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THE SATURDAY EVENING POST

a t S i x t y B e l o wBy Capt . RICILUU)

d Alaskan blizzards too coldbear, tbe Army, playedJones to a vital stretcb ofoo steep for a goat.

v at ing Batta l ion came down the gangplank inSkagway's rocky flord, they had looked withat the old Robert W, Service couple t tha ton a spruce plank over the counter atThis is the Law of the Yukon, that onlythe Strong shall thrive;That surely the W eak shall perish, andonly the Fit survive.

ths la te r , witb the thermo meter onth eatWhitehorse registering sixty-eight

all there could hepossihly to railroading.

F r o s t b i t t e n C . I. r a i l ro a de r s : L t . Col . H . C .B a u g h n , left., and Lt. Col . W. P . Wi l s on .In civilian life, some of the soldiers of the 770th aunit of tbe Military Railway Service of tbe Transpor-tation Corpshad highballed Southem Pacific trainsthrough the high Sierras, where snow can choke a passbetween nightfall and dawn.Others had brought New York Central fliers downtbe Mobawk Valley in tbe fiercest blizzards of tbeEastern seaboard. Still others had stoked freightengines of the Grea t Northern across theMonta naRockies or hraked the Milwaukee's gaudy orangeOlympian down the twisting switchbacks of the BitterRoots .

15They had heen recruited from seventeen major rail-roads inthe United Statea. Their experience ran thewhole gamut of American railroading. Sgt. JamesJordan, decora ted with the Soldier 's Medal for muf-fling a fire in his cab, had pulled tbe thro ttle of a littlehumpbacked switch engine at a ClJcago steel mill.Capt. Joe Winters had fired the big Union Pacificmou nta in locomotives which snaked the Spokane Lim-ited up the Columhia River gorge. But none of themhad ever seen anything to ma tc h tbe 110 narrow-gauge miles of the White Pass and Yukon."T ha t l ine 's too s teep for a goat and too cold for apolar bear," said Pvt. Howard Foley, from tbe LongIsland Railroad, in New York, after bis first jolting

journe y over tbe 110 miles.Yet tbose 110 miles were vital to the American wareffort, and for that reason the 770th had heen acti-va ted and shipped northward by Army transport upthe mountain-barricaded waters of the Inside Passage.Tbe Wbite Pass and Yukon afforded the only accessto the sub-Arctic sobtu des along tbe 1630-me route oftbe Alaska Higbway between Dawson Creek, BritisbColumbia , and F airbanks , Alaska . It also was the onelink between tbe highway and the sea. It was tbe oneplace wbere troops migbt work on the historic roadother than at tbe te rminals ; it offered tbe only chanceto complete the highway on schedule.Furthermore , the White Pass and Yukon endedsquarely in tbe center of tbe chain o strategic airportsa t Watson Lake , Wbitehorse and Northway which t ieAlaska by ai r tothe Canad ian pla ins . These a irpor trequired vast expansion. In addit ion to all tbis, thAmerican Army bad under way the immense Canolproject, entaihng 640 miles of wilderness pipeline tobring the pro duct of tbe N orm an W ells oil fields on tbeMackenzie River to tbe mihtary bases and airports ofthe North Pacific theater of v/ds.Tbis meant tba t thousands of tons of cement , end-less piles of pipe , innumerable bul ldozers and hugequanti t ies of supplementary (Continued on Pagv 1 0 9

Sa m ple of the s c e ne ry u loug t he mi l i t e Pa s s a nd Y u kon , toug he s t 110 mi le s o f r a i l roa do n t h e c o n t i n e n t , w h e r e w a t e r t a n k s turn to s o l id i ce a nd w he e l s f r ee z e to the t r a c ks .

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THE SATURDAY EVENING POST 10M A N W I T HA

(Contititiedfrom Page 23)

the man with theIt'sdifficult tositstill inthe proper back-and magnifying lenses magnifynt too. Sometimes day insectsbe photographed at night, andinthe daytime; a particu-to finda term in the refriger-the chill will stiffen it upIfof hia own about which he is

of familiarity. Thereofwasps in ahoz near the bam

s to handle his insects. He haso milk aphida, the cows of the ants,and he was no more successfulForapet mantis which

waa allowed the run of the house, andliked to sit meditatively watching histypewriter. It waa five inches long analud the disconcerting habitwhich onlythe mantis seems to possess^of turningita head to keep you in ita line ofvision.It also had an appetite so voracious thatTeale decided itscharacteristic prayingattitude was a constant supplication formore. It ate so many things, includingother insects that had been killed withamimonia or cyanide and dipped in de-natured alcohol and shellac, that scien-tists were much interested in it. It ac-companied Teale to a meeting of theBrooklyn Bntomological Society andgave the scholars inthe audience starefor stare. It even made a radio appear-ance and, being asilent creature unableto croon or play any known instrument,had the announcer a little perplexed un-til Teale put it on the microphone. Oncethere, it ranaround inquisitively, andthe small tapping of its feet went outover the air as akind ofmantis clog.

