A Hong Kong Experience
It gets a little monotonous when you live on rice and greens for four years. You try to remember the funny things because if you remember the bad things you'd go out of your head. You know the war nowadays is kind of unpopular with the younger generations. They really felt we wasted our time. The causes of been more the war might have understood: probably the cause that made Germany start was. legitimate. But they happened to take their leader, Hitler. He was a mad man really. You read back that after the first war, when Germany lost, the political leaders were so hard on people with the reparations they had to make to pay back for what the Kaiser did. There was terrible depression, as you can see the chaos today. They were looking for a leader. They had freedom but they were in terrible chaos and then Hitler came to power and they saw Hitler as a leader, and from then on it was foolish. When I was a prisoner in Japan four years we couldn't believe that the Germans had done such a thing, murdered 15 million Jews. We just couldn't believe it. We could believe it of the Japanese because. the Japanese didn't believe in the Geneva Convention. They believed in the defeat of the Bushida Code which is that when you die in battle you automatically go to heaven, and anybody that surrenders is worse than a criminal, and this is the way that they treated us. We were young, I was 22. I could see that if Hitler dominated the world what it would be like. It would be that freedom was really gone.
Japan was known as an ally during the first world war (but then they made the axis with Germany). They more or less just sent us to Hong Kong. I myself thought it was just a bluff because we didn't have a hope. Hong Kong was written off but it was a booster to send these million troops there, just to better the morale. The British Intelligence was very bad; they never thought the Japanese would attack. The Japanese were only 20 miles away from us.
We were in Hong Kong three weeks when the Dec 8 started, but we were expecting it. We got there on Nov. 16 and of course the hostilities broke out on the 8th. The week before the 8th, I remember particularly, it was a Sunday morning and a Lieutenant from Richmond came to me and said, 'I want you to take so many men and go to the island which was across the harbour.' I took our men and went to the island and into our positions. The following Sunday we were sitting at the harbour, about 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and I had a terrible feeling. I saw all the ships leaving and they were going just as fast as they could. We were sitting there wondering, 'There is something wrong. There is something going on.' That night the orders came through for the rest of the garrisons to man positions and be ready. In the morning I had to go from where I was, Dagular, to a place called Sheko, with all my rations and in the morning when I went down, I was on a truck, there were all our fellows with guns and I said, 'What's going on?', and he said, 'We're at war with Japan, listen.' You could hear them bombing the barracks. We were in position. They bombed our barracks and they killed some civilians. They came into Pearl Harbour the same day. How is it the Americans didn't know they were coming? This is something I couldn't understand.
When I came into Hong Kong I had just been married. I was born in Scotland and my family came to Canada in 1930. I had five brothers and they all went into the war and they all came back. We came from Scotstown. I had one brother in New Zealand who joined the New Zealand army and one brother in the British Navy and the others were all in the Canadian army. I was the youngest. My oldest brother was in Crete when the Germans took it the first time. Another brother, who was in Scotland, engineer in the Navy, never came to Canada until he was in the Mediterranean and was on the aircraft carrier. This is how the British were set in their ways: they were on watch, they had radar and they saw a German torpedo plane. They were watching him coming, but it was time to change the watch, so everybody changed watch. While they were doing this the plane came in and let a torpedo go. My brother said, 'Normally it wouldn't have bothered, because it hit the boiler room, but it hit several boilers so it disabled the ship.' He said, 'We put into Malta and the ship was too large. As soon as the Germans knew they had crippled our aircraft carrier, they were right after us. So during the night we switched places with another aircraft carrier and went to Gibraltar.' The Germans never found them. Gibraltar didn't have a dock large enough for them to handle so they came across the Atlantic at 8 knots an hour to Newport. That was where the ship was repaired. My brother got a leave to come to Toronto to see my mother, who had moved after we had all left home. He hadn't seen her since 1930.
