African Americans and the Building of the Alaskan Highway

By Audrey Peterson for American Legacy [the magazine for African-American History), (Fall,2005), pp.50-60

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When, during World War II, the Army sent black engineers to Alaska and Canada to help build a crucial highway, doubters insisted they didn't have the skills and wouldn't be able to stand the sub-arctic cold. Three regiments of more than 3,000 African Americans proved them dead wrong.

The African-American soldiers of the 95th Regiment had made a bet. Their commanding officer, Lt. Col. Heath Twichell, had given them the task of building a bridge over the Sikanni Chief River in British Columbia, Canada, in five days. If they couldn't do it, the job would be taken away from them and given to someone else. The troops knew they could do it. They had even wagered their paychecks on it. Chopping down spruces, milling planks and boards, and driving pilings into a river swollen with spring melt, the men built the 30o-foot bridge in just three and a half days.

An August 1942 Time magazine article provided the only major media attention the endeavor got. "Lieut. Colonel Heath Twichell set his Negro engineers to bridging the tumbling water, singing as they sawed. Wading waist deep in the fast icy stream, they put the bridge across in 36 hours, sang hymns at a Sunday service down by the riverside after the job was done." It was pure cornpone, but it was an acknowledgement. The reality for the soldiers sent in the spring of 1942 to build the Alcan (Alaska-Canada) Highway was quite different.

The men of the 95th !night have found themselves anywhere else in the Army than so close to the Arctic Circle if it had not been for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941. The United States declared war, and suddenly Alaska, the closest point in North America to Japan, looked incredibly vulnerable. Alaska was a vast, 656,425square-mile U.S. territory with a popu1ation of about 70,000, mostly natives and American trappers, miners, and fishers. Its only real defense was at Dutch Harbor, a naval base in the Aleutian Islands, 800 miles west of Anchorage, where a few airplanes and a tiny radio station were overseen by the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Transport within Alaska could be gotten, but only by air or sea, with local trappers and bush pilots as guides. There were two mainland railroads, but they didn't cover much ground. Riverboats carried people from one remote town to the next. If the Japanese attacked Alaska, how would America defend it? And if they seized it, what would stop them from invading the West Coast, Seattle or San Francisco?

President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the building of the Alcan Highway in February 1942, under the direction of Col. (he would later be promoted to brigadier general) William M. Hoge. The 1,500-mile road would be the first land route to connect Alaska to the United States. It would enable America to feed the area with troops and arms, tanks and airplanes. U.S. Army engineers decided to plot the highway to connect a line of existing airfields and military posts from Dawson Creek in British Columbia to Fairbanks, Alaska. "With such a string and with a road to "supply them, Alaska could be held," wrote Time magazine. The road could also provide a way to help our Soviet allies in Siberia, if needed.

A deal was made with Canada. The United States would make surveys and build the Alcan with the help of both American and Canadian contractors. Canada would give the right of way and allow the use of local materials, including timber, gravel, and rock. It would also waive import taxes and exempt Americans employed in Canada from paying Canadian taxes. It sounded great on paper, but none of the Army officers in Washington, D.C., responsible for the plan had any experience with construction projects in sub-arctic regions. Moreover, much of the area was uncharted, and the highway had to be built within a year. From the generals on down to the enlisted men, quick thinking and the ability to improvise would be indispensable.

Right away there was a personnel problem. Most of the Army Corps of Engineers was assigned elsewhere, mainly in the South Pacific. So the War Department had to do something it had sworn it wouldn't: call up black engineers. Popular opinion at the time viewed African -Americans as less skilled than whites. Most were given jobs as stevedores, stewards, cooks, and the like. True, blacks in America had been distinguishing themselves in war since the Revolution----including Pearl Harbor, when a 23-year-old Navy cook third class named Doris Miller pulled his captain to safety, then manned a machine gun against the Japanese, earning himself a Navy Cross. Still, many white officers had doubts about the character and ability of black soldiers, based on nothing more than deep-seated prejudices. "[The Negro] is careless, shiftless, irresponsible and secretive," said an often-quoted 1937 report from the U.S. Army War College. "He . . . is best handled with praise and by ridicule."

The military also had a rule that blacks were not to be sent to frigid climates because they were not suited to cold temperatures. This was odd considering that in 1899 members of the 24th Colored Infantry had been sent to the raucous Alaskan mining town of Skagway to keep order. They had stayed for three years, and by all accounts they were not just tolerated but truly respected by the white townsfolk. No records mention any difficulty with the cold.