It was, Teale thinks, the most interest-ing insect tbat heever knew. He isn'tsure that itwill continue to hold ita ownin that pleasant position. It is estimatedthat there are 625,000 species of insectson this earth and, although he has heenmost industrious in his efforts to get ac-quainted with them, he's only dented thesurface of the thing so far.

HIGHBALLINGAT SIXTY BELOW

(Continued from Page 15)s had to be hauled from SkagwayAlaskan coast to Whitehorse atof navigation on the Yukonforon the airfields and thefor some

Gen. Brehon Somervell, command-

He drove on the Alaska High-acommand car and skimmed theeerie ledges of the White Passin a 1927 sedan fitted withhim in his planehe returned to Washington wasthe veteran masterof the W. P. & Y., who also iaofSkagway. General Somer-in-onthe 110 spectacularfrom Skagway toWhitehorse wasto the successful construc-In Generalce, plans were made tothe Whiteand Yukon,

on Ala a kanita own-

The leasefor. theof thendone year

the line wass of cargoe five monthato No-er. In the sav-to two trainaand fre-all.

Gen.A. (Patay)com-of the

IF YOU R POSTIS LATE

Despitethefinejobwhichour overloaded transpor-tation system ia doing, allkinds of transportation inwartime are uncertain. Mil-itary supplies, of course,must take precedence overcivilian shipments . Tbe Cur-tis magazines are shippedfrom Philadelphia in whatwould normally be ampletime to reach you on theregular publication date.If your Post is late, it isfrom conditions heyond oi:rcontrol.

Alaska Highway and the NorthwestService Command, wanted 15,000 tonsevery two weeks. This was the job of theG. I.wbicb means Government Issue,and is a colloquialism foranything per-taining to soldiersrailroaders of the770th who disembarked at Skagway justas winter's winds were beginning to icethe W. P. & Y.Their commanding officer, Lt. Col.William P. Wilson, ofDenver, had beensuperintendent of the Burlington's linesin the Rocky Mountains. "Narrow-gauge railroading was mybusiness forfifteen years," he told Col. K.B. Bush,chief of stafif of the Northwest ServiceCommand. "We'll get along all right.There'll be nothing to it."Bush looked sympathetically atWil-son. "Colonel," he said, "you've neverseen a railroad like this one, wide gauge,narrow gauge or meter gauge."A week later Wilson was back inBush's office. Heheld his hat humhlyin his hand. "Colonel," he began, "I apol-ogize. I'll say Ihadn't seen anything yet.This isn't only a railroad. It 's an airwaytoo. We need dirigibles and cargo planesas much as we need locomotives."Up out of Skagway the White Pass andYukon ascends 2900 feet in nineteenmiles. Much of the grade is4per cent.The lead engine of a train ia frequentlythirty feet higher on the mountain wallthan the caboose.Curves are sosharp that trains

rounding them arecurled up like acowpuncher's lar-iat. Overhangingprecipices frowndownonthethirty-aix-inch tracks,andhelow the ties thecliff falls away 1200sheer feet to theturbulent watersof the SkagwayRiver. The rail-road follows theheartbreaking trailof the '98ers overWhite Pass, a trailbeset hy hlizzards,avalanches and in-credible tempera-tures.Thia was the set-ting in which theG. I. railroaders of

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THE SATURDAY EVENING POST Novembtlie 770th were called on to perform.Approximately 1000 tons a week weregoing over the bleak summit of WhitePass. They had to multiply this figureat least seven limes. Some of the per-sonnel of the 770th came straight fromcold-weather lines like the NorthernPaciflc, Delaware and Hudson and theNew York Central. But others had hadtheir blood thinned by many years in thesun. Sgt. R. R. Chastain had been theSeaboard's yard conductor in Miami'sgolden air. Sgt. Cecil Brock had been anengineer on the Alabama and WesternFlorida. Lt. J. W. Rogers was from theSouthern Railway in Mississippi. AndColonel Wilson'a right-hand aide, Lt.Col. Herman C. Baughn, had been SantaFe trainmaster at Needles, California,where 115 degrees in the shade is the rulerather than the exception.

