Scrap

When the frontier villagers along the Alaska Highway saw the U.S. Army throwing away stoves and mattresses, they got mad. Soon to the cities of southern Canada stories drifted back of equipment being destroyed by the ton, of great dumps of discarded goods rising in northern Alberta, British Columbia, and the Yukon.

The Vancouver Daily Province reported that "fires burn day and night" on the dump piles at Dawson Creek, B.C. A farmer said that he had seen more than 100 good stoves thrown on one dump. A woman in Whitehorse wrote to her father: "I saw ... a barracks between two and three city blocks long, packed with winter clothes . . . blankets . . . chairs. ... So help me God, they stacked them up, poured gasoline over them, set them on fire."

The goods allegedly being destroyed are the materiel left behind by U.S. Army builders of the Alaska Highway, now finished. Colonel Frederick S. Strong Jr., chief of the U.S. Army's Northwest Service Command, flatly denied that any wasteful destruction was going on. Major General W. W. Foster, special Canadian commissioner for Northwest defense projects, conceded that some materiel was being destroyed. But he said that it was "materiel which, when reconditioned, will not meet the U.S. Army minimum standards." The Honorable T. A. Crerar, Minister of Mines and Resources, promised everybody an investigation.

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