Four officers and 118 enlisted men arrived at Skagway on 22 July 1942. They were to be attached to regiments to haul gravel. Unfortunately their trucks and supplies remained in Seattle so the 428th cooled its heels in a hangar at the Skagway airfield.
Once they made it to the regiments, the job of the 428th was to position their heavy dump trucks next to Osgood shovels, operated by the regiment, that quickly filled them with tons of gravel. The engineers building road constantly encountered muskeg – deep mud – that they had to corduroy, laying logs side by side the length of the road.
The logs actually floated on the muskeg. The weight of passing vehicles would sink them. The cure for that was the gravel delivered by the 428th. The weight of the gravel layered between layers of corduroy forced the road bed down to a solid base. Sometimes the muskeg/gravel sandwich wound up with as many as 20 layers.
