaskan Highway is dedicated
at Soldier's Summit,
Yukon Territory,
by officials of the United
States and Canada.
The building
of the Alaska Highway
represented one of the great
triumphs of the U.S. Army
in 1942.
And they made sure
everybody across
North America heard about it.
It was in the newsreels,
it was on the radio programs,
it was in the newspapers.
The American Army
was trying to send messages
of reassurance
and messages to the enemy:
we're serious about this.
We will do anything
we absolutely have to do.
Just after the final gap
was closed,
the Army restaged
the historic meeting
of the two lead
bulldozer drivers,
a black corporal
from Pennsylvania
and a white private from Texas.
Within four months, the military
would splash the photograph
across the pages of Yank,
the Army weekly,
in an article glorifying
the achievements
of the African-American
engineers.
And we did it in record time,
before they said we could do it.
For the most part, the men in my
outfit couldn't read or write.
And they said they couldn't use
heavy equipment.
But these men became experts
with that heavy machinery.
They did work that nobody
thought they could do,
in an area nobody thought
they could survive.
They had shown
to the American Army
they could do almost anything
that they were asked to do.
This was intended to be
a morale booster,
particularly for black troops.
It sent a signal that blacks
were doing some things
that others thought
that they couldn't do,
and yes, it was helping
win the war.
The Army and the nation
was attempting to mobilize
the entire population.
They could make it clear
to the American people
that the only way...
The best way...
To win this war, certainly,
was for all Americans
to join hands
and get in the fight together.
By the time the engineers
completed their work
on the highway,
the war in the Pacific
was turning
in favor of America
and its allies.
In the summer of 1943,
U.S. forces drove the Japanese
out of the Aleutian Islands.
Japan never advanced
to Alaska's mainland.
But the Alaska Highway did play
a vital role in World War II.
Nearly 8,000 Lend-Lease
aircraft,
flown from America to Russia
by means of the Highway
and Northwest Staging Route,
helped the Soviet Union
triumph over Germany.
Fierce battles in Europe
and the Pacific
soon overshadowed the building
of the Alaska Highway.
By war's end,
it was all but forgotten.
I took a part in building
what was considered
one of the greatest
engineering projects
during the last century.
Some people said it was second
only to the Panama Canal,
to build 1,500 miles of road
in eight months.
What we went through,
you actually had nightmares
of the cold
and stuff like that, you know.
I used to complain
it was a waste of time.
I finally got back to see
what we actually made,
and it was altogether different.
All that cussin' at nights
and stuff like that
went out the window,
because we did a beautiful job.
It's beautiful.
There's more about building
the Alaska Highway
at American Experience Online.
Explore Yukon geology,
see a timeline
of Alaska history,
and learn more
about the highway builders.
American Experience
is made possible
by the Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation,
to enhance public understanding
of the role of technology.
The foundation also seeks
to portray the lives
of the men and women engaged
in scientific
and technological pursuit.
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November 20, 1942.
On a remote vista
in Yukon Territory,
several hundred men braved
bitter cold temperatures
to mark the end of an ordeal
few people thought possible...
The completion of the 1,500-mile
Alaska Highway.
The building of the Alaska
Highway represented
one of the great triumphs
of the U.S. Army in 1942.
They needed a high-profile,
high-energy,
big, dynamic project that said,
"We'll do anything we have to do
to defend North America."
Born out of the shock
of Pearl Harbor,
the Alaska Highway was
a first step
in America's defense strategy...
A vital military supply line
during World War II.
Over 10,000 Army engineers were
rushed to the far Northwest.
Their mission was
to blaze a road to Alaska
in less than a year.
They battled mountains, muskeg
and mosquitoes
on a front that stretched
across miles and miles
of rugged, subarctic terrain.
We were in wilderness.
That's where the road was...
Wilderness.
Uncharted...
nobody had been there before.
We kept the tractors going
as much as we could.
It was... it was tough.
It was actually a fight
for survival
against the weather.
For a brief moment,
their heroic efforts uplifted
a nation in need of good news.
But soon other war stories
overshadowed
the triumph in the North,
and the victory was quickly
forgotten.