I was going to school in Scotstown. We went to school to play hockey more than anything else in those days. I always said I had to marry the teacher to get out of school. Jean was teaching grade four and I was in grade eleven. I was married on September 12. I had six days to get married and it took me three days travelling time. I had to come from Val Cartier, catch a bus to Sherbrooke, and go to Waterloo. We arranged it so we'd be married in the evening. Since I was in battle dress she didn't want to wear a white dress. So she just wore another dress and I got married. We went back to Quebec City for our honey moon. I didn't have time, so we spent one weekend in Quebec City, then came back to Sherbrooke. The bus terminal was down where the Premier theatre was. I got on one bus and back to Val Cartier and she went on the other bus back to Waterloo, and that was our honeymoon.
They sent us to St. John, New Brunswick by mistake and they lost us. They wanted us to go to Hong Kong but they lost us. We were in St. John for 2 weeks when I was sent back to Val Cartier, to get geared up to go to the far east. Colonel Denison on Moulton Hill was my Captain. He gave me embarkation leave and said, 'Now remember if you miss this draft you're liable to two years in a penitentiary.' So I made the draft and got four. On the way home, three days doesn't give you much time, I was with another chap from Sherbrooke, and between Quebec, and Sherbrooke, we had an accident. The car rolled over. I was sitting in the back seat with another couple of fellows. I went out the open window, it was a 1938 Ford. I thought my hip was broken, so when we got back I saw a doctor. I stripped down. He saw the bruises and said, 'What happened to you?' I said, 'Well I was in an accident about six weeks ago but it is much better now.' He said, 'Okay I'll let you go.'
I remember packing our gear. We had to carry everything we owned on our backs. We marched from Val Cartier to the station, about a mile and a half, and got on the train. Someone said, 'Do you know where you are going?' We didn't know where we were going because it was secret. Only when we were half way across the prairies did they say we were going to Hong Kong and some of the guys were mad. We didn't want to spend our lives in Hong Kong. So we got on a ship in Vancouver called the Awatea. This was a mail ship and it was running between New Zealand and Australia but for some reason it was in Vancouver. They took over the cabins and hung up hammocks and mounted all kinds of anti-aircraft guns on it. The thing was top heavy. When we saw what we were going to get to eat we nearly went off the ship. It was mutton and tripe, this is what the Australians liked.
It was terrifically hot. The ship rolled a lot because it was top heavy and some fellows were sick. We had to help out with cleaning the decks and things like that. I had the job of holy stoning the deck. I had a crew of men. We put sand and water on the deck and pushed this huge stone, a heavy, big rock across and the deck comes up white. Everybody was getting sympathy. It was such a rotten job. We had to get up at 4 in the morning and quit before the rest got up but we did nothing while the rest lugged stores all day long.
We put into port at Honolulu, seeing a huge tower with Dole pineapple juice on it. The Americans were so lulled into their senses - this beautiful harbour is just an emerald green. They had a huge power boat with two sailors patrolling the harbour. Girls came down to the dock in grass skirts. 'Remember nobody knows who we are, we may be be Australians or we may be New Zealanders.' And with that they'd throw Canadian money to the girls! Everybody thought there was no action. We were only allowed to stay there about 24 hours. We took off and as we were coming through the Philippines they said again, 'We're in territory that may be a little unfriendly.' We were so hot in Manilla when we picked up two British destroyers. I remember reading the message Japanese patrol vessels sighted. Nothing to worry about.'
When we came into Hong Kong an aircraft came out to meet us. It was a relic, like from the first world war. Is this our air defence? They were so low you could almost shake hands with the gunner. We got off the ship at Hong Kong, and they marched us in. The British gave us a lecture telling about the Japanese. They were destructive up at the border and we had never seen them. We didn't know what they looked like. They had driven all these refugees out of China and they were all in Hong Kong. Almost one or two million refugees.
The barrack life - we were used to doing our own work. A Britisher came over the first night when we were ready to go to bed, the mosquito nets were supposed to go down at 5 o'clock because the mosquitoes carry you away, and he got after us because we were carrying our own coal. He said, 'You lose face. The Chinese coolies do everything. They clean barracks, made your bed, made sure the mosquito net was down and this sort of thing.' We paid these people hardly anything but this is what they said to pay them. We gave them cigarettes and a tip. It got so they wouldn't do anything for us, they just laughed at us because we were half-way decent. They actually got demoralized by this. They dug the trenches for the telephone lines so the coolies knew where all our telephones were. All the defences were made on the harbour because they never expected an attack over land because the Japanese were only 20 miles away and a half mile across. There was the fifth column, which is actually the underground, and people like that. The Japanese soldier is probably the best in the world. They are brutal but fanatical.
