INTERVIEW WITH LESLIE PULLLEN

Date of Interview: June 20, 2003 in Nashville Tennessee

Interviewer Ryan MacIvor
Transcriber: Case Mond

Ryan MacIvor:
The date today is June 20th, 2003. And we’re in Nashville Tennessee, for the last reunion of the 341st Engineers, Company D. What is your name? (Leslie Pullen was with Company F of the 341st, Army Corps of Engineers)

Leslie Pullen:
Leslie Warren Pullen

Ryan MacIvor:
Could you please spell your full name for me, Leslie.

Leslie Pullen:
Pardon?

Ryan MacIvor:
Spell your name?

Leslie Pullen:
Leslie Warren Pullen.

Ryan MacIvor:
Okay, and how do you spell your last name?

Leslie Pullen:
P.U.L.L.E.N.

Ryan MacIvor:
And what was your rank?

Leslie Pullen:
First... Second Lieutenant at that time. First Lieutenant [later]

Ryan MacIvor:
So when you first joined the armed forces, you were a First Lieutenant...

Leslie Pullen:
Second Lieutenant.

Ryan MacIvor:
Second Lieutenant. And what year was that?

Leslie Pullen:
Eh... December (thinks long time) 1943. You know, I had to think about that. I graduated in ROTC in 1942. And I was commissioned in December of 1942. And I joined the regiment near the end of January of 43.

Ryan MacIvor:
And what was your base? Your base, in the United States... Did you have a, um... ?

Leslie Pullen:
I went to... I was actually working for Republic Steel Corporation at the time, in New York state. I was shipped down to... or told to report to Fort Belfor in Virginia. And that was my replacement depot. And from there I was ordered up to the Alaskan Highway.

Ryan MacIvor:
And how long did it take for you to travel from there to Dawson Creek? Do you remember?

Leslie Pullen:
Somewhat. It was by train. It must have taken... It was in between two or three days.

Ryan MacIvor:
And what section of the highway did you work on?

Leslie Pullen:
The first section.

Ryan MacIvor:
The first section, so from Dawson Creek...

Leslie Pullen:
This was... yeah... from Dawson Creek to... what was it?... 220 miles up the road.

Ryan MacIvor:
And what did you do?

Leslie Pullen:
I was a platoon leader, and when I joined the regiment at that date, they’d already completed most of the road. I went with F Company. I was assigned F Company. And F Company was... damn, I can’t remember... You know, I can not remember the mile marker. It was quite a ways up the highway, in the middle of winter, and the whole project at that point was to maintain the bridges within the company’s jurisdiction. Keep them from being knocked out by floating ice in the rivers.

Ryan MacIvor:
Les, what was your most memorable experience when working on the highway?

Leslie Pullen:
I don’t have one.

Ryan MacIvor:
Are there any memories or experiences?

Leslie Pullen:
It was pretty much normal maintenance at that time. The... (to himself:) Memorable experience... I really don’t remember any. Everything was kinda... it was all brand new to me, so it was... Depths of winter, January... We left July or August, so... I just got into the routine and that was it. My Staff Sergeant straightened me out a couple of times, about who was boss in that platoon, and that was it.

Ryan MacIvor:
And what was the name of your Staff Sergeant.

Leslie Pullen:
Oh... A hell of a guy... (thinks) From Louisiana...Cajun... You know I haven’t seen him. We haven’t talked to each other. We have never corresponded... Eh, Sautier... S.A.U... Sautier. How would you spell his last name? I think it was Jim Sautier. Sergeant Sautier. And he was a good Staff Sergeant, good platoon sergeant.

Ryan MacIvor:
What did you do when you weren’t working? What type of activities did you engage in?

Leslie Pullen:
Well, you know, we didn’t work... We had a day off every week. They have me a pair of skies, there was lots of snow, and I would go skiing a little bit, because I’m an non-skier. So I tried out the skies. Did a little hunting, duck hunting with an 30/06 rifle. Um, shot a few ducks, and the mess sergeant had a hard time preparing them for... (laughs) for the people who wanted to eat duck, but he did it. The object when shooting a duck was to shoot him in the head so you’d kill the duck but didn’t ruin the meat. Those were the highlights, I guess, of off-time.

Ryan MacIvor:
How did you keep in touch with family and friends?