December 1941.
30-year-old Ruth Gruber,
a journalist from New York,
was on a fact-finding expedition
for the U.S. secretary
of the interior
to help promote
Alaska Territory.
Eight months into her far-flung
travels, Gruber found herself
a part of an urgent military
mission in the Bering Sea.
I was on a Coast Guard cutter.
We were searching for Japanese
fishing canneries
that we suspected were spying,
when word came that Pearl Harbor
had been attacked,
and it was really
a frightening moment.
We didn't know how soon
the Japanese would decide
it was time to attack Alaska.
FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT
We are now in this war.
So far, the news has been
all bad.
We have learned
that our hemisphere is not
immune from severe attack,
that we cannot measure
our safety
in terms of miles on any map
anymore.
In the weeks
following Pearl Harbor,
Americans feared that Japan's
march across the Pacific
would continue to the west coast
of North America.
People who thought
they were secure,
who thought that in fact
the world war was never going
to affect them directly,
all of a sudden now are living
with the realization
that the bombs could come
the next day,
that the next Pearl Harbor
could be Vancouver,
it could be San Francisco,
it could be Los Angeles.
Alaska sat particularly
vulnerable.
The territory's Aleutian Islands
were only 750 miles from Japan's
closest military base.
The Aleutian Islands
stretched out invitingly
toward a shrewd
and daring enemy,
and Japs in Alaska would be
a direct threat
to the west coast of America
and also to the interior.
At the beginning of 1942,
the United States had some
20,000 troops
stationed across Alaska.
Of the Army's 12 bombers
and 20 fighters,
only half were ready
to meet an attack.
Alaska's defenses were woeful.
The officer commanding
the Alaska Defense Command
was sending wires back
to Washington saying,
"If the Japanese come here,
I can't defend Alaska.
I don't have the resources."
As a quick solution,
the Army Air Force rushed
two squadrons
of bombers and fighters
to the territory
by way of
the Northwest Staging Route.
The series of airfields in
Northwest Canada were designed
to ferry military aircraft
and supplies
from the Lower 48
to Alaska Territory.
The airfields were in a very
primitive state of construction
and not all of them were
operational.
The combination
of lack of navigation aids,
untrained pilots, bad weather
and bad luck resulted
in most of those planes crashing
before they got to Alaska.
It was a real fiasco.
For the Americans it became an
immediate and pressing issue...
"What do we do
to defend Alaska?"
It was extremely vulnerable.
Very quickly the idea
of a highway to Alaska emerged
as a major element in the entire
North American strategy
for the defense
of the far Northwest.
On February 11, just two months
after Pearl Harbor,
President Roosevelt approved
the construction
of a highway to Alaska.
With sea lanes under attack
and air passage unreliable,
the secretary of war declared
that a land route to Alaska
was imperative
from the viewpoint
of national defense.
Military planners decided
to connect the air bases
of the Northwest Staging Route.
Roosevelt certainly saw a need
to secure an air corridor
to Alaska.
And that's what the highway was
primarily designed to support.
The decision meant that the road
would have to be blazed
across 1,500 miles
of remote subarctic wilderness
and through the rugged
Canadian Rockies.
The terrain had not been mapped,
and it would be like going
from Washington, D.C.,
to Denver, Colorado,
with no maps.
You just kind of knew
about where it was,
and in the process
you're building a road.
The War Department snapped
into action,
assigning the monumental job
to the Army Corps of Engineers.
The order was deceptively
simple:
build a road to Alaska
as fast as possible
and before the arrival
of the next winter,
about eight months away.
The Corps rushed over 10,000 men
north on troop trains
loaded with some of the 250,000
tons of equipment, materials
and supplies
the mission would require.
The battle plan called
for seven engineering regiments.
Three would be made up
of African-American soldiers.
Once in place, the engineers
would attack the wilderness
from several fronts, joining the
long road section by section.
It was a hastily conceived plan
hatched in Washington
by officers with no experience
working in arctic regions.
The American government
had to reassure
the people of North America
that the continent was safe,
and that putting a couple more
ships on the West Coast
wasn't going to do it.
