I love discovering stories that are new to me. Sometimes I find a story that I think would make a great movie. In my imagination I reach out to my movie producing friends like Tom Hanks or Steven Spielberg. They think my idea is fabulous because for the most part, no one knows about the heroic story of… There are many of these in my “ideas for movies to write, fund and produce” file. From time to time you’ll see them here as a post. It is my privilege to honor their memories.

After the Japanese invasion of the Aleutian Islands during World War ll, the governments of Canada and the United States agreed in 1942 to build the Alaska Highway to help defend the continent. According to historians, it did, however, take some time for the U.S. Army to involve black soldiers in World War II.

Regiments of black soldiers were sent north to help cut and hack through virgin wilderness. Along the way were clouds of mosquitoes, boggy land, permafrost and temperatures ranging from 90 degrees to minus 70 during one of the coldest years on record.

Historians often call the building of the Alaska Highway one of the 20th century’s greatest engineering feats. A total of 10,000 soldiers slashed through the wilderness frontier in only about eight months. Blacks comprised about one-third of the 10,000 soldiers assigned to build the highway. They served in three segregated regiments, consistent with U.S. military policy at the time that required black soldiers to serve in segregated units that typically were assigned to menial work.

Author and historian Lael Morgan noted that while researching the history of the highway for a National Geographic article, she learned that thousands of black soldiers played an important, but largely unheralded role in building the highway. She found that “despite a chronic lack of supplies and equipment, they got the job done”. With a shortage of military manpower in the early going of World War II, and the need to establish an overland route to supply Alaska in the face of Japanese aggression, military leaders were forced to send black soldiers to help build the Alaska Highway. The highway, which runs from Dawson Creek in British Columbia to Alaska’s Delta Junction, opened to general civilian traffic in 1948.

In 2017, the 75th year anniversary of the building of the highway, State lawmakers in Alaska voted to set aside Oct. 25 each year to honor the black soldiers who worked on the Alcan Highway, now called the Alaska Highway. 

For more reading about this story visit apnews.com, celebratealaskahighway.com, alaskapublic.org.
 We Fought the Road, by Christine and Dennis McClure.