It's often overlooked that more than a third of the 10,000 soldiers sent to Alaska in 1942 to build a road through the rugged Yukon were from all-black regiments. One of those soldiers was William Griggs who'd operated a small photo studio in Baltimore with his father before the war.

Griggs became the Army's official photographer of the Alaskan Highway project—known then as the Al-Can highway—taking more than 1,000 pictures. Though the weather was bad and black soldiers suffered under command of a general whose father had been a Confederate officer in the Civil War, Griggs says he never felt the work was insignificant.

"The shortest route from Tokyo to the United States is through Alaska," he says, "and the Japanese occupied some of the Aleutian Islands. Our job was to prepare a land route from the United States to Alaska to protect the country. I knew I was doing something important."

Griggs later earned an Army commission and published a book about the black regiments—the 92nd, 93rd, 388th and his own 97th—who took only eight months to complete their daunting mission.

Sources:

Griggs, William E., The World War II Black Regiment That Built the Alaska Military Highway: A Photographic History. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2002.
www.upress.state.ms.us/inside/world_war_II_black_regiment/ask.html.

Lael Morgan, Miles and Miles: Honoring Black Veterans Who Built the Alcan Highway, Department of Journalism and Broadcasting, University of Alaska Fairbanks and The University of Alaska Museum, Fairbanks, AK 1992. Exhibit and Program Guide.