They needed a high-profile,
high-energy,
big, dynamic project that said,
"We'll do anything we have to do
to defend North America."
Now a key part
of protecting Alaska
would fall to soldiers armed,
not with tanks,
but with bulldozers.
There were people who said,
"This can't be done,
certainly not in a year."
There was no certainty
that they would find a buildable
route through the Rockies.
They didn't know whether they
could get it through or not.
They really did not know.
In March, the engineers began
arriving in the far North.
As his ship pulled into Prince
William Sound, Hayward Oubre,
a university-trained artist
from New Orleans,
caught sight of Alaska.
When you first behold
the beauty and nature in Alaska,
you are overwhelmed.
It was in April, the snow was on
the ground, I had my parka on,
and I said, "Praise God.
I've never seen
a landscape so beautiful."
John Bollin had quit
his dry cleaning job in Virginia
to enlist in the Army.
Our first look at Alaska
was in Skagway.
To see a mountain close up,
and to go up it,
it's a thrill of a lifetime.
And you get to wherever
you think the top is,
and there's more snow up there
than you ever seen.
For other soldiers,
like Henry Geyer,
a truck driver from Pittsburgh,
the first day hinted
at hardships to come.
It was 30, 40 below zero,
and you were going
from California,
Fort Ord
and that kind of weather,
up into snow and ice,
and so it wasn't...
it was no picnic.
The first day we were there,
our food was freezing
in our mess kits
and we had to unload the train,
the trains were coming in
with supplies and people.
From there on in, it was just
struggle and organizing.
Fred Mims, a South Carolina
bus driver before the war,
served as a lieutenant
in the Quartermaster Corps
attached to the highway project.
In charge of supplying
the troops,
the Quartermaster Corps
had issued
effective cold-weather gear
like down sleeping bags,
fur parkas and lambskin caps.
But the rubber boots and woolen
gloves the soldiers got
were no match
for the extreme cold.
"There were many cases
of badly frozen feet,"
reported one officer.
"Tractor operators were found
along the road
"sitting by their parked
equipment and crying violently,
so great was the cold."
Most of the soldiers
sent to the North
had a lot to learn
about road building.
Chester Russell,
from Kingsburg, California,
who had worked the rodeo circuit
before being drafted,
suddenly was told
he would be driving
a 19-ton D-bulldozer.
I ended up as a swamper... what
they call a swamper... on a D-8.
A D-8 tractor...
I'd never seen one before.
At 21 years old,
I wasn't prepared,
I'll guarantee you.
I'll guarantee you
I wasn't prepared.
The units that served
on the Alaska Highway
had less experience
with the heavy equipment
than would have been desirable.
So they had some
on-the-job training to do
in difficult circumstances.
I got assigned to the
maintenance of the bulldozers,
and my first actual experience
with the bulldozers
was after we got there.
My degree was
in metallurgical engineering.
I was more comfortable with
a microscope in a laboratory
than I was with a bulldozer
or some of the other tools
of highway-building.
My responsibility was to take
care of the heavy equipment.
Most of the equipment
I had never seen.
Being an asphalt and a concrete
city boy,
I didn't know nothing
about this heavy equipment.
When we went up there,
we learned on the job...
And in a hurry.
My job was to try
to organize the supplies
that were coming in in crates.
We had just mountains
of big crates of canned goods.
We were pretty well confused
about the stuff,
because most of our people
didn't know the difference...
A number 2 can of beans
and a number 10 can of beans.
We had to organize
and find out how to do that.
It took a while to get started.
The engineers overwhelmed
small towns
like Dawson Creek,
British Columbia,
where the arrival
of one regiment
tripled the town's population
almost overnight.
No one knew what was going on.
We didn't know anything about it
until the troop trains
started coming and the equipment
and the Army vehicles,
and it was just amazing.
This is an outfit of a thousand
men, several hundred trucks,
dozens and dozens
of bulldozers and cranes
and other pieces
of heavy equipment
and literally hundreds of tons
of supplies...
Everything from gasoline
and diesel fuel
to food and spare parts.
It was very exciting.
There was American soldiers
everywhere.
It made us a great deal
more aware of the war.