Officially, they said the Japanese had landed on the island on December 8, they hit a reserve company that was next to the mainland and they were only supposed to come on if we couldn't hold them off. They started to fight. We could hardly believe this was happening. I did most of my fighting in Repulse Bay. We didn't know the island as well as the Japanese did. They had better maps.,BR> Wells Bishop was a marvellous soldier. He had a dog he got in Newfoundland that would march in our parades in Quebec City. We called him Sargeant Gander, he was very gentle and friendly. When he got to China he just went out of his head when he saw a Chinese man. When the Japanese landed on the beach he would bite them and that's how he got killed in action.
We had just moved and I told Sargeant Heath about this parcel of men on the island and that I was going up on top of the hill to signal back to my headquarters. We were up there when it got dark. This was just before the war started. I did my signalling. There were two or three men with me and we thought we'd take a shortcut down to where our group was. We got kind of tangled up and lost and the first thing we knew we came into some barbed wire. We made quite a clatter getting over this and then all of a sudden we were surrounded by British 'Where are you going, mate?' We could hear the globes clicking in the rifles and so we said, 'We're Canadians and we've lost our way.' 'Come in and have a cup of tea.' But they still kept their rifles on us. So we had tea and hardtack and this Sargeant Heath was there. I got to be quite friendly with him, he went down to Repulse Bay with us.
I remember saying, 'We have got to move up. The Japanese have landed on the island and we have to take this position and meet them.' I had some men on the hill. 'We'll come back in later.' - just obeying orders really. So we started up the line. That was my first shock of seeing wounded and dead men. It's hard to describe the sight. There were two brigades, east and west, and the Japanese just sliced through the island. We were trying to head them off. They had tanks, some on foot, some cavalry and they were well trained. As we went into this Repulse Bay, they were bringing out the dead ones and as we passed we'd whisper to each other, 'Who's he?'
We went down into the Repulse Bay hotel. I remember running about 200 yards. We got over to that hotel, then we were cut off. There were still civilians in the hotel. They were supposed to have sent all the civilians to Australia. It was grim. We couldn't see any way out. There was no navy. Pearl Harbour had been devastated. We had one gun boat and one destroyer, and the three or four aircraft the Japanese got at first, so we had no aircraft. So there was absolutely no aircover when we were going down there. There was a Japanese plane circling, watching us.
The island is ten square miles. The ladies in the hotel were marvelous. We had no water, the Japanese had cut off the water supply, so we were drinking the water out of the radiators and they were making tea. There was an underground passage between the garage and the hotel. I was in a three room suite on the second floor, a bedroom, a sitting room and a bathroom. The mountains came right down to the hotel; it was cut right into the mountain. The plaster had come down where the bullets had hit. We would lay on the floor and you could look up the hill. I had one man sitting back in an easy chair with binoculars which we captured from the Japanese. I was lying on the floor, and what we had to do, because we were very low on ammunition, was the guy in the chair would spot the position of the Japanese and I would creep up to the window, fire and flop back down again. Suddenly a woman was in the doorway of the room. We pulled her down. She could have gotten her head blown off. She said, 'My dog, I'm looking for some water for my dog.' We were drinking water out of the pipes and she was looking for water for her dog. This dog was barking so I crawled over on the floor and I told her I would look for some water for the dog. I found some water and went back into the room where the dog was and she said, 'If he bothers you by barking, shoot him. You Canadians are doing so much for us.' I wouldn't shoot, I won't even go hunting today. I just couldn't bring myself to shoot and I've often wondered what happened to that dog.
