After Pearl Harbor, one of the most vulnerable places in the United States was Alaska. Isolated, barely defended,…

After Pearl Harbor, one of the most vulnerable places in the United States was Alaska. Isolated, barely defended, closer to Japan than to Washington, and with no road connecting it to the rest of North America. Roosevelt ordered one built through 1,500 miles of Canadian wilderness. They gave the Army eight months. This is the story of the Alaska Highway..🧵1/4

🧵 2/4 Roosevelt authorised it in February 1942. Work began on 8 March, out of Dawson Creek, a farming town in British Columbia with a population of about 600. What lay ahead was mountains, forest, rivers, and muskeg, which is ground that looks solid and then swallows a bulldozer. Much of it was unmapped. Surveyors worked ahead of the machines by climbing trees, taking a compass bearing on something in the distance, climbing down and cutting toward it. Then in June the situation changed. Japanese forces bombed Dutch Harbor and occupied Attu and Kiska in the Aleutians, American territory. The road stopped being a precaution. Army engineer regiments had already started the job, and it quickly became obvious they needed more men. Almost every other engineer regiment in the Army was committed elsewhere. There was one source of manpower left.

🧵 3/4 The Army had spent years insisting that Black soldiers were unsuited to cold climates and unfit for demanding work. In 1942 it sent three segregated Black engineer regiments, the 93rd, 95th and 97th, to build a road through the sub-Arctic. There were 3,695 of them, almost exactly a third of the engineer soldiers on the project. Most were not told where they were going until they got there. They were barred from entering towns and kept out in the bush. The 95th, the regiment with the most bulldozer experience, had its machines taken away and given to a white regiment, and was handed picks, shovels, axes and saws instead. Then there was the country itself. Temperatures could plunge as low as 70 below. Mosquitoes and gnats in summer, and 20 hours of daylight, so the work never really stopped.

🧵 4/4 At the Sikanni Chief River, 300 feet wide and running fast with snowmelt, the 95th was told to build a bridge in five days. They bet their wages they could do it in four. They finished it in 84 hours, working chest deep in freezing water and singing to keep going. On 25 October 1942, near Beaver Creek in the Yukon, two bulldozers came at each other through the spruce and stopped in the last gap in the road. Corporal Refines Sims Jr of the 97th, from Philadelphia, and Private Alfred Jalufka of the 18th, from Kennedy, Texas, climbed down and shook hands in the middle. Somebody took a photograph. 1,500 miles, eight months, and the road that finally connected Alaska to the North American highway system. The Army was not desegregated for another six years. This was the story of the Alaska Highway. I post a story like this every single day. Most people never see them. Follow so you don't miss the next one.

🧵 BONUS/4 The photo.