They were building this highway
to protect us.
We felt very involved.
In April, shocking news from the
Philippines reached the North.
Nearly 80,000 American
and Filipino troops
had surrendered in Bataan.
Officers on the highway decided
to start work right away,
even though they had no route
through the Rocky Mountains.
On April 11, 1942,
construction officially began
on the Alaska Highway.
Of the 11,000 men sent north,
nearly 4,000 were
African American.
As throughout
the segregated U.S. military,
white and black engineers
on the Alaska Highway project
were kept apart.
Black soldiers worked under
the command of white officers.
Faced with a shortage of troops
after Pearl Harbor,
the secretary of war
had forced the Army
to assign black engineers
to the mission.
The Army had a policy
at the time
that was based
on the supposition
that blacks would not function
well in extreme cold climates,
and so there was a...
a kind of de facto ban
on sending black units to
anyplace like Alaska or Canada.
The employment
of African-American troops
on the Alaska Highway was seen
by some in the Army, I'm sure,
as an experiment.
Not everybody thought
it was the best choice.
Many white officers had doubts
about the character and ability
of black soldiers.
"The Negro is careless,
shiftless, irresponsible
and secretive," described
a military study.
"He is best handled with praise
and by ridicule."
This study came from
the Army War College.
It's a finishing school
for officers
who are going to have, uh...
successful careers,
and this is what
they were being taught.
And so you can imagine
the kinds of stereotypes
that the officers entered
this experience with
and how difficult it was
for the black troops.
In the minds of
most senior white officers,
black troops were not as capable
in terms of their technical
efficiency and ability
to use the equipment.
There was an expectation
that they would do poorly.
While it today sounds
very prejudiced,
it was generally felt that
the African-American troops were
a little lacking in
the necessary qualifications
of intelligence and background
and training
to do as well
as a corresponding Caucasian.
Almost anything that they did
was likely to be
severely scrutinized.
These men were
under enormous pressure.
People who've not traveled into
the northwest of North America
have absolutely no idea what
the engineers faced in 1942.
When they started
this construction,
they knew virtually nothing
about the area.
The suggestion
that you will build a highway
through 1,500 miles
of this territory
without really understanding
what you're doing,
and you'll simply say, "You must
get it done in a year."
It's an arrogant act
in one sense,
and it's also
a very courageous one.
In the rush to get
the Army engineers north,
some regiments arrived
before their equipment,
forcing the men to begin
clearing the path by hand.
At Charlie Lake, near
Fort St. John, British Columbia,
officers, eager to press ahead,
decided to ferry some
of their construction equipment
to a new position.
What they had done... they had
constructed a raft-type thing.
They took two pontoons
and put a road section
between the two pontoons.
And with that, they could
load heavy equipment on it
and take it about 12, 14 miles
up the lake.
May 15th.
Storm clouds menaced
over Charlie Lake
as the men launched
the makeshift raft.
To the people who lived
around Charlie Lake,
they knew they shouldn't
be on the lake
when the conditions
were like that.
And how come the soldiers were
allowed to be out on the lake
when the conditions were such?
They had a special outfit
that's supposed to know
what they was doing.
But they overloaded
these pontoon boats.
They had a weapons carrier, and
they had a D-4 Caterpillar on it
and a bunch of food supplies.
I was within a hundred yards
of the shore of the lake,
and somebody came
running back up
and said something had happened
to the units.
A sudden squall had engulfed
the barge.
The waves started coming
over the front of it,
and they'd turned
to go to shore.
One of the Caterpillar tractors,
I think,
slid sideways a little bit,
and it caused it to capsize
and turn over.
And all of them went down
in the lake.
Well, the thing sank in seconds.
I mean, it just went right down.
The hypothermia
in the first part of May
would happen very, very quickly.
A local trapper witnessed
the accident
and made three desperate trips
in his rowboat
to try and rescue the men.
There were five men saved,
but there were 12 drowned.
It was quite a shock
to all of us,
and everybody felt bad about it.
It was a bad start.
We was out searching
for the bodies.
It's not a happy thought,
but we just... we just went on.
That's... that's the way it was.
