When the United States entered the Second World War, Alaska became an important strategic hub for military operations in the Pacific, and for the transport of U.S.-built war planes to the Soviet Union for use on the eastern front. This required a considerable amount of petroleum that had to be shipped from the U.S. West Coast to Alaska, and the U.S. Army was concerned this shipping route was vulnerable to Japanese air attacks.   The Canol Project was designed to mitigate this project: it involved a building a 2,600km system of pipelines with related roads and telegraph lines from the existing oil field at Norman Wells, NWT to Fairbanks, Alaska, through a remote area that was unmapped and essentially unknown by Europeans. The project was an incredible feat of logistics that involved moving an enormous amount of military and civilian worker, equipment and materials under wartime conditions to an extremely remote area.…