Leslie Pullen:
Letters. They were very slow, obviously. They had to be hauled by truck and what not.

Ryan MacIvor:
And did you write lots of letters home?

Leslie Pullen:
Yeah, I was married. I probably wrote my wife every week -- new wife. And I wrote my family. I’m not sure that we were even allowed to say where we were. You know, censorship in those days, military censorship was pretty good. They didn’t want them to know where the units were or what the units were doing. I don’t think it was very strict there, but it became very strict overseas in England.

Ryan MacIvor:
What do you remember most about the land?

Leslie Pullen:
I supposes there’s a couple of things. A wilderness area up north like that is kinda beautiful, although it’s rugged. The people that I saw, and that the company came in contact with, besides other soldiers, was a few Indians once in a while. And the Indians were living... they must have been living off of bark. They were poorly fed, ill health, looked sick, acted sick. We didn’t see many. I’m talking about one or two at a time, and maybe half a dozen occasions, the most, at most.

Ryan MacIvor:
What do you remember most about the weather.

Leslie Pullen:
The weather? I spent my college years in the upper peninsula of Michigan, where the average snowfall is 200 inches annually, generally over that. So I was used to snow and I was used to cold weather. We were equipped with pretty good parkas, pretty good boots. So I really didn’t object to the weather. What I did object to... You know, the companies had sauna baths at that time.

Ryan MacIvor:
And what are those?

Leslie Pullen:
That’s a Finnish bath where you... a little wooden shack... and you set up a drum, an empty oil drum, made for the purpose, to build a fire in. You packed the oil drum with rocks, and you throw water on the rocks, to make steam.That was the way we bathed.

Ryan MacIvor:
And what was the name of that again?

Leslie Pullen:
Sauna. S.A.U.N.A. It’s a Finnish name. We didn’t wash a hell of a lot in the wintertime. Which was quite unusual... I can remember... You want a memorable thing? I suspect that it might have been six weeks that I got my first bath up there. I did go to the hot springs one time, and that was rather exciting. Snow banks all around and the hot springs beautifully warm. Very comfortable, get out and dry yourself of. But that was a one-time experience.

Ryan MacIvor:
So talk about the living conditions. When you were on the highway, what types of living conditions...?

Leslie Pullen:
Storage of meat was very important and the companies built ice houses. Each company had its own ice house. Ground beef was delivered and we were very careful about that. We didn’t want to feed men bad meat and in our company it never happened. Now we’ve had spoilt meat which was thrown away, but it was never cooked. The officers had their own quonset hut, small quonset hut, or shack... You know, I can’t remember what the... It wasn’t a tent. The men lived in, I think... You’re asking the questions and I should have prepared a little bit, talk to some other guys. I think the tents were... I think we had tents with four-foot wooden walls. The canvas was well-supported, stove in the middle, and that was it. Of course, everybody had sleeping bags, well-made sleeping bags too. They weren’t... In fact, I kept my sleeping bag and used it in Europe for... till it just got unusable.

Ryan MacIvor:
Now, what was your...

Leslie Pullen:
(interrupts) The latrine, that sanitation, we built outhouses, generally six or eight-holers. But one of the companies decided... nobody could figure out how we decided and it was about 10 or 12 holes long and when somebody opened the door (laughs) and there were four or five guys in there, [they’d come and the blast of air] was terrific, so (laughs).

Ryan MacIvor:
What was your specific line of work on the construction project?

Leslie Pullen:
We had a job maintaining the bridges every day. And that was done basically by using dynamite and catching large blocks of ice coming down the river, shooting them, breaking them up. The danger was, these were all wooden bridges with, what’s called timber bends to support the beams and the roadway. nd those bends were simply set on the bottom of the bridge and a large block of ice would back up more ice behind it and that could take out the bridge. We didn’t lose any bridges that year in Company F.

Ryan MacIvor:
Now, did you have any accidents, or did you know of anyone that had any accidents along the highway or anyone that died in the construction project?

Leslie Pullen:
In F Company there no accidents that I remember None. I would say that there were none. Accidents did occur once in a while. Trucks going off the road in, in wintertime, icy conditions. But F Company had no accidents. There was more of a... It occurred to me now that one of the officers was a chess player. I also played chess. We spent a lot of time at night playing chess. No radios, of course. Mail call was every couple of weeks or something like that, so we had to entertain ourselves.

