THE ALASKA HIGHWAY HOAX: An exercise in mythlogy

　
 A recent article in the Anchorage Daily News, “Unsung heroes built WWII lifeline through Canada” by Christopher Cussat, correctly portrays Henry Geyer of Pittsburgh, PA and others who helped build the Alaska Highway (initially known as the Alcan Highway) as courageous pioneers and heroes.

But Cussat strays into mythology when he writes that “President Franklin D. Roosevelt stressed the need to construct the highway after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.” Cussat wrote that the Alaska Highway was “one of America's earliest and most dramatic efforts to increase national security. With reasonable fears of a Japanese invasion through Alaska and Canada, the United States felt that our distant military contingent in the northern territories desperately needed a highway to connect air bases to one another and to fundamental resources.”

The article perpetuates the persistent myth that construction of the Alaska Highway was essential to the military defense of western America and Canada after the bombing of Pearl Harbor precipitated war between the U.S. and Japan. This erroneous notion also pervades the PBS documentary, “The Construction of the Alaska Highway,”  first aired in February, 2005. It continues to spawn one of the more enduring hoaxes in U.S.-Canadian history.

Contrary to longstanding and widespread misconceptions, which have been driven by official but misguided sources, the Alaska Highway, financed mostly by the U.S. and built primarily with U.S. military labor and equipment, was not vital to national defense nor security in the wake of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and declaration of war with Japan.

Indeed, the U.S. War Dept. was opposed to construction of the road for military purposes. Though subsequently used extensively for military and civilian purposes, in 1942 it was mainly a hidden pretext for prospectively opening up and developing northwestern Canada's and Alaska’s rich natural resources on behalf of special entreprenuerial interests, and to provide the U.S. with terrestrial access to its far-flung territory.

U.S.. military forces, along with a handful of civilian contractors and Canadians launched an heroic, even sacrificial effort to complete the road in less than a year to accommodate its alleged military necessity. But their Herculean efforts and sacrifices were squandered on the political pretensions of some of America’s top government leaders.

Foremost among them was President Franklin D. Roosevelt. As Commander-in- chief, he ordered construction of the highway against the recommendation of some of the nation’s key military officers, and despite deeply expressed skepticism by Canadian officials.

Alaska's late U.S. Senator Ernest Gruening. discussed the genesis of the highway, which he proposed and justified on grounds of national defense, in his autobiography, Many Battles:  (Liveright, 1973),  In it, he addressed on-going negotiations with Canada government officials. They hinged on whether the Canadian government would permit and support construction of the proposed highway through Canada to Alaska. Gruening had already won support for the highway by President Franklin D. Roosevelt BEFORE Roosevelt consulted with his military leaders.

Gruening wrote: "(In late 1940), Negotiations were reopened, and several months later when I was in Washington again, I had a phone call from Assistant-Secretary (of state) Adolph Berle, who had been conducting the negotiations.. He was one of the ablest men in our foreign service. “The Canadians really don’t want us to build that highway.” he said, “but if we can assure them that it has military value, they’ll let us go ahead.”
(Gruening): “Well, it’s obvious that it has military value.”

“You may think so, and I may think so,” Berle said, “but the Canadians will not accept that unless we can get the Army to say so.”
“Of course I can,” I said confidently.”

"I reported this conversation to (U.S. Senator, D-Washington) Warren Magnuson and together we drafted a letter to the secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson. It gave a detailed description of both the A and B routes with the arguments for each, stating our preference for the former, and asked that the War Department express an opinion as to which of the routes would be preferable from the Army’s standpoint. Two weeks later on April 26, 1941, the reply came.

“The War Department considers that the construction of such highway cannot be justified on the basis of military necessity. Because of that view , it is believed that it would be inappropriate to comment upon the relative merits of the two suggested routes.” The letter was signed “Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War.” "We were momentarily stunned, Gruening wrote.

Gruening attributed the War Department’s continuing opposition to construction of the highway to military “ignorance.” Nevertheless, he wrote in Battles, “the Alaskan highway was brought up at the next Cabinet meeting and the President appointed a committee of three - the Secretaries of War (Stimson), Navy (Knox) and Interior (Ickes) - with instructions to proceed at once with the construction of the highway.”

Ironically, however, the Canadian government vetoed both Routes A and B proposed by the Americans, ordering one instead which substantially deviated from both and better accommodated Canada’s commercial rather than U.S. military objectives, robbing the highway of much of the U.S. sponsors’ alleged grounds for military necessity. Gruening wrote in Battles that Senator Magnuson “denounced the new route as a 100-million dollar blunder.”

One Canadian historian, Captain M.V. Bezeau , a specialist in the study of the highway’s history,　has speculated that Roosevelt seized the opportunity to capitalize on the moment to obtain concurrence from Canada for construction of the road through its territory at a time when there may have latent wartime concerns among the Canadians not extant during peacetime.

Although the PBS characterized the construction of the highway as "the first step" in America's defense strategy, the project wasted unfathomable resources - natural, military, human and monetary - which could arguably have been more productively and strategically deployed elsewhere, and significantly shortened the war against Japan, saving countless thousands of lives.

The highway was largely irrelevant to America's overall defense strategy except to detract from it. 　
An unimpeachable authority for this position may be found in "The Alaska Highway: Papers of the 40th Anniversary Symposium,"　 Kenneth. Coates, editor; Captain M.V. Bezeau, University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, 1985.

The　 U.S. War Department, Capt. Bezeau wrote, "repeatedly examined these suggestions　 (to build　 the highway on grounds of national defense) and rejected them." The Canadian-American Joint Board on Defence concluded from the outset that the defensive value of building the proposed highway to Alaska was "negligible," and construction on the basis of military necessity alone was "unjustified and unsupportable." Nevertheless, in the end, a political rather than a strategic agenda prevailed, and the road was built and paid for mostly by U.S. taxpayers.

Bezeau concluded that the highway was “a magnificent achievement carried out as a military project in time of war, but it was not needed for defence. The highway was actually planned and built for other reasons.”