Two weeks later,
on June 3, 1942,
what Americans had feared since
Pearl Harbor became a reality,
when the Japanese attacked
North America at Dutch Harbor
in the Aleutian Islands.
American casualties topped 100.
The Aleutians were a very
important part of Alaska
for the war.
And if you look at a map,
you see the Aleutian Islands are
separated from the mainland,
and they go this way.
And it's like a dagger
pointing right at Japan.
And that's why it was so clear
to some of us
that the Japanese would come up
and try to invade
through the Aleutians.
In less than a week,
Japan seized two islands
at the far reaches
of the Aleutian chain.
Foreign forces had captured
American territory
for the first time
since the War of 1812.
With Japanese troops encamped
on Alaskan soil,
the war in the Pacific
had come to the doorstep
of North America.
We were afraid that the Japanese
were going to come through
into Alaska.
I mean, we didn't know
what we were dealing with.
Maybe our lives were
on the line, too.
All of a sudden, they were
the front lines of the war,
as opposed to being
in the back corner
of an international war effort.
And it gave them
a sense of purpose.
They were saving democracy.
They were saving North America.
Warmer weather brought
new problems for the engineers.
Spring rains created
miles of mud,
and by the start of June,
the Corps had completed
only 95 miles of road...
Plus major sections
of the proposed route
for the Alaska Highway
crossed large stretches
of wet, decayed vegetation
called "muskeg."
This fella told Sergeant King,
"You better watch that muskeg,
because it'll get you."
Sergeant King,
he was patting his old .45,
and he said, "That's all right."
He says, "I've got my .45.
I'm not afraid of it."
We learned what muskeg was
for sure, I'll guarantee you.
Muskeg is basically
a frozen wetland.
Constructing over muskeg is
an extreme challenge.
In the wintertime,
you can simply run across it.
It's frozen; it's hard;
it's not too much of a problem.
But in the summertime,
it starts to thaw,
and you end up
with a large shallow lake.
Think of thawing muskeg
as a big sponge.
If you put weight on it,
the water squishes out
and everything sinks,
and you end up having
a very difficult time
getting across that terrain.
The muskeg
the engineers encountered
ranged from small, shallow bogs
to swamps several miles long
and over 25 feet deep.
And if you'd get
a tractor in it,
it'd just sit there and vibrate.
If you leave it running,
then it'd just vibrate till
the darn thing buries itself.
As soon as the ground thawed,
we really had
stick-in-the-mud problems.
Crews used bulldozers
and dynamite
to clean out
shallow sections of muskeg,
but deeper pools could swallow
the dozers whole.
The Corps decided
the best way to deal with
muskeg was to go around it.
Survey teams hugged hillsides
and dramatically bent the road
in a series of wild zigzags
to avoid muskeg bogs.
If you'd run into conditions
that was... you couldn't go on,
you moved right or left,
one or the other.
You... you moved.
It looked like we didn't know
what we were doing,
because sometimes
we'd head off one way
and head off another way
and finally end up going through
the most favorable route,
not the best,
but the most favorable.
When the engineers couldn't go
around the muskeg,
officers ordered the men
to "corduroy" the road.
They laid down trees
along the roadway,
and then put logs
across those trees,
transverse to the roadway,
and then put the fill
on top of that.
And in effect it floated
the roadway across the muskeg.
Laying down corduroy takes
an awful lot of labor,
because it's all hand.
You cut the trees down, lug 'em
over, place them in position,
and go back and get more trees
and do the same thing.
As much as the officers wanted
to punch the highway
through in a hurry,
dealing with muskeg and mud
drastically slowed things down.
By the end of June,
after three months of work,
the engineers had constructed
360 miles of road.
The Army knew it had
about four mths left
to build at least 1,100 more
miles before winter arrived.
In time, aided
by a change in season,
the outlook
for the mission improved.
After months of frustrating
aerial reconnaissance,
a survey team
finally had discovered
a way through
the Canadian Rockies.
On the ground, as temperatures
rose and the mud began to dry,
the engineers picked up
the pace.
During the month of July,
they would blaze
over 400 more miles of road.
The greatest problems
that the engineers faced on the
highway was overcoming nature.