Actually I wondered you know, I wondered, because this girl spotted where we were, because that night the Japs got on the roof of the hotel and they came into that room. We were up there in the daytime and came downstairs at night. They got into the hotel through the window, they captured a Vickors gun and they were walking down the hallway and opening doors. This Sargeant Heath, he always said, 'Wheres me blokes?' he had two other men with him and he went upstairs, came around the corner and fired a gun at them and the Japs ran into the room. British are good soldiers, a lot of people would say, because they were good soldiers. We thought a lot of them, we had good respect for them.
We fought it out for a couple of days and we had to try to make our way back. The Japanese were mortaring us and they were getting ready to attack our hotel so we got orders to get out. We couldn't go at all in the daytime, every time we went out we got clobbered. The first party started down the road and the Japs immediately opened fire on them. They didn't panic. One fellow was carrying a tripod on his back and he slapped that down. They opened up and drove the Japanese back up the hill and were on their way.
As we cut into the mountains the Japs were all around us. I put my shoes around my neck and I put two pairs of socks on and I had a gun. We started out at ten o'clock. We had to go through the Japanese lines and get through and back on our own. They told us, now don't lose sight of the man in front of you because if you do ... We had no guides leading us back, we weren't taking the road, we were going to cut right over the mountain. The man in front of me was a British airforce pilot. He had no aircraft so he was fighting. He stopped. I said, 'What's the matter?' He said, 'I lost the man in front of me.' And here we are somewhere in the middle of the Japanese lines and we were sneaking through. It was black. I didn't know where we were going. 'Well, how did you do a thing like that? You walked along and suddenly you dropped your hold.' He had been pretty well beat up, was pretty well fatigued, and couldn't keep hold. The things you have to do are hard. I said, 'You go behind the line, go to the last man and if you don't keep up ... We started on again and this fellow started to whistle. He had lost us. We had to do something, here we are trying to sneak through. Anyway we got him back. I don't know what stroke of luck it was, but the trail made a horse-shoe and I went straight and down through a gulley. Just as I got to the top of the gulley, there was the last man he had lost. I followed him in. We got into Stanley, that was on the 23rd or 24th of December. So we had just got in in the morning when they said, 'You have to get out, the Japanese have broken into the village of Stanley.'
The Japanese were two football fields away, and they were dive-bombing the barracks. You could hear their mortars whistling through the air. And I remember hearing a Chinese flute, those notes were weird.
Finally we went back in for a rest. This had been 7 days we had no sleep you know, you'd sleep when you could. When I got back into Stanley there was a garage there and I put my head on a steel rail and I slept like a baby just on cement.
We started back out of Stanley that night. The Japanese had captured the hospital. They killed some of the nurses. I was going down the road with another group of men and you could see these shells coming right at you. The ones that hit you, you don't see. There was a kind of a garage cut into the hill and a space just about five feet behind it, so we ran in. What we didn't know is that it was full of gasoline and the Japs saw it and they saw us run in there. I remember the only scar I got at all was I cut my finger on a broken window. We got out of there.
We went down the road and there was a station for pumping water and a telephone just hanging, but it was still operating, so I called for an ambulance because these men were coming back up the road in pretty bad shape. I remember this Scotchman saying, 'You might as well shoot us now because when they see us in the morning they're sure going to kill us all.'
The first thing that we knew the war was over; the white flag was flying. We were actually fighting after the surrender. In some of the documents they say that this is why the Japanese were so brutal in the hospital.
They moved us into a camp called North Point, it was right on the harbour in Hong Kong and had been used for a Chinese refugee camp. It was on that shore line that the Japanese invaded. Some of the buildings were practically demolished. It was built for 300, and they put 2,000 of us in there. The Chinese had been packed, even then.
The biggest problem we had there was cleanliness and sanitation. There were so many dead bodies in the harbour, and the only way we could find them was by the odour. It was so dirty, the plumbing was gone, the toilets were plugged, so we had to really set to and get this place cleaned up. We had a program that everybody had to kill so many flies a day. We eventually got the camp clean. We still had our rations, but what we should have done was divided it and said to each man, 'This has got to last you.' But the Japanese came in and took it all. I remember the first meal. They brought in a big bag of rice and half a pig. They boiled up this rice and