It didn't help that Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., the commander of the Alaska-Aleutian theater and the son of a Confederate general, was himself a bigot. He wasn't against having blacks do hard labor as support staff to white troops, but he feared that African-American soldiers would be lured by high-paying dock jobs, and settle in Alaska "with the natural result," he wrote in a letter to Brig. Gen. C.L. Sturdevant, Assistant Chief of Engineers, who was responsible for staffing, "that they would be interbred with the Indians and Eskimos and produce an astonishing objectionable race of mongrels which would be a problem here from now on." He was assured that the black troops would be stationed so far in the wilderness there would be no chance of their fraternizing with anyone. Still, this would be an experiment, and the African Americans would be under a great deal of pressure not only to perform but to excel.

The solitude of Alaska and neighboring Yukon Territory and British Columbia was broken when the engineers began arriving, in March 1942. General Hoge's seven regiments, three African-American----the 93d, 95th, and 97^th----and four white, more than 10,000 troops, roughly a third of them black, would be posted in five positions along the route. Each regiment would build a specific section of the highway through virgin forest, over mountains, muskeg (swampy patches of decayed vegetation), permafrost, ice, and snow.

In April 1942 the 93d arrived at Skagway. Its job was to make a trail that the all-white 340th Engineer Regiment would use to transport equipment and material for building the highway. The trouble was, there was no equipment. Not a piece had arrived. The engineers, both black and white, waited for three weeks, doing busy work like filling potholes and patching up the wooden sidewalks. When the bulldozers and trucks did come, they were given to the 340th, which was charged with creating a 200-mile segment of highway from Carcross to Watson Lake in the Yukon Territory. This left only hand tools for the men of the 93d to use to make the access roads.

"We had no idea where we were going until we got on the ship in Seattle. It was like that then," says 88-year-old Hayward 1. Oubre, today a noted artist in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and in 1942 a master sergeant and draftsman in the 97th Regiment. "We got there to Valdez, we had our parkas on, and I said to myself, 'My God, this is the most beautiful land scape.' The mountains looked so big and yet we were miles away."

"Hayward was my bunkmate; we were friends," says William Griggs, 87, a retired teacher and school counselor, who was a staff sergeant and the regimental photographer for the 97th. "The day after I got married, I got my orders and had to leave right away. I didn't have my honeymoon until a year later."

Oubre and Griggs, like many of the 1,100 men of the 97th, were from the South, New Orleans and Baltimore, respectively. And now they and their fellow soldiers stood in several feet of snow, in a small fishing village 400 miles west of Skagway. These men, along with their white officers, made up the only regiment to work in the Alaska territory (the section north of Slana to Delta Junction was to be built by civilians from the Public Roads Administration, one of several agencies created under President Roosevelt's New Deal program to provide jobs for unemployed Americans; the same group would improve a preexisting road north to Fairbanks). They were not going to follow behind but blaze a trail southeast from a town called Slana to meet with the 18th Engineers who were coming northwest from the Yukon Territory. However, the 97th had no more luck than the 93d when it came to equipment. All the soldiers had were some beat-up dump trucks.

The men of the 95th were veterans of engineering projects, having worked on several at Virginia's Camp A. P. Hill before going to Fort Bragg and then on to Dawson Creek in British Columbia at the end of May. Unlike their compatriots in other regiments, they had the bulldozers and trucks to get the job done. Or so they thought. Their enthusiasm was soon dampened when they were assigned the task of following behind the all-white 341st Engineers as they built north to Fort Nelson. The heavy equipment was given over to the white regiment, and the 95th was left with hand tools, shovels, and wheelbarrows, to improve and maintain the newly blazed trail. The official reason was that the 341st had been there longer, so had more experience working with the terrain. The truth was that the top command could not let the white soldiers work behind the African-Americans: "How would this white regiment have reacted to the humiliation of being taken out of the lead and given a supporting role behind a black outfit?" the historian Heath Twichell asks in his comprehensive book, Northwest Epic: The Building of the Alaska Highway. His father, Col. Heath Twichell, was an officer on the project. It seemed that taking away the best equipment and more glamorous jobs (if you could call bashing your way through woods, ice, and mud glamorous) and giving them to the white regiments was par for the course. Jim Crow could reach from all the way down South to the North Pole.

