Zero effort is shameful
by Denis Hamill - NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
It has been four years since Sept. 11, and all we have in the place where 3,000 died is a hole in the ground. For shame.
It is simply staggering, a failure of monumental proportions, that we have not put one brick on top of another at Ground Zero.
Recently I've been researching a mostly forgotten episode in the history of WWII, a feat of engineering second only to the building of the Panama Canal in the 20th century. It's called Alcan, later renamed the Alaskan Highway.
Right after the Pearl Harbor bombing on Dec. 7, 1941, the nation was in a panic - much as we were after 9/11 - about where our enemies would attack next.
Many people believed that the next and most vulnerable flank in North America was Alaska. Japanese spies were known to have been in the Bering Sea since 1939, photographing and sizing up the Aleutian Islands, which pointed like a curved dagger down at Japan. If the Japanese could get a foothold in Alaska, they could invade us from our weak northern border.
We had 20,000 troops in Alaska in early 1942, and of the laughable 12 bombers and 20 fighter planes, only half were operational.
In the weeks after Pearl Harbor, Japanese subs torpedoed our cargo ships delivering crucial supplies to Alaska. The air staging route through Canada's unforgiving wilderness was pathetic. Tiny and mostly inoperable airstrips were often snow- and fogbound.
We dispatched two emergency squadrons to Alaska. Most of the planes crashed or ran out of fuel. Only half made it because of the treacherous weather and lack of navigational guideposts.
On Feb. 2, FDR called an emergency cabinet session. The prospect was grim. The Japanese were advancing through the Pacific and heading for the Aleutians, and if they were not stopped, would be the first time since the War of 1812 that foreign enemies stomped boots on American soil.
We had all of nine months - before the next winter - to do something dramatic to protect Alaska. Someone remembered that in 1929 Congress had approved a 1522-mile Highway to Alaska through the Canadian Rocky wilderness and the Alaskan Klondike, but the costly idea was abandoned.
Now, with sea lanes closed and air routes unnavigable, FDR told his cabinet to do whatever the hell it had to do to build the highway so that planes could follow a staging route, refuel at refurbished airports along the highway, and eventually open a trucking route through our vulnerable north.
The Army Corps of Engineers said they'd need 11,000 men attacking the highway from four intersecting points to pull this mission-impossible off in less than nine months. Problem was they had only 7,000 men.
FDR suggested the Negro Engineer Regiments. The military brass scoffed, saying that just as Negroes were unsuited for combat, they were useless in cold climates. One officer cited an Army War College report that concluded, "The Negro is careless, shiftless, irresponsible and secretive."
FDR activated the black troops. Most were Southerners, field hands and cane cutters who could not read or write. Most had never seen snow. Almost none had experience with heavy machinery or building roads. But in March, the Army Corps of Engineers started work on this highway - from Dawson Creek Canada to Fairbanks, Alaska - through uncharted, unmapped wilderness where few whites and fewer blacks had ever gone before.
They worked in 12-hour shifts in temperatures that plunged to 79 degrees below zero, plowing and blasting, with grading averaging 8 miles a day. Men froze to death in their bulldozers. A dozen perished trying to ferry a bulldozer across Charlie Lake. In June, when the men learned that the Japanese had invaded Dutch Harbor and seized two of the Aleutian Islands, killing 100 Americans, they worked 18-hour shifts, surging with black and white American patriotism to protect the homeland.
The blacks excelled. Astonishingly, one black regiment built a 360-foot bridge across the treacherous Sikanni Chief River in three short days.
Spring rains brought muskeg, or swampy ground, forcing them to move at a pace of 1 mile a day. Summer brought 90-degree-plus heat, dust storms and mosquitoes. They dealt with landslides, forest fires and Arctic blizzards, and they survived on pancakes, frozen WWI rations and Spam.
But on Nov. 20, 1942, eight months and 12 days after starting, two lowly soldiers - one black grunt plowing south, one white guy bulldozing north - met at a place called Contact Creek.
The Alaskan Highway was finished.
A black hand clasped the white hand in a hugely successful propaganda photo symbolizing this gargantuan engineering feat of the United States.
Eleven months after Pearl Harbor, we built a 1,522-mile Highway to Alaska. Four years after 9/11, Ground Zero is still a hole in the ground. For shame.
(Note: btw - didn't I see OSAMA BIN LADEN at Starbucks the other day? Zero effort from the Bush Administration to finally get him. 4 months was spent in Afghanistan. 4 years since 9/11. Between the article above and Bush & his cronies - I feel that they have pissed all over the almost 3,000 people who died in NYC that day. Your accountability moment has come, Mr. Bush - and how DARE you continue to use 9/11 to bolster your NOBLE CAUSE in Iraq. For SHAME!)
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