“The biggest and hardest job since the Panama Canal.” —Maj. Robert W. Madden, describing construction of the Alcan Highway
On Jan. 20, 1943, at the opening session of the annual meeting of the American Society of Civil Engineers in New York City, high-ranking officers of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and officials from the Public Roads Administration told a rapt audience of their experiences building what the New York Times described as “one of the wonders of the modern world,” the Alaska-Canadian Highway, popularly known as the Alcan Highway.
A stretch of the Alcan Highway connecting Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, with Fairbanks, Alaska, ca. 1942. Library of Congress photo
Proposals for such a road had existed since the 1920s, but little was done until Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Immediately, the defense of remote Alaska became a priority. Plans for the Alcan Highway, a strategically secure supply route, accelerated under the aegis of the Army Corps of Engineers.
In February 1942, just two days after he had received the assignment, Assistant Chief of Engineers Brig. Gen. Clarence L. Sturdevant, the “Father of the Alcan Highway,” submitted a plan for surveys and construction. In it he specified, “A pioneer road is to be pushed to completion with all speed within the physical capacity of the troops. The objective is to complete the entire route at the earliest practicable date to a standard sufficient only for the supply of troops engaged on the work. Further refinements will be undertaken only if additional time is available.” His target for completion of the highway was fall 1942.
Many called such a feat impossible. The highway’s route went through rugged, un- mapped wilderness and would have to be built under some of the most extreme weath- er and topographical conditions imaginable. But the operable phrases were “pioneer road” and “a standard sufficient only for the supply of troops.” Basically the Army engineers would blaze the road and make it suitable enough for military purposes. The Public Roads Administration was responsible for follow up improvements to make it capable of handling civilian traffic.
Surveying began in February. Using locals as guides and constantly updated aerial photos, survey teams averaged two to four miles a day. Once the basic route was worked out, seven engineer construction regiments were prepositioned at points along the route and each was responsible for constructing a 350-mile section of the road. Three of the regi- ments, the 93rd, 95th, and 97th, were African- American regiments, and Brig. Gen. Simon Bo- livar Buckner Jr., responsible for Alaska’s defense, initially tried to bar them from his area of operations.
U.S. Army dump trucks line the road with gravel along the Alcan Highway route, ca. 1942. Library of Congress photo
This was the era of Jim Crow and a segregated Army. Buckner was also the son of a Confederate general. Buckner’s objections dwelt on the possibility of miscegenation be- tween the African Americans and native peoples, not competency. Two of the three African American regiments, the 93rd and 97th, were sent to Alaska. To alleviate Buckner’s concerns, they were stationed far from any settlement.
Construction of “The Road,” as it came to be known, began on March 8, 1942, and the person responsible for the actual building of the highway was Brig. Gen. William M. Hoge, creator of the obstacle course. Hoge quickly discovered that when it came to building a road in this remote northern wilderness he had to unlearn almost everything he knew. The primary reasons for that were muskeg, bogs of rotten organic matter and muck, and permafrost, permanently frozen ground. Traditionally, trees and other vege- tation and topsoil are bulldozed away to make a level foundation for the road. Hoge re- called, “That was absolutely wrong with permafrost . . . you had to do exactly the re- verse.” Instead, teams had to fashion layers of felled trees and other vegetation over the permafrost and muskeg to create an insulating blanket to prevent them from melting.
Once a firm surface was in place then a road could be built.
Opening ceremonies of the Alcan Highway at Soldiers’ Summit, a stretch of highway 1,500 feet above the wide swath of Kluane Lake, which is approximately 100 miles east of the Alaska-Yukon international boundary, ca. 1942. Library of Congress photo
The troops also worked in extreme weather conditions, with winter temperatures reaching –70 degrees Fahrenheit. “The worst I ever saw,” Hoge recalled. Mosquitoes and other bugs were also a huge problem. When eating, Hoge said, “. . . you would raise [your mosqui- to] net and by the time you got food on the spoon up to your mouth it would be covered with mosquitoes. You were eating mosquitoes half the time. . . .” And when the men weren’t eating mosquitoes, the insects were eating them. Hoge said, “I’d put my hand on my neck and [would] pull it back and it would be covered with blood from my neck.”
When it was completed on Oct. 28, 1942, 1,700 miles of road, from Dawson Creek, British Columbia to Delta Junction, Alaska – the first all-weather route from the conti- nental United States to Alaska – had been built. By then the strategic need for the high- way had passed; nonetheless the Alcan Highway was hailed as one of the top ten con- struction achievements in the twentieth century, and it is still in use today. The History Channel’s “Modern Marvels” program did a documentary on its construction and can be seen on YouTube.