But on this project, some company was always working behind another. Leapfrogging units moved forward in columns, each performing its specifIc task. First, surveyors mapped out the road, 10 miles ahead of the bulldozers. The powerful D-8 bulldozers~two rows of five each-then followed, knocking down trees and uprooting vegetation, cutting a swath as much as 100 feet wide. When bulldozers weren't available, the men hewed the trees by hand. After that a second company, with smaller bulldozers, made a rough road, corduroying (laying logs and brush down crosswise) over soft spots and muskeg, and building temporary bridges and culverts. Then came the grading detachments, filling in with dirt, and crews to replace the temporary bridges and culverts with permanent ones. A final company would bring up the rear, shoring the road with earth where needed, and checking drainage ditches. But not topping it with stones; that type of fancy work would be left to the civilian Public Roads Administration.

It all sounded simple, but many of the soldiers had not been trained to use the big bulldozers, so they had to be quick studies. "Most of the equipment I had never seen," said John Bollin, who was an engineer with the 93d Regiment, in the 2005 PBS documentary Building the Alaska Highway. "Being an asphalt-and-concrete city boy, I didn't know nothing about this heavy equipment." He, like others, needed on-the-job training. With the lack of experience and miles of unknown terrain ahead of them, the men got off to a slow start.

Then, on June 4, the news came that the Japanese had bombed the military base in Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands. More than 100 Americans were dead or wounded. The engineers had still created less than 100 miles of highway. Within a week of the bombing, the Japanese seized two of the islands---Attu and Kiska---so they were now on American soil. The project took on a fresh urgency. The engineers were on the front lines of the war. They redoubled their efforts, but the gluey terrain caused by spring rains slowed the builders. Heavy equipment would sink, so they had to hand-cut trees to corduroy their path. By the end of June they had completed only another 265 of the 1,450 miles of pioneer road. And in four months all construction would be halted because of oncoming winter.

With summer weather came dried ground, making the work easier, but also a battery of new miseries: choking clouds of glacial dust (a fine silt), voracious mosquitoes, tiny biting insects called no-seeums, and heat as high as 90 degrees. And with the summer solstice, the region became a land of the midnight sun. Under constant daylight, the men worked double shifts of 10 hours, or three shifts of 8, an advantage in terms of speed, but brutally exhausting.

"We had no time off. None," says Oubre. "We had a chance to come in and sleep." There wasn't much to do but sleep during the free hours anyway. "They kept us in the wilderness," says Oubre. "The officers' wives were flown in to be with them. But we didn't have that." Nor were the black soldiers allowed to go to the theaters or restaurants in any of the small towns they occasionally came upon.

Sometimes race had nothing to do with iti the men were simply stuck in the boondocks. Confined to camp, they read, II listened to music, sang songs, told jokes, I, and played cards. "The fellows used to gamble outside of my tent. You want to hear some cuss words, you just listen to frustrated black soldiers in World War II," Oubre chuckles. "But I couldn't sleep, so I complained. The guys were told, they could gamble if they didn't disturb the other men. Next day I heard mumbling outside my tent. They were cursing, the lowest kind of cursing, but in whispers."

"I wrote letters," says Griggs. "And aside from my official job of taking pictures to send to Washington, I had to go ahead and open my mouth and say I had experience with outboard motors and small boating, so they made me pontoon supplies back and forth from where I was Iat headquarters company to the advance parties."

The men also fished and hunted to jazz up the notoriously monotonous Army diet of canned meat and dehydrated vegetables, powdered eggs and powdered milk Says Oubre: "Once I was walking with a man who threw a rock and killed a duck. We had grouses. We cooked bear meat. The guys would get raisins and things and make liquor. The officers didn't mind so much; they wanted it too."

And General Buckner or no General, Buckner, African-Americans did interact with the native Alaskans. "We came in contact with Indians. They were not considered white, so we traded with them," says Oubre. "It seemed like we had the entire Army' supply of chili con carne. We were sick of chili," Griggs adds. "The Indians told us we could trade with them, but no more chili! We were also able to help them with medical supplies and the like." What did the natives think of the black men? "They had been schooled with some ideas about what we would do and what we would look like," says Oubre, "but they soon found out that we were just like any other human being."

By the end of August 1942, the summer's nonstop work had paid off. The men had built an additional 826 miles. Newspaper andl magazine reporters were invited to see one of the more presentable stretches of what one later dubbed "the Glory Road to Tokyo." Wire stories told the kind of tale Americans craved, of ordinary Joes, mud-covered and tired, fighting the elements to build a highway to whip the enemy. With about 400 miles left, General Hoge and other top brass now had the end- of the project in sight.

