Alaska Highway As Japanese militancy increased in the 1930s, political leaders in the Alaska Territory lobbied Congress for military facilities. Not until Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin signed a non-aggression pact, and rumors spread of a Soviet-Nazi build-up across the 57-mile Bering Strait, did Congress appropriate nearly $30 million for military bases. By 1941 Alaska bristled with military installations, and local troops went on war alert on December 1. Japanese submarines torpedoed an American freighter outside the Los Angeles harbor and shelled a refinery near Santa Barbara. In Oregon, planes launched from submerging seacraft bombed a refinery, a national forest, Fort Stevens, and a naval base at Astoria. Government leaders glossed over whatever news fragments reached the public, but fretted over the safety of a Boeing plant in Seattle. One major obstacle to defending the mainland still existed, for no land route connected the contiguous 48 States and Alaska. Early in 1942, Army engineers hastily began clearing a road north from Dawson Creek, Canada, to Fairbanks, Alaska, where a rail line ran to Anchorage and the coast. The Alaska Highway made headlines in the Seattle Times-Intelligencer on May 3,1942. The sub-headline expressed concern about a Japanese invasion of the mainland. Civilian contractors and road builders, including the Utah Construction Company, moved the highway's beginnings south to Edmonton, then followed the Army. The civilian workers widened and surfaced the trail into a highway and reworked bridges. Pictorial Histories Publishing Company archives, Stan Cohen author/publisher