We were in wilderness.
That's where the road was.
Wilderness.
Uncharted.
Nobody had been there before.
The only thing we saw was
nothing but trees.
And trees upon trees upon trees.
And then to be told
that you're going to put a road
through that...
A lead bulldozer,
flanked by two others,
tore into the dirt
and knocked down trees
to create a 60-to 90-foot swath.
Behind these front units,
the bulk of the regiment
widened, straightened
and graded the road,
and using the timber at hand,
built culverts and bridges.
They basically cleared
the vegetation off the roadway,
pushed it to the side, and then
took the soil alongside the road
and pushed it up into the middle
and made ditches on each side.
Their effort was not
to make a full highway,
but really more of a trail that
was two trucks wide, basically,
and get it done very quickly.
There were often days
where the survey crews would be
maybe ten miles ahead
of the first
clearing bulldozers.
And they would be exploring
two or three possible valleys
as to where the road would go,
knowing that they had to find
a route that could be built,
because the bulldozers were
right behind them
and they were not about to stop.
The black soldiers
on the highway...
Who had been written off
as "careless," "shiftless"
and "irresponsible"...
Held their own.
It was thought
that they couldn't learn
how to operate complicated
construction equipment,
like bulldozers
and things like that.
We were able to overcome
what we did not know
by trial and error.
One African-American regiment
constructed a 300-foot bridge
across the swiftly flowing
Sikanni Chief River
in just three and a half days.
The bridge would stand longer
than any other built
that year on the highway.
"We can't afford
to lose our own personal pride,"
a sergeant said,
"by slipping up."
They believed
in their heart of hearts
that by fulfilling
this military obligation,
when they returned home
as civilians
they would be treated
differently,
their children, their families
would have a different life,
and all of the hardship and
suffering that they experienced
would somehow be vindicated.
Work on the road was tough
for both black and white troops,
and the 20 hours of daylight
during the arctic summer
made the job
even more exhausting.
I hated it.
You didn't have
a special time to...
not like punch in a clock,
you know, like eight hours.
You worked until you dropped.
In the summer, the sun was up
all the time.
We were on 12-hour shifts.
Half of the company was in
the morning and half at night.
We worked all the time,
seven days a week.
We was working so hard
that by the time
you got through at night,
you rolled your sleeping bag out
underneath a tree
or in the bushes,
and you crawled in it
and sacked out.
Seldom did we ever put a tent up
and tie all
of the corners together.
Usually you put 'em up just
enough to hold them together,
because they were only going
to be there for the night.
The next day the cooks
would have to tear them down,
load them up,
and move them up the road
as close to the front
as they could move.
It was slave labor,
is what it was.
We weren't prisoners, but
wanting to get the job done,
we done most anything to do it.
You had to do the job.
You didn't like it.
So you figured that you might
as well enjoy it,
because otherwise
you'd have gone nuts.
We didn't have any fresh foods
issued for several months.
We lived on Spam
and Vienna sausage.
Spam...
was the delicacy of the...
of the soldiers.
We ate it with joy.
Pancakes was the... that was
the number one on the list.
We ate pancakes three times
a day there, for about a month.
At the Cat camp, we had to carry
our lunch with us.
The cooks never got to us.
We mainly had
World War I rations
that'd come in a little tin can.
We didn't have to worry
about doing any dieting.
We got so sick and tired
of the chili con carne,
we would send truckloads
of chili con carne
down to the Indian village
and trade it off for fish.
And they said... "We trade,
but no more chili con carne."
They got tired of it themselves.
Like most things on the highway,
personal hygiene was
an improvisation.
God, you should've seen
some of the tubs
that they made out of 50-gallon
drums and things like that,
because we didn't have
any bathrooms
or anything like that, you know.
We bathed in some
of the... the streams, too,
but, I'll tell you,
that water was cold.
Summer brought more challenges.
Temperatures soared
into the 90s,
dust clouds choked the air,
and then came the season's
most hated enemy:
mosquitoes.
There was just droves of 'em.
We were issued those campaign
hats with the brims like so
and pulled the nets down over
and fastened 'em
around your neck.
