General Hoge soon realized that he would need additional troops to complete the road expeditiously. But with the Japanese stepping up their assaults in the South Pacific, most regular army engineers had been dispatched there. The War Department solved the problem by sending black units to Hoge’s aid. Commanders did not reach the decision easily. The army was still segregated in 1942, and officials were hesitant to post black soldiers in areas (especially the American South) where their presence might incite racial animosity. Furthermore, under the misapprehension that African Americans would be unable to withstand Arctic conditions, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson had previously refused to post black troops in the far north. But the highway project’s need for manpower finally convinced Stimson to reverse his policy, and three black Engineer regiments — the 93rd, 95th, and 97th — were assigned to the project, boosting Hoge’s numbers by a third and increasing his command to 10,607 men.

In June 1942 the Japanese attacked Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, adding increased pressure to the fast pace of road building. Troops worked long hours in shifts, without a day off. Some companies used what they called a ‘train system’ of construction, with all units moving forward simultaneously — the heavy bulldozers in front, knocking down or uprooting trees, followed by other ‘dozers that pushed the debris to the sides of the road, and then work parties corduroying over soft spots, creating permanent bridges and culverts, and eventually giving consistent shape and borders to the roadway. In other places, companies of men labored in what can only be described as a leap-frog method: each crew took responsibility for a 5-to-10-mile stretch of road, and when a crew finished a section, it skipped to the front of the line and began work on another. As the summer of 1942 ended, Hoge’s reports to his superiors grew more optimistic.

The changes the road building brought to the region baffled the few isolated native and white trappers living there. ‘We were taking goods into the north by horse and dog sleighs the way our fathers and grandfathers had done,’ recalled one trader about his first encounter with the road builders, ‘when we met . . . a great fleet of trucks as far as the eye could see . . . . [T]ime went ahead more in a few minutes than it had in a whole lifetime. Like the snap of your fingers, we changed from the old to the new.’

In August 1942 Lieutenant General Brehon Somervell, the army’s chief logistician, made a four-day inspection of the highway to check on any problems and to see if any organizational changes were needed. He decided that the project was moving too slowly and that Hoge’s troops were ill prepared for the winter. The following month Somervell relieved Hoge of his command and replaced him with Brigadier General James O’Connor. Hoge later claimed that Somervell had fired him not because of Hoge’s shortcomings but to settle a score that dated from their service together in the 1930s.

An advance clearing crew of the 340th Engineers finally met the 35th Engineers on September 24, 1942, on a tributary of the Liard River — thereafter known as Contact Creek — to open the pioneer trail from Dawson Creek to Whitehorse. A month later the 18th and 97th Engineers encountered one another near Beaver Creek in the Yukon Territory. In just over six months soldiers and civilian contractors had laid down a supply road that many thought could never be built — certainly not so quickly. A statement from Secretary Stimson’s office praised the men who ‘pushed forward at the rate of eight miles a day, bridged 200 streams, laid a roadway 24 feet between ditches, [and] at the highest point, between Fort Nelson and Watson Lake, reached an altitude of 4,212 feet.’ But the exhaustive work caused one sergeant with poetic tendencies to write, ‘The Alaska Highway winding in and winding out fills my mind with serious doubt as to whether ‘the lout’ who planned this route was going to hell or coming out!’

At the highway’s official opening at Soldier’s Summit on November 20, 1942, General O’Connor speculated that the building of this road might someday ‘become an American saga ranking with the epics of Frmont and Lewis and Clark.’ Yet the story wasn’t over. As late as the close of 1943 some 11,000 military men were still assigned to the region, under the direction of the PRA, and progress on the road continued until well after the war, as workers replaced temporary bridges with steel spans and relocated some sections to improve the army’s two-lane track.

Questions about the highway’s usefulness persisted as well. As late as 1947 Congressman Warren Magnuson of Washington continued to promote construction of Route A, which he called ‘the real Alaska Highway.’ The road also figured in a 1943 U.S. Senate investigation of the CANOL Project led by Harry Truman, the junior senator from Missouri. Truman’s committee determined that the pipeline had been raised in haste, at extraordinary taxpayer expense, and that it failed to provide a local source of oil that would be necessary in the defense of Alaska.

Thanks to that probe and others like it, Truman earned national renown and the nod to become Roosevelt’s last vice president. After the war, Truman saw the U.S. government sell off or dismantle CANOL’s components. But the highway persisted. It opened to tourist traffic in 1948, and over the following decades, Alaska and British Columbia refined their respective sections. Now completely paved, the road offers an extraordinary (and often extraordinarily lonely) journey into the northern wilds. Built to speed supplies north, it is now a road over which to linger and enjoy one of the twentieth century’s great engineering marvels.

This article was written by J. Kingston Pierce and originally published in the January 2001 issue of American History Magazine. For more great articles, subscribe to American History magazine today!

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