Vintage Alaska Highway movie 1944 US Army

[Stephane Dumas]

I spotted that vintage movie on Youtube made by the US Army about the Alaska highway who was filmed in 1944.

[nexus73]

Good find Stephane!  Imagine building a whole new route of 1500 miles in 8 months today.  What I did not know was the additional infrastructure built.  Airstrips, pipelines, telephone lines and the cutoff from Haines were major projects on their own.  Then to see how the second season of construction made the bridges permanent plus route improvements to make the Alaska Highway functional as an all-season route was a good story.

In the end Alaska turned out to be a strategic dead end.  The Japanese lost the battle at Attu, then saw no need for further operations in the Aleutians, which led to the Kiska garrison being evacuated.  The Americans sent some bombing raids against a Japanese fishing port in the Kurile Islands but the weather was so lousy that any sort of sustained large scale operations was not feasible.  All we got out of the deal during the war was the road but in the end it was peacetime that would see the value of that road come to the fore instead of during wartime.

Rick

[Bickendan]

At this point, is the entire length of the Alaska Highway paved?