Ryan MacIvor:
So what was the food like?

Leslie Pullen:
The food was pretty good. Normally it was pretty good. And it was varied.

Ryan MacIvor:
Was it fresh, canned, or...?

Leslie Pullen:
A lot of canned stuff. A lot of hamburger. We also had pork. Not sure that we had much pork, but there was pork occasionally. Vegetables were OK, potatoes. It kept everybody filled up.

Ryan MacIvor:
So the equipment that you used to maintain the bridges, did it break down often? You used dynamite and stuff. How did you used that type of equipment?

Leslie Pullen:
Well, what you were... The army uses TNT, which are blocks of explosives, and they’re shot with primer cord. And that is... you take a case of TNT out there, the primers... primer cord would prime TNT and you’d put men in position. Sometimes not very nice positions, close to the water. And as the ice came down, they would throw the TNT on the ice. We would explode it, and that was it. Kinda simple. It made a lot of noise, broke up a lot of ice, and we were all delighted the bridges stayed in place. The platoon would go to work in the trucks. The mess was delivered, as I recall. Mess was delivered to the troops at noon time. Kind of a normal day.

Ryan MacIvor:
Did you hear of any stories from other regiments that were on the highway? And did you have any interaction with the other regiments on the highway?

Leslie Pullen:
None. We didn’t even interact with other companies. The companies were distributed at 30, 40 mile intervals and... I suppose that varied too, depending on the number of bridges on that stretch of road and so on. The other maintenance on the road was rebuilding wooden culverts if it failed. This was simply, you’d cut timber close to the site. Bulldozer would dig the trench. A square, nailed together, spiked together structure would be built. The logs side by side, in place, bulldozer would cover it up, compact it, bring the elevation up to road level, up to road elevation and that was it. We did a lot of that.

Ryan MacIvor:
Did you face any dangers on the highway? Were there any dangers that you guys faced, and how did you deal with any of those types of problems? Was it wildlife, or that sort of stuff...?

Leslie Pullen:
We saw bears once in a while, and... (drinks water) I don’t recall seeing a moose up there. I don’t think it was moose country. Black bear country. And there was a partridge that we would like to shoot at -- I don’t know that any were ever killed -- but other than that, there wasn’t much wildlife, especially in the wintertime.

Ryan MacIvor:
What about pets? Did you have any pets, or any type of animal friends?

Leslie Pullen:
No.

Ryan MacIvor:
I know in some of the materials, some of the other men adopted pets, whether it be a cat or...

Leslie Pullen:
I can’t even imagine where you’d find one up there.

Ryan MacIvor:
Yeah, a stray bear, stray moose, that sort of thing... I’ve already asked you this question but I’m asking it a little bit different for you. How did you blow off steam?

Leslie Pullen:
Pardon?

Ryan MacIvor:
What did you do to blow off steam, and how did you...

Leslie Pullen:
Oh, blow off steam? Payday there was dice games, crap games, shooting craps, which the men all looked forward too. Chess, checkers, reading, writing letters.

Ryan MacIvor:
What types of books did you read? Or were they magazines?

Leslie Pullen:
I can’t be specific on that. Some guys would get magazines. Some guys had books. There was no distribution of that stuff. It all came in by mail, from their families and friends. The games were generally had by the guys that played with... chess, he had his own chess set, or checkers set. And that was about it, at F Company. We had a lot of chitchat, you know, where are you from, what did you do? The officers were all reserve officers, no regular army. They’d all been to college some place. The men were a group of guys that were absolutely great guys. They might be from New York, Atlanta, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Missouri, Utah. Not only our company, but all the companies were... had a... California, Arizona, New Mexico. A lot of different guys from different areas that had a... that were sharing the same experience. They became a very cohesive, well-knit bunch of guys. A great company. The regiment was a great regiment.

Ryan MacIvor:
Now you said that you were with F Company as well as D Company. So tell us that transition that took place between one company to another.

