Transportation - Home Base to Hong Kong

---

Battle Information

We do not have specific battle information for this soldier in our online database. For a detailed description of the battle from a Canadian perspective, visit Canadian Participation in the Defense of Hong Kong (published by the Historical Section, Canadian Military Headquarters).

Wounded Information

Hospital Information

No record of hospital visits found.

POW Camps

Transportation SE Asia to Home

No other or additional related information found. Please submit documents to us using the contact link at the top of this page.

Post-war Photo

Other Military or Public Service

No other or additional related information found. Please submit documents to us using the contact link at the top of this page.

Death and Cemetery Information

Gravestone Image

Obituary / Life Story

Sid Blow was born November 22, 1920 at Areola, Saskatchewan to Bert and Amelia Blow. He had one younger sister, Mary. Sid grew up in the Alameda, Oxbow area and took his schooling in Alameda. As a child Sid played hockey, delivered newspapers and did odd jobs around town. He caught gophers and sold their tails, caught turtles and carved initials in their shells and ate peanuts with pals at the Chinese Cafe. After grade eight, Sid quit school and worked for farmers in Alberta and Saskatchewan. This was mid 1930s and he rode box cars on freight trains to get from one job to another and back home again.

World War II started and Sid joined the army. After training Sid was sent to Hong Kong. The Japanese army attacked Hong Kong before the Canadians artillery arrived. After using up their ammunition, the remaining soldiers surrendered. For the next three years and eight months Sids life was a life of torture, abuse and starvation at the hands of the Japanese. Sid survived and returned to Canada in poor condition. Sid had tuberculosis and spent time in a Sanitarium, where he met a nurse named Alice Dutli, and they were married July 23, 1952. They were blessed with six children. They bought a farm in Broadacres and then in 1963 they moved four miles south of Tisdale. Here they raised cattle, pigs, chickens and numerous pets. Growing a big garden and maintaining the yard was both work and recreation.

Favorite times for Sid and Alice were family and friends, playing horseshoes, cards, visiting and swapping stories. Sid worked off the farm doing carpenter work and then worked at Fripp Fibre Form until he retired in 1985. In 1996 Sid and Alice moved into Tisdale. In 1997 Alice moved to Newmarket Manor and Sid moved to Cedar Villa. Sid then moved to Newmarket Manor in 2000 where he resided till his passing.

Sid was predeceased by his parents Bert & Amelia, wife Alice and son Glenn.

Sid is survived by a sister Mary Cleland, Sons Bruce (Ann), Robert (Gloria), daughters Amanda (Ken), Marie (Guy) and Donna (Dave), grandchildren Jason, Cheryl, Heather, Angela, Melissa, Amber, Glenn, Cydney and great-grandchild Rori.

Picture is of Sidney and Alice July 23, 1952

Links and Other Resources

There may be more information on this individual available elsewhere on our web sites - please use the search tool found in the upper right corner of this page to view sources.

Related documentation

• Our HKVCA Vault (Google Docs) may contain additional information, newspaper clippings, and documents which have been saved for this soldier. To access this information, click on the vault link and a Google Docs folder list will open in a separate tab. Use the first letter of the soldier’s service number, found at the top of this report, to open the correct folder. Each sub-folder is identified by service number. Scroll down until you reach the one of your interest.
• Facebook has proven to be a valuable resource in the documentation of 'C' Force members. The following link will take you to any available search results for this soldier based on his regimental number. Note: results may be contained within another related record. Facebook Search Results
• Find a Grave® is a valuable resource that may contain additional information on this 'C' Force member. When you arrive at the site search page, fill in as much detail as you can for best results.

General Comments

L13643 Sidney BLOW- Sent in by daughters Donna and Marie October 2018

My dad passed away in 2002 with Parkinsons Disease. He had helped my mother through many years when she suffered with Alzheimers.

This is my dad’s story as told to Boyd Hamilton of the Tisdale Recorder Newspaper, published on August 21, 1995: Sidney Herbert Blow L13643 P.O.W. 1941-1945

My name is Sidney Herbert Blow. I was a prisoner of war from December, 1941 until the end of August, 1945. My father was Herbert (Bert) Blow and my mother was Amelia Molly Martens. I was born at Arcola, Saskatchewan on November 22, 1920.

I attended public school in Alameda, Saskatchewan. As was usual at that time when I had completed the eighth grade, I quit school and went to work on the farm. Sometimes I worked for wages for some of the local farmers.

The Second World War was going on and most of the young men were joining up. It just seemed like the right thing to do so, on April 10, 1941 I joined the South Saskatchewan Regiment, 2nd Battalion in Regina, Sask. I took basic training in Regina and then more advanced training at Fort William (Thunder Bay), Ontario and Winnipeg, Manitoba. When the Winnipeg Grenadiers returned from Jamaica, I transferred to their outfit.

It is a funny thing when you are being trained to kill others, it seldom seems to occur to you that others are being trained to kill you and that you could be one of those killed.

We shipped out of Vancouver, B.C. aboard the Awatea and were escorted by the Prince Robert. There were troops aboard both boats and when we arrived in Hong Kong we were about two thousand Canadians there. Besides the Canadians, there were two regiments from England, two regiments from India made up of Gurkas and Punjabis, about two regiments from Australia and two more regiments called the Hong Kong Volunteer Defense Corp. This last group was made up of anyone and everyone they could get. There were Portuguese, Chinese, Taiwanese and a mixture of everything else.