It might not have seemed so, though, to the men of the 95th. In June they still didn't have proper equipment. Rain fell in buckets, turning freshly cleared ground into sludge that was impossible to shape into a road, let alone work on with hand tools. The men mostly spent their time resupplying the 341st Regiment, situated well ahead of them. Morale was low. They were having problems with their white officers. The book Taps For a Jim Crow Army: Letters From Black Soldiers in World War II, by Phillip McGuire, contains sections that were censored (but, amazingly, saved) from letters written home by men of the 95th Engineers. One corporal complained that a. captain "told a boy if he didn't be quiet, he make him. The boy told him that the first time he tryed to close his mouth he would cut his throat. The boy really meant it." At least one officer was on the side of the men, writing to his wife about some of his peers: "Strange as it seems, these dastardly punks are Southerners. The Army works for them, and the colored man is still his slave. I'd like to line them against a stone wall and then convert them into fertilizer."

The passages were clipped by the camp censor and sent to General Sturdevant, who decided a change was in order. He removed the colonel in command, who it seemed was at least part of the problem. In July Lt. Col. Heath Twichell took over the 95th Regiment. Immediately he understood that the black soldiers needed real work. He convinced Col. James A. O'Connor, who in May had assumed command of the three regiments (including the 95th) working on the southern section of the highway, to let the black soldiers take the assignment of building the bridge across the Sikanni Chief River. More than just a task, the project gave the soldiers of the 95th a chance to prove themselves. "We can't afford to lose our own personal pride," one sergeant said to the Time magazine reporter, "by slipping up." The Sikanni Chief River Bridge remained in place long after others fell down, "a monument to the hardihood and skill of the men who built it," Twichell wrote in Northwest Epic. Based on their success, the regiment was given several more bridge projects.

Twichell, who had had his own doubts about how competent black soldiers could be, was now more than convinced. He made sure that the drivers and mechanics got extra instructions on operating the equipment. He was determined to shut up even the biggest skeptics. The men of the 95th were lucky to have a white officer who was firmly on their side, because there were only a few black officers to turn to, and they were doctors and chaplains, good for the body and spirit but when it came to fighting Jim Crow, they just didn't have enough clout.

One who did help keep up morale was Rev. Edward G. Carroll, the chaplain for the 9sth Regiment. "Yes, there were discrimination problems," said Carroll in a recent interview with Lael Morgan, an emerita professor of journalism at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. "The race you don't know is the race you suspect, but our men proved themselves."

"We only had one black officer, a chaplain, Capt. A. L. Smith," says Griggs. "We didn't have too much trouble. There were incidents, but none of insurrection or courts-martial. I didn't have too many problems. I had something they all wanted: pictures. I made good friends with some of the officers, in particular a captain from Texas, a medical officer who was interested in promoting racial harmony."

Into September, the black soldiers held their own, learning, like many of their white counterparts, by trial and error. Although up and down the highway the work was gritty, the job of the 97th was possibly the toughest. The Alaskan interior was colder and got more snow than the Yukon Territory and British Columbia. The regiment had to travel 200 miles north from Valdez and build a road over the Mentasta Mountains just to get to Slana, where their section began. Navigating bulldozers around crumbling mountain trails was treacherous. In October the temperatures dropped to 40 and 50 below. If a man's skin started showing the telltale white patches that meant frostbite, he would have to stop and get inside, thus taking another body off the job. They had to chop glaciers by hand to clear the way. Anything they couldn't move, they built bypass roads around. Diesel fuel solidified, and gas lines froze. Engines had to have torches set under them and be left running all night; once turned off, they would most likely not start again. The men had to be content with a poky five miles a day, as opposed to an average of at least twice as many elsewhere on the highway. Top brass griped that they were slow because they were just no good.

And, as all along the highway, the men on construction details constantly had to set up and break down their camps. With canvas tents for shelter, the only added insulation came from condensation that was created by stoves and froze on the tents. Latrines and garbage pits had to be dug, often through the ice.

Manning the bulldozers, building corduroys, grading, filling, and doing the multifold jobs that many thought they couldn't do, the men of the 971st Regiment made 295 miles of road from Slana, Alaska, across the Tanana River and south to Canada. It was a testament to the 971st that when they reached the point, somewhere above the Alaska-Canada border, where they were supposed to meet the 18th Engineers, and the other regiment wasn't there, the 971th kept going another 20 miles until they found them. They crowed, and had good reason to. When a Philadelphia technician, Cpl. Refines Sims, Jr., of the 971st, met Texan Pvt. Alfred Jalufka, the lead driver of the 18th, on October 25, 1942, the two stood in the scoops of their bulldozers, reached across, and shook hands. The other segments had been joined a month before at Watson Lake, but this was the winning picture. The photo of the meeting went to every newspaper and magazine in America. The final two segments of the highway were finally linked. On November 20,1942, the Alcan Highway officially opened to military traffic. It had taken a little more than eight months to complete.

By the summer of 1943 U.S. forces had driven the Japanese out of the Aleutian Islands, and the number of military personnel in Alaska (which would not become a state until 1959) swelled to 124,000 that year. The highway proved its worth when 8,000 aircraft were trucked over its surface to the air bases, then flown to Russia to be used in that country's fight against Hitler. In 1946 the Canadians took control of their section of the highway (paying the Americans for it, so there would be no future claims). The Alaska Highway, as it is called today, was not open to the public until 1948. It took another few years for it to be completely paved.

What of the men? Some stayed on to maintain the road through the winter; others were assigned to engineering projects elsewhere in Alaska. Still others were sent wherever they were needed most. After the war several went on to distinguished careers. Reverend Carroll became the first black bishop of the United Methodist Church of New England. One master sergeant with the 93d Regiment, George Owens, served as president of Tougaloo College in Mississippi from 1964 to 1984. Joseph Prejean, illiterate when he joined the 93d, learned to read, got training in Army cooking school, and became a well-regarded Louisiana chef.

Hayward Oubre, a student at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) when he was drafted, went back to school under the GI Bill and became the first Mrican-American to receive a master's degree in fine arts at the University of Iowa. His work is now in museums and galleries alongside that of Elizabeth Catlett (a fellow student at Iowa) and Hale Woodruff (who was his mentor).

William Griggs left in the spring of 1943 to have his delayed honeymoon. He then went to Officer Candidate School in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, becoming an officer in the Signal Corps. He eventually got a master's degree in secondary education administration from New York University. ("At the time, the University of Maryland would not admit black students. But they still had to pay for my education," says Griggs.)

With the shock of Pearl Harbor as potent and horrific to Americans then as 9/1l is to us today, the American people needed something to feel good about, and it was important that black soldiers were a part of the effort right from the start. There were other experiments with blacks and whites working together: the U.S. Coast Guard was trying it out even as the first men arrived in Alaska and Canada to build the highway (see "The Mariners," Spring 2005). In 1943 the Navy refitted a luxury yacht for military use, then staffed it with black and white officers and seamen (see" 'The Best Democracy I've Known,''' Summer 2000). African-Americans would go on to distinguish themselves again and again, as pilots in the Tuskegee Airmen's squadrons; as drivers in the convoys that rolled night and day through France to supply Gen. George S. Patton's army (see "The Red Ball Express," Spring 2001); and as members of the 761st all-black tank battalion that spent 183 days on the front lines of the European theater, fighting in the epic Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes Forest and participating in the final push against Hitler's army. But the men on the Alcan Highway were in the vanguard, their participation a first, tentative step toward employing the skills of blacks during wartime. "This episode . . . stands out as an example of actually celebrating the activities of black troops," said the historian Ken Coates in the companion Web site to the documentary film Building the Alaska Highway. "They did work that nobody thought they could do, and they did it in an area that nobody thought they could survive."

In 1948 President Harry S. Truman desegregated the U.S. Armed Forces by executive order. Integration was now a military-wide imperative. The more than 3,000 African-Americans who helped build the Alcan Highway went on with their lives with little or no recognition for their contribution. On the project's fiftieth anniversary in 1992, an exhibit and reunion was organized in Fairbanks, Alaska. Not until more recently have these men been given serious attention. The PBS documentary includes them on its Web site at www.pbs.org/ wgbh/amex/alaska. Heath Twichell's book Northwest Epic is a detailed account of the project, with much care and research given to the role of the black soldier.

William Griggs took thousands of photographs, many of which, he presumes, were stored or trashed by the military. Still, he kept more than a thousand himself and published a selection in The World War II Black Regiment That Built the Alaska Military Highway: A Photographic Essay, edited by Philip J. Merrill. Griggs's photos of the men of the 97th Regiment give us a real and rare look at the hard work and camaraderie of the black soldier at war.