 American engineers have conquered the untamed Canadian wilderness. Mountains and muskeg and tractless pine tangle have given way to the Alaska Highway. Today, it is open for the convoying of supplies to the Alaskan War Front. A 1600-mile length with the base of men and materials in Canada and the United States. Officially designated as the Alcan Highway, its completion three months ahead of schedule has won the praise of an embattled people. A praise for the American soldier engineers, 20th century pioneers who worked long days and nights in temperatures ranging from 35 degrees below zero to 90 above. Alaska stands as a bulwark against Japanese attack on North America. It is also strategic for our own offenses. The sea routes are too often periled by fog and storms. And Jap raiders add to the menace. A meager network of roads spread only across the seaboard, linking coastal towns with farebanks. Therefore, this territory desired by the Jap was desperately in need of an unbroken land route to farebanks, starting from Dawson Creek in British Columbia. At this Canadian railhead, construction began on an artery so important that many international observers referred to it as the American Burma Road. The Army supervised the entire job, and the Army will now patrol the winding, twisting ribbon of highway, will maintain it, and handle all the war shipments to Alaska. Now the picture record of the mammoth road construction job. The officer in charge is Brigadier General William Morris Hodge, 26 years an Army road builder. From his headquarters at White Horse, in the Canadian Yukon, he directs all operations. Far below at Dawson Creek, a never-ending stream of supplies rolls into the quartermaster's depot. They've come up by rail from Edmonton, principal link to the United States. But the railroad ends here. Until now, to the north was trackless wilderness. Today, gasoline, diesel fuel, and other necessities are ready to pour out in convoys over completed sections of the highway to the Army work crews already cutting their way upward toward White Horse. Here, then, is the efficient operation of the source of supply without which the road could never have been built. Mobile maintenance stations are also constantly keeping the equipment of every sort in running condition. Each day, thousands of construction troops move briskly from base camps to their specific jobs. Some to carve the trail through the densely wooded area. For others, grading, ditching, and putting down a finished road surface. Always first, the surveyors map out the course of the fast-growing road. Road builders have long dreamed of a highway to Alaska. But not until the United States Army applied its sights to this engineering battlefront was it believed a possibility. The war brought the grim realism that the highway must be built. And here, you see it being done. After the surveying engineers come the giant bulldozers, always smashing ahead, tearing into the very heart of the Canadian wilderness to blaze the trail for other soldier crews following close behind. They cut through at the rate of two miles a day, beginning the 50-foot wide clearance necessary for the road. Twenty-two hours of work a day in regulated shifts leaves time only for Chow and the other camp life tasks so familiar to a soldier. It's hard to find time to relax when you're always getting ready for the next day and the thrill of pushing the job further ahead of schedule. But they manage to keep spik and span. Meanwhile, work goes on. The natural glacial deposits of gravel and the fine glacial silt have made possible immediate access to excellent surfacing materials. They're graded and rolled into an all-weather highway. Also, aiding the speed-up operations is the fact that the road builders can draw on gravel pits established along the highway at five-mile intervals. Crews two-and-a-half miles back and two-and-a-half miles ahead use this ever-present supply. And so, men and modern machinery combine to mold and pound out the endless miles of roadway. When mountains have to be crossed, the army engineers know just how to do it. And expertly, they crack the glacial rock into the valuable road-filling gravel. More and more truck loads are called for as the project takes on accelerated activity. The vehicles now loading are due to deposit their gravel at a point where the road crosses typical low-growth Muskeg country. One of the countless glacial streams has to be crossed. These waterways have been spanned by either timber bridges or the army's ponten bridges. The heavily laden trucks come across and speed through the raging overflow like amphibians. In full stride, the work continues. Northward past Fort Nelson and on toward Whitehorse. And here, as the unloading goes on, can be seen how the engineers master the Muskeg. They float their highway on a bed of gravel and logs, a technique adapted from old-time corduroy roads built by the pioneers. Mile after mile of the new road springs up, the men of the engineer corps winning the war on the construction front. No matter what the obstacles are, they meet them and carry on. They have masks ready when an especially dusty area is encountered, so there's no halt in operation. Here's the reward for all the effort. The highway is moving closer and closer to Fairbanks. In view now is the town of Whitehorse, linked by roadway with supplies and equipment from Dawson Creek far southward. And stretching ever northward, the Alcan military highway winds for the last of its 1600 miles. Cowardly the nation accepts it as an army triumph. They chose the route. They said it could be done and then proceeded to do it. That's the story. But the results, the value of the highway in this war, will live forever in American history.