If you didn't have
a mosquito net on,
you'd get bites all over you.
You had mosquitoes
that dive-bombed you.
They'd dive like the Japanese
with the dive-bombing.
They'd dive and hit you.
That's true.
You couldn't fight 'em off,
there's no way.
The mosquitoes
would just eat you up.
You'd have just been welts
all over your body.
You couldn't take a shirt off.
You couldn't even roll
your sleeves up.
If the palms of gloves were
wore out, you still wore 'em,
because they'd keep the back
of your hands from being bitten.
Far away from towns, with few
opportunities for leave,
the men also fought
the pain of isolation.
There was nobody.
There was absolutely nobody.
As far as... young sweetie pies
up there,
I never seen...
we never seen a lady.
In fact, it's probably a good
thing there wasn't any up there.
I got married
while I was in the service,
and I wanted to get back
to my wife.
Now, why would I want to be up
there into the wilderness,
you know, nothing up there
to see.
Let's face it.
We were completely isolated
in most cases.
At the beginning we were near
some Indian villages,
but most of the time
we were completely isolated.
The importance of this need
to hold on to Alaska
had precedence
over everything else.
It overcame the isolation,
the long hours,
the tedium of repetition
day after day
of doing the same thing.
War raged in the South Pacific
throughout the summer of 1942.
In battle after battle,
American losses mounted.
With Japanese forces
still lodged in the Aleutians,
the threat to North America
remained close at hand.
We had to head them Japs off,
and in order to do it, we had
to keep the tractors going
as much as we could.
We had to, to get it through.
Now that it had a promising
amount of road completed,
the War Department decided
to show off the highway.
For the first time,
reporters were allowed to visit
the restricted military project.
Americans began reading about
the Alaska-Canada Highway...
"Alcan" for short...
And the heroic engineers who
were waging a war in the woods
to defend the nation.
1942 was not a great year
for the U.S. Army,
but one thing it could do
and could do very well
was to conquer
the North American wilderness.
So, putting through a highway
was important to the nation
in maintaining morale.
The August 31st edition
of Time magazine
hyped the highway
as a job for Paul Bunyan,
but in reality,
the project was stalled.
With 460 miles left to go,
a new problem made it unlikely
the road would be finished
before winter.
The engineers
had struck permafrost.
Permafrost is simply
ground that's been frozen
two or more years.
The temperature
of the permafrost
was about 30 degrees Fahrenheit.
And when the Corps of Engineers
removed the vegetation
off the ground,
they found a hard surface,
but it changed
the surface temperature
of about three
degrees Fahrenheit.
And so it was now above
the freezing temperature,
and then thawed very rapidly.
And as it thawed,
it changed in character
from a hard surface
for them to drive on,
to mud, in which they
of course got stuck.
The road building method
that had allowed the engineers
to build over 800 miles in two
months suddenly had failed them.
Work on the northern portion
of the highway stopped.
The engineers
and construction workers
entered the far Northwest in
a state of incredible naiveté.
Very few people
had any experience
with constructing highways
in cold weather areas;
the scientific information
on building across permafrost...
Virtually nonexistent.
The Army engineers scrambled
to find a solution.
Since they could not go
around the permafrost,
they needed to keep
the ground frozen.
It took them six weeks
of trial and error
to figure out how to deal
with permafrost.
To protect the ground,
the engineers decided
to sideline the bulldozers
as they cut down trees by hand
to immediately insulate
the surface with corduroy.
The Army engineers
were problem solvers.
In combat you have to come up
with a solution
to whatever problem
you're facing
very quickly and efficiently
in order to move
the war effort forward.
They had not known
about permafrost,
but they were able to adapt
what they knew
to the problem at hand.
Their solution worked,
but reduced construction
to only a mile a day.
At the start of October,
the temperature began
to drop sharply.
Permafrost was no longer
their biggest problem.
What would be one of the coldest
winters on record had arrived.
With only 166 miles left,
two regiments...
One black, one white...
Struggled to close the last gap
of the highway.
- Working in the cold climates...
- 40 and 50 below zero...
Is always a very real challenge.