Leslie Pullen:
After the regiment left the highway, we were shipped to Camp Sutton, North Carolina, for a review of basic training, to go overseas. And at that point, I was transferred from F Company to E Company (to himself:) Um, F Company to E Company, no, D Company. I take that back. From F Company to D Company. They never told us why that happened. I spent at least half the time at Camp Sutton with D Company. And all through the war, until... E Company went to work for Shafe Headquarters. The whole company would detach from our regiment, they went to work for Shafe Headquarters and they provided latrine construction, slit trenches for protection against air attack. And they did such a great job that they were just reassigned. So we had no E Company. When E Company was formed, I was one of the officers that went to E Company.

Ryan MacIvor:
Tell me about the bugs, and the no-see-ums.

Leslie Pullen:
Well you know, I hit the highway... No-see-ums are common in the upper peninsula of Michigan also, and literally, you don’t see them until they sting the hell out of you. But this was wintertime when I joined the regiment. They were all killed off, of course. I can’t quite remember when they came back. What would it be? Up to... It must be April or May before they come out again. You might know that from living in Dawson Creek. There weren’t any other, um... We never saw snakes, they were hibernating. Two bears, not often, big black bears. No cats, no caribou, no moose. We may have seen one or two moose on some of the major rivers, but that didn’t make a big impression on me.

Ryan MacIvor:
When you were up there in winter, how did you guys deal with frostbite. Did anyone get frostbite or...

Leslie Pullen:
(interrupts) Well, I learned something about cold weather. Number one, you can’t chop wood at 70 degrees below zero. And the reason you can’t is it freezes your lungs. You get so exercised and taking big gulps of air -- you can’t do it. It was cold, but bearable. You know, 40 degrees, it sounds like it’s terrible, but it’s not really terrible, it’s just cold. And if you’re dressed for it, you’re dressed for it. We were pretty well dressed. Nobody had any problem that way. By the time I joined the regiment, they all had (sentence incomprehensible, touches microphone) take care of their feet, keep clean and dry, and it worked well.

Ryan MacIvor:
So have you ever been back up on the highway?

Leslie Pullen:
I never have, but I’ve had relatives that’ve been on the highway two or three times.

Ryan MacIvor:
And if you had the opportunity, would you like to go back?

Leslie Pullen:
I’d like to go back. I think we’re getting a little bit old, my wife and I, to make that trip, but yeah, I’d like to go back.

Ryan MacIvor:
What did you think of the North and the wilderness?

Leslie Pullen:
I enjoyed it.

Ryan MacIvor:
I guess you were used to it, because you used to live on the upper peninsula of Michigan.

Leslie Pullen:
I used to walk a couple of miles to my classes every day, and the first winter I just had a heavy wool sweater. And it got cold. We’d have 20 below, 30 below once in a while. I don’t know what I wore in those days, on those occasions. (drinks water)

Ryan MacIvor:
The people that you met in that area, you’ve stayed in touch with some of them, over the years?

Leslie Pullen:
No, when I was discharged from the army, my profession was mining engineering. And I went to work for the Oliver Iron Mining Company on the Wasabi Range in Minnesota. I lost contact with all of the 341st. And I moved around a lot in my profession, so there was just no chance, really. I lost contact with everybody.

Ryan MacIvor:
And how did you get back into... This is the final reunion, so how did you get...?

Leslie Pullen:
Well, I re-contacted an officer that served in D Company, his name was James Blackburn,. after the war, quite a long time after the war. He lived in Concord, Mass. My wife and I visited Blackburn and his wife in Concord. Something like in 1986. That was 40 years after the war. And Blackburn did have contacts with D Company people. He went to a reunion one time, and notified me, told me what an enjoyable time he had. And that was the first, my first knowledge that D Company guys were meeting annually.

Ryan MacIvor:
When... do you remember getting the message to leave the highway?

Leslie Pullen:
Getting the what?

Ryan MacIvor:
Getting the message to leave the highway and go back home, from the North back to the States.

Leslie Pullen:
Do I remember that?

Ryan MacIvor:
Yes.

Leslie Pullen:
Um. Yeah. I don’t know what... You know, we... Let me think... We... August, September. We arrived by rail in August. We had woolens on and arrived in North Carolina in August. You know, I can’t even remember how we got the company to the railhead. I suppose it was someplace in Edmonton. Would that be correct, from Dawson Creek?

Ryan MacIvor:
I would think you would have taken the train from Dawson Creek to Edmonton.

Leslie Pullen:
From Dawson Creek. Okay. That’s probably what really happened. And of course, we packed our, well, we packed our belongings. All we took was personal belongings. Everything else stayed up there.