Swathed in a parka and quivering likeaspic, Baughn looked at the thermometerat Carcross, in the heart of the JackLondon country, and fotind that atsixty-five degrees helow zero even com-plaints about tbe weather freeze in one'swindpipe.The men of the 770th were mechanics,dispatchers, engineers, firemen, conduc-tors, telegraphers, section bands, cooks,brakemen and track walkers. They tookover all the jobs on the railroad. Thecomparative handful of civilian em-ployees stayed on to instruct and help.It was not uncommon to see a locomo-tive with three men in the cab-the G. I.crew plua a veteran civilian as a "rider"showing the aoldiera the curvea and em-bankments where too much throttlemight mean a plunge as high as the Em-pire State Building. This arrangementstill prevails, with the 770th operatingthe North's oldest and most famous rail-road under the coaching of Canadian andAmerican civiliana who have been withthe line ever since the gold ruab.

As luck would have it, the 770th ranhead-on into the meanest, cruelest Arcticwinter since 1910. Snowahoe rabbitafroze in their lairs. At the Northway air-port the temperature dropped to seventy-two degrees helow. On the Alaska High-way antifreeze hardened in the cans.Truck motors had to be kept running allnight or they would never atart in themorning.A trapper found a lynx dead fromthe cold. Ice floes tbe size of grandpianos choked the Yukon River atWhitehorse. The Mounties put asidetheir boota and wore n^ukluks with foiu"pairs of wool socks.When White Pasa traina stopped totake on water, the locomotive wheelsfroze to the rails. Often they were notbroken loose until another engine wassummoned by wire to give the train ashattering bump. In the yards at Skag-way, Whitehorse and CarcrosswhichJack London shortened from CaribouCrossingenginea were moved every tenminutes to keep them from freezing tothe track. Drifting, wind-blown anowplugged the line at innumerable points.Indians on snowshoes risked their livesto hring emergency rations to passengersii),-s!talled trains.

When Winter Did its Wore ISourdoughs who remembered Serviceand London and Rex Beach in personhad never experienced a winter like it.But Colonel Wilson determined to keepthe line open. General Somervell andGeneral O'Connor wanted tonnage, andhe was going to give it to them. That waswhen the big storm hit.The wind howling across the height ofand and whistling down the canyonsounded like the loup-garou, the dreadedercury plummeted out of sight. Colo-

had to be separated with acetylenetorches. Metal became brittle and draw-bars snapped under the loada. Fire doorsin snorting, straining locomotives werecoated with half an inch of froat. Ex-haust steam, pouring back into enginecabs, froze the overalls of the G. I. crewsas stiff as planka. Only one injectorcould be used, the second being turnedinto the water tank to keep the waterfrom freezing.One by one, the desperately puffingnarrow-gauge engines quit. Flesh andblood were abroad in the storm, hut it

waa more than iron and steel could stand.Rotaries stalled. On the wind-sweptbasalt near Fraser Loop, Colonel Wilsonand twenty-two aoldiers with him shov-eled anow into the tanks of engines No.81 and 62 to maintain water in. the boil-ers; the water towers along the trackwere frozen as hard as granite. The coalin the tenders ran out and the soldiersbegan to chop up stacks of spare ties tokeep the engines alive.When 81 and 62 at last succumbed tothe buzzard. Colonel Wilaon and his G. I.

On the fifth day. Colonel Wilson re-ceived word by telegraph, the only me-chanical facility functioning in the storm,that 66 and 69 were frozen fast on themountainside, midway between Skagwayand Fraser. The next blow was to thesolar plexus. The storm was preying onthem at sea as well as on the land. Wilaonand his men learned that the barge enroute from Prince Rupert had becomeoverloaded with ice and that No. 253was at the hottom of tbe bay near Cbil-koot Barracks.At this juncture the colonel wrote inhis report, "Situation at Fraser Loopserious." All qualifications had heen re-moved.From Carcross a D-4 cat bucked highwinda acroas the frozen surface of LakeBennett, ascended the pass and gotthrough to the cabin with a load of food."That bulldozer," said Wilson, "lookedto us hke six regime.ita with colors fly-ing." The hungry G. I. railroaderscrowded around the cat driver, and soonbacon and beans and fried potatoes wereon tbe fire in the cabin at Fraaer Loop.