Any time you're working
in the cold,
men and equipment move slower,
the logistics become
more difficult.
The metals that they had
at 40 below zero
became very brittle
and broke very, very easily.
The equipment that we had
was not designed
for sub-zero weather.
Trucks we had to keep running
24 hours a day.
If you didn't,
you'd have to get underneath
the truck with a blowtorch
and heat up the transmission
and the rear axle
before it would move.
At 40 below zero, skin froze
in a matter of seconds.
It was actually
a fight for survival.
On one occasion, I spilled
some gasoline on my clothing,
and it evaporated.
And I went to pull my coat off,
it pulled the flesh off, too.
Minor mistakes can be deadly.
If your vehicle breaks down
in the Arctic,
walking a few miles
can actually cost you your life.
Mile by mile,
the two regiments pressed on.
Each day, their bulldozers
growled closer and closer.
At 4:00 p.m. on October 25th,
just south
of the Alaska-Canada border,
the engineers closed
the last gap of the highway.
In less than eight months,
the United States Army
Corps of Engineers
had conquered
a forbidding wilderness
and built
the first overland route
from the continental United
States to Alaska Territory.
The 1,500-mile
military supply line
was hailed as an unprecedented
engineering feat.
The Alaskan Highway is dedicated
at Soldier's Summit,
Yukon Territory,
by officials of the United
States and Canada.
The building
of the Alaska Highway
represented one of the great
triumphs of the U.S. Army
in 1942.
And they made sure
everybody across
North America heard about it.
It was in the newsreels,
it was on the radio programs,
it was in the newspapers.
The American Army
was trying to send messages
of reassurance
and messages to the enemy:
we're serious about this.
We will do anything
we absolutely have to do.
Just after the final gap
was closed,
the Army restaged
the historic meeting
of the two lead
bulldozer drivers,
a black corporal
from Pennsylvania
and a white private from Texas.
Within four months, the military
would splash the photograph
across the pages of Yank,
the Army weekly,
in an article glorifying
the achievements
of the African-American
engineers.
And we did it in record time,
before they said we could do it.
For the most part, the men in my
outfit couldn't read or write.
And they said they couldn't use
heavy equipment.
But these men became experts
with that heavy machinery.
They did work that nobody
thought they could do,
in an area nobody thought
they could survive.
They had shown
to the American Army
they could do almost anything
that they were asked to do.
This was intended to be
a morale booster,
particularly for black troops.
It sent a signal that blacks
were doing some things
that others thought
that they couldn't do,
and yes, it was helping
win the war.
The Army and the nation
was attempting to mobilize
the entire population.
They could make it clear
to the American people
that the only way...
The best way...
To win this war, certainly,
was for all Americans
to join hands
and get in the fight together.
By the time the engineers
completed their work
on the highway,
the war in the Pacific
was turning
in favor of America
and its allies.
In the summer of 1943,
U.S. forces drove the Japanese
out of the Aleutian Islands.
Japan never advanced
to Alaska's mainland.
But the Alaska Highway did play
a vital role in World War II.
Nearly 8,000 Lend-Lease
aircraft,
flown from America to Russia
by means of the Highway
and Northwest Staging Route,
helped the Soviet Union
triumph over Germany.
Fierce battles in Europe
and the Pacific
soon overshadowed the building
of the Alaska Highway.
By war's end,
it was all but forgotten.
I took a part in building
what was considered
one of the greatest
engineering projects
during the last century.
Some people said it was second
only to the Panama Canal,
to build 1,500 miles of road
in eight months.
What we went through,
you actually had nightmares
of the cold
and stuff like that, you know.
I used to complain
it was a waste of time.
I finally got back to see
what we actually made,
and it was altogether different.
All that cussin' at nights
and stuff like that
went out the window,
because we did a beautiful job.
It's beautiful.
There's more about building
the Alaska Highway
at American Experience Online.
Explore Yukon geology,
see a timeline
of Alaska history,
and learn more
about the highway builders.
American Experience
is made possible
by the Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation,
to enhance public understanding
of the role of technology.
The foundation also seeks
to portray the lives
of the men and women engaged
in scientific
and technological pursuit.
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