In 1942, the Army Corps of Engineers assigned more than 10,000 men to build the Alaska Canada Military Highway. About a third were black soldiers: members of three newly formed “Negro regiments” the corps accepted for the job because it had no choice, other engineering units having been dispatched to the Pacific theater.
The black soldiers faced vicious cold, heat, mosquitoes and mud, like everyone else. But they also had to contend with relentless racism.
The Army was still segregated; black units were led by white officers. As late as 1936, a manpower assessment produced at the Army War College described black soldiers as shiftless, dishonest and lazy. “Say what you will,” the report declared, “the American Negro is still a primitive human being."
It was a view the Army as a whole embraced. The officers in charge were usually Southerners who supposedly “understood” blacks but in fact disparaged and despised them. Senior commanders of the road-building effort, one of them the son of a Confederate general, declared that blacks (often they called them something else) might be able to wield picks and shovels, but not the heavy equipment the job required.
So when they were issued heavy equipment, black units sometimes received vehicles otherwise headed for the scrapheap. And sometimes they lost even that to white units whose equipment was delayed or damaged.
Heath Twichell, a historian and retired Army colonel who wrote “Northwest Epic” (St. Martin’s Press, 1992), a history of the highway, known as the Alcan, said in an interview that his father, Col. Heath Twichell Sr., was assigned to the roadwork and was “heartsick” when he was given command of a black unit. He thought the assignment would kill his chances of a promotion.
But he soon realized that all his men needed was a hard job they could do well and get credit for. They found it at the Sikanni Chief, a fast-flowing river through a gorge 300 feet wide in the mountains of British Columbia.
In what the elder Mr. Twichell wrote later was “72 hours of ceaseless effort,” at times by the light of their truck headlights, the men felled trees, squared timbers, assembled trestles and waded chest deep into the ice-cold river to float them into position. They cut and assembled wood to form the bridge’s decking, and built and installed heavy timber cribs to protect its footings from ice and driftwood.
A photograph of this bridge, with a caption saying who built it, appeared in Time magazine in August 1942. More important, the unit had won a reputation on the ground as fast workers who produced sturdy bridges under highly adverse conditions, and who could operate and maintain their heavy equipment in the Alcan’s cold, heat and mud.
As the elder Mr. Twichell wrote in a letter home, “We hear less and less about the supposed deficiencies of Negro troops.”
In October, two crews, one moving north and one moving south, completed the road’s last link. Later, The New York Times reported what happened when they “met head-on in the spruce forests of the Yukon Territory.”
“Corporal Refines Sims Jr., a Negro from Philadelphia, was driving south with a bulldozer when he saw trees starting to topple over on him,” the account said. “Slamming his big vehicle into reverse, he backed out just as another bulldozer, driven by Private Alfred Jalufka of Kennedy, Texas, broke through the underbrush.
It continued, “Immediately after this Yukon version of driving the golden spike, Sims and Jalufka turned their bulldozers around and began widening the opening.”
The story captured the public’s imagination. The Engineering News Record called it “two races, working together to build a lifeline to Alaska’s beleaguered defenders amidst the most spectacularly rugged terrain and horrendous weather conditions imaginable.” The Army even promoted the story in Yank, its magazine for the troops.
When the highway was officially dedicated, Corporal Sims, Private Jalufka and two other soldiers, one black and one white, were there to hold the ceremonial ribbon.
Six years later, President Harry S. Truman ordered the Army desegregated, and many historians cite the Alcan experience as helping make that possible. On its Web site, the Federal Highway Administration calls the Alcan “the road to civil rights.”
Army Times: Black Soldiers Work Commemorated
The story that astonished Myers involves the construction of the Sikanni Chief Bridge, 162 miles out of Dawson Creek. Black troops in segregated units worked on the road with minimal supplies in miserable conditions. They faced a fast-moving river 300 feet wide, but their heavy equipment had been sent to white divisions. The officers said there was no way the men could build a bridge across it on schedule.
The men thought otherwise. They bet their paychecks that they could finish the bridge in less than three days. With hand tools, saws and axes, they prepared the lumber from nearby trees. Tied to the shore with ropes, they plunged chest-deep into the rapid, freezing water and set the trestles. They sang work chants and chain-gang songs. They used the headlights of trucks to keep working in the dark.
They finished the bridge ahead of schedule.
Winning the bet was sweet, but what happened next is remarkable, said Myers. When the commander in charge, Col. Heath Twichell saw what they’d done, he ordered his white officers to eat with the black enlisted men.
“It was the first time in the history of the Army that anything like that had happened,” said Myers.