Ryan MacIvor:
And did anyone replace you on the Alaska Highway?

Leslie Pullen:
I don't think so. Well, civilians.

Ryan MacIvor:
Les, is there any... Do you have any photographs, journals, poetry, old newspapers, of the Alaska Highway, or other memorabilia, that you would be willing to share with us if we contacted you?

Leslie Pullen:
I really have nothing on the highway. I have very little of our time in Europe. I didn’t have a camera. I did get some highway pictures, and I will share them with you. If I have highway pictures I will name names if I can remember them, and send those pictures to you. It seems to me I had a series of pictures and I can’t remember how I got them -- maybe somebody else’s camera and they duplicated them, something like that.

Ryan MacIvor:
Is there any other memories that you have of your time in Northern British Columbia and building the Alaska Highway that you like to share with us. Anything I haven’t touched on. Maybe the northern lights. Do you remember seeing the northern lights?

Leslie Pullen:
Well, the weather, of course the weather is unusual. In June, you have virtually 24-hour daylight, which is new to anybody. And the Aurora Borealis, Borealis I guess, is spectacular, in that country. The scenes, the scenic, the forests, a lot of trees. Boy, did we see trees. There was nobody else up there for company. So in that respect, in that regard it was kind of unusual. Probably the best thing that the regiment got out of it was the work, and using the tools required to do that job. And the friendships, the cohesiveness of the men. They all shared the same grub, cold. I read with quite a lot of interest, this fellow Bush’s comments about D Company. I don’t remember the author...

Ryan MacIvor:
That’s Norman Bush...

Leslie Pullen:
Yeah, he is a writer, and maybe a minister. I learned this from Betty Filger, and she had a write-up that he had made of his experiences on the highway. His experiences were totally different from mine. His experiences made good reading. I would recommend it. Some of these were... What I saw were excerpts from the book on the Alcan Highway that he wrote. They were good, interesting. Mine were mundane. You know, you went up there, it was cold so you dressed to stay warm. You ate pretty good food and a lot of it. Wrote a lot of letters. Played a lot of chess. Worked reasonably hard. We rebuilt a couple of those bridges while we were there. We put in a lot of culverts. The weather is so harsh in that area that the construction has to be remarkable. And the way this highway was built over the muskeg was a sight to behold because it was all... what would be the word... timber was cut, laid down, bark to bark. And the fill dirt was put on that material, that timber, and that’s the way we went across the swamps.

Ryan MacIvor:
Les, I’m gonna jump on you.

Leslie Pullen:
Okay.

Ryan MacIvor:
Do you know how much money you made a day?

Leslie Pullen:
Yeah. A lieutenants pay, at that time, was something like, maybe $120 a month. A private’s pay, at that time, was something like $30 a month. At least that’s what we got in ROTC. That went quite a ways. Cigarettes were a nickel a pack. Postcards and postage. Postcards were, what, a penny. Postage was three cents for a letter. Fact is, military... what do they call it? There was a name for military mail... of course, that was free. And there was no place to spend money up there. Guys gambled with their paychecks, shooting craps. That was about it. But that was a big activity around payday.

Ryan MacIvor:
Okay Les. Is there anything else that I have missed that you have any memories of, when you were building the highway or on the highway?

Leslie Pullen:
No, I really can’t think of anything else.

Ryan MacIvor:
Do you know what your serial number is? Would you mind sharing that with us?

Leslie Pullen:
You know, I use that serial... I use my army serial number as a password on the internet, so I really don’t want to share it. But it’s a number I never forgot. I have my original dog tags.

Ryan MacIvor:
Okay Les, I thank you for the interview. So once, again, if you could state your name for the camera.

Leslie Pullen:
Les Pullen

Ryan MacIvor:
And it’s June 20th, 2003, and it’s 9:30 p.m. in Nashville, Tennessee.

Leslie Pullen:
Correct.

Ryan MacIvor:
Les, thank you. Thank you very much.

Leslie Pullen:
You’re welcome.

Ryan MacIvor:
See, that wasn’t difficult. Some of the questions helped you.
(noise, taking Les’s microphone off his shirt.)
Perfect. Now, lets see the picture. Do you want to sit right here and I...(fade)

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