LITTLE LULUrailroaders were marooned. They tookrefuge in a tiny cabin near the line. "Ex-cept that it was unbelievably cold in-stead of ghastly hot," Wilson said later,"our retreat was a fair replica of theBlack Hole of Calcutta. Twenty-three oftia slept on the floor of a shack built tohouse six people at the most. We werepiled in there like cordwood. But it hada stove and we could chop up tiea for fuel,and so at least we didn't freeze."

Seated in the midst of his men on thefioor of the cabin, Colonel Wilson keptan account for General O'Connor oftheir experiences. On the fourth day ofthe incarceration by the blizzard, withfood nearly gone, he wrote, "Situation atFraser Loop beginning to look seriotis."Of course there still was hope. Engines66 and 69 might be shoved through thestorm to the rescue from the shops atSkagway. And there always was newlocomotive No. 253, heing brought up theInside Passage by barge from PrinceRupert, 400 miles down the seacoast.Perhaps 253 could he unloaded on thedouble-quick and, like the old blue-

On the eleventh day the siege at last waslifted. Engine 71 got through ftomSkagway with the rotary, and the line wasreopened. Wilson and his twenty-twosoldier railroaders got their first full mealand warm sleep in nearly two weeks.That waa the critical period in theArctic saga of the 770th. From then on,freight totals began to soar. Four thou-sand tons a week were achieved. Soldierengineersmen hke Sgt. Edward Can-field, from the Erie Railroad, and Corp.Jimmy Di Thomas, from the Pennsyl-vaniastuck to the throttle for twelvehours a day. Capt. Joe Winters sat forfifteen hours in the oily water of theroundhouse pit at Whitehorse, when theweather was fifty-four degrees helow, toweld the broken "wishbone" of No. 69.

New locomotives were barged in;these were the standard United Nationstype which British soldiers call the Aus-terity and Americans the Gypsy RoseLee, because the locomotives are strippedto essentials.On one memorable day the soldierrailroadera shoved thirty-four trains

up to the highest expectationseral Somervell and General OTwenty-four hours of operatinow accomplishing what two wdone before. The arrival of thisWhitehorse not only meant Alaska Highway would be cahead of schedule but that newand hangars could be added toairports along the road.Not long ago Gen. Henry Hcommanding our Army Air For"Never has a road been so impairmen as the Alaska Highwaplies hauled over the White Yukon by the 770th have beento this development.On the North's Roll ofHToday, the tonnage of the Whovers around 10,000 tons a wE. A. Warren has hved at the tion of Log Cabin since it .was Mounted post where gold seechecked in as they crossed thetional boundary. "I see moreLog Cabin each day now," sheremarked, "than I used to see month."And Clifford Rogers, veterhaired president of the White Yukon, has added, "The soldie

lot of diffictilty when they firsThey didn't believe that this toughest one hundred and ten track in the world.' And thknow what an Arctic winter clike. But today they are domarkable job. I venture to saySeven Hundred and Seventietcupy a place in the hiatory of thright alongside Klondike MMounties, Ma Pullen and Dan Mand that's some place indeed."Freight has not been the oshoved through this frigid zonsoldier railroaders. In a few mWhite Pass and Yukon transpoproximately 22,000 troops anconstruction workers to Whfrom where they journeyed on thHighway to airfields and other

Half the old parlor cara of the commandeered and benches for thia purpoae. The other emptied of their chairs and usedquarters for several hundred methe 770th. They himg their clotthe luggage racks and moved icots. Nor were the chairs alloto waate. General O'Connorgrabbed them for the headquthe fartbeat-north Service Cever established by the Americ"Those chairs," said ColonGeneral O'Connor's chief of staour only seats for nearly flve mRailroaders in the north, band civilian, knock on wood wnote that tbe 770th has achievenomenal tonnage record withooua accident. "The Lord has hthe hand" is General O'Conplanation. ,Once a train derailed on a bridning a mountain torrent 21S fThe soldiers worked with one ling over thin air, but the mosinjury was a lacerated fli^erother occasion a bulky piece of ery for the new oil refinery ahorse refused to go around curve. The G. I. railroadersaway a slice of cliff and proceerily on their way.As a result of this G. I. cothe north's most rugged transproute, seventeen railroads in thStates are going to have, aftersome hardened veterans who for anything. Their chief. Col

son, expressed it in a special ordhe said, "After thia war is wonreturn to your respective railrowill all be better railroad men

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