We arrived only twelve days before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and Hong Kong was attacked the next day. I was stationed in the Kowloon area of Hong Kong. The British Colony of Hong Kong included 368 square miles of the mainland as well as the Island of Hong Kong. They were connected by a ferry service at that time.

We had no warning at all when the Japanese attacked us. They came in with planes and just bombed the hell out of us. Our Command Center was wiped out first thing. When this happened the Chinese fled into the hills. I have never seen so many people. They were a moving mass of humanity that just covered every street and road as far as you could see. There were hundreds of thousands of them.

We were told too that the Japanese took no prisoners so we should fight to the death. We had very little military support but we held two battalions of Japs at bay for more than a day. When we ran out of ammunition and could hold the Japs back no longer we retreated back over dead bodies, wounded men and demolished buildings. There were fires everywhere.

For some reason the Japanese stopped their advance and it gave us a chance to destroy our equipment. Trucks, guns, etc., all went into the salt water. Everything was in chaos. I was alone. It was every man for himself.

I commandeered a Chinese family that had a sampan to take me across to the Island of Hong Kong. They had a child that had an arm hanging by a piece of skin, and they had blood on themselves. I was wounded twice, once in the leg and one piece of shrapnel went right through my arm. It was lucky I had my arm up or that piece of shrapnel would have gone through my head. The wounds on my arm bled a lot and my whole sleeve, especially on the bottom was sort of filled with dried blood. I never did get any treatment for this wound but it eventually healed up all by itself. I still have the metal in my leg but it does not seem to bother me. My arm works pretty good too.

When the Japs rounded us all up they figured they had taken too many prisoners so the took about half of our guys out and bayoneted them, the rest of us were put into a work camp at Hong Kong. We worked from sunrise until dark, every day.

Never a day off to rest. We were trying to take down a hill to make a runway. The allies, probably the Americans, wanted to stop the project so they would strafe and bomb it regularly. They killed a lot of our guys too. We travelled by truck from our barracks to the work project. Although we were kept in the same quarters we had before the Japs came they had removed all the furniture so we had to sleep on the concrete floor. There were bugs there of all kinds, cockroaches, bed bugs, fleas, lice and God only knows what else. I suffered three attacks of malaria. When you were sick they moved you to a separate building but as soon as they felt you were able to work again they put you back where you had been. The fed us twice a day, a scoop of watery rice and some greens. We were expected to work but it was almost a starvation diet.

We received no information at all. It was not long before we did not know what day it was or even what month it was and eventually what year it was. We worked every day, we never saw our living quarters in daylight as we left before daylight and returned after dark. Outside our barracks we could see the big boxes that the Canadian Red Cross had sent to us. We never received any of it. When the war ended the allies dropped boxes of food for us by parachute. By then we were so far gone we could not take advantage of it. Most of it was grabbed by the Chinese. To say the least we were just about on our last legs. My body had already started to turn numb; in fact I was numb to the touch from the bottom of my feet just about to my waist.

There are two kinds of Beri Beri, wet and dry. Both kinds are caused by starvation. In the wet kind you sort of fill up with liquid and if you push a finger into the flesh it will slowly come back out but the space is just sort of filled with liquid. I contracted the dry kind and I just kept getting thinner and thinner. I was so bad I could put both my hands under the edge of my rib cage.

When I walked into that prisoner of war camp I promised myself that I would walk out of there some day. Those that gave up died within a day or two. I just tried each day to make it one more day. I was almost to the stage of giving up when the war ended.

That atomic bomb saved our lives. I had been a prisoner of war for three years and eight months. When the allies came in and released us they also put the Japanese into the barracks we had been occupying. It was called Sham-Shui-Po. They had to keep us away from them as we would have killed every Jap there if we had the chance. It really bothered us that these Japanese prisoners were given so many goodies and they had treated us so badly and starved so many of us to death. I could go into details about some of the atrocities the Japs committed against us but suffice it to say, the Japanese are very, very tough on their prisoners.

We were first taken to Manila where they tried to feed us up and they gave us shots for something. As soon as we were able we were put aboard American ships and sent back to San Francisco. From there we were soon sent to Vancouver, B.C., and then on to our home province.

I was sent to the Sanatorium at Fort Qu’Appelle as I had contracted tuberculosis. Due to the hardships in the prison camp my toes had drawn up and I still have to wear special shoes. While recuperating there I met a nurse that caught my eye. Her name was Alice Dutli from Kerrobert, Sask. We were married July 23, 1952. It has been a good marriage and we have been blessed with six children. We lost our second son in a car accident in 1978. He was 23 years old. We have grandchildren that we see almost every day and that is good.

It has been a long hard pull but my pension takes care of our financial needs and I busy myself in the summers with a garden and the lawn. We visit our relatives in Kerrobert, Sask., and elsewhere from time to time.

We do most of our shopping in Tisdale, Sask., which is only four miles away on a good highway. We like it here.

Because of my war experiences the Department of Veterans Affairs has seen fit to award me the following decorations and medals: War Medal, Canadian Volunteer Service Medal, Defence Medal, 1939-1945 Star (for volunteering for service when a war is on), and Pacific Star. I also have a Silver Clasp with the Maple Leaf Emblem in Relief.

---

End of Report.

Report generated: 27 Apr 2025.