The Pioneer Road

The general commanding the Army in Alaska asked that the Black engineers be kept out of the territory. They built a third of the Alaska Highway anyway, including the last mile.On October 25, 1942, two bulldozers met in the spruce near Beaver Creek, in the Yukon. One was driven by Corporal Refines Sims Jr. of the 97th Engineers, a Black soldier from Philadelphia. The other was driven by Private Alfred Jalufka of the 18th Engineers, a white soldier from Texas. The two men leaned across the gap and shook hands, a photographer made the picture, and the newspapers ran it. Then, for about fifty years, the story of the road mostly left it out.The road was one of the great construction feats of the war. Authorized in February 1942, two months after Pearl Harbor, it ran from a railhead at Dawson Creek, British Columbia, through roadless muskeg, mountains and permafrost to Delta Junction, Alaska: about 1,500 miles, cut by about 10,000 soldiers in about eight months. Seven engineer regiments did it. Three were Black, about 3,700 men under white officers, housed in separate camps, kept largely out of the towns on the route, and issued less heavy equipment, and later, than the white regiments beside them. When the ribbon was cut at Soldiers Summit on November 20, 1942, the speeches named governments, generals and the Corps of Engineers. Two Black soldiers held the ribbon; their regiments went unnamed.This is the whole project, not just the construction season: the civilian rebuild of 1943; the Canol pipeline that produced oil for about a year; the airfields that passed nearly 8,000 Lend-Lease aircraft to Soviet crews at Fairbanks; the American army that outnumbered Canadians in Canada’s Northwest by 1943, and the price Ottawa paid to buy back what it built; and the Kaska, Dene, Tlingit, Southern Tutchone and Upper Tanana communities whose trails lay under the surveyors’ lines.What you’ll learn:Why nobody would pay for a road to Alaska, and why a chain of Canadian airfields decided the routeHow a pioneer road was actually built, and why scraping the moss off permafrost sank it into the groundWhat is documented about the equipment the Black regiments were given, and where the 'hand tools only' story becomes legendWhy the air route to Russia, not truck traffic, was the road’s real wartime value, with the counter-case given its dueWhy Canada paid the United States for installations on Canadian soil, and what the road cost the people already thereHow the men in the photograph came back into the story, and what the record can and cannot show about the highway and the desegregation of the ArmyThis book is for you if:You have driven the Alaska Highway, or mean to, and want to know what happened at the places you passYou read Second World War history and want the home-front engineering story told at the pace it happenedYou read Black military history and know the Tuskegee Airmen and the Red Ball Express but not the 93rd, 95th and 97th EngineersYou want figures given with their sources and ranges, and legends checked in both directionsAbout 10,000 soldiers built a road in eight months. A third of them were men a general had asked to keep out. The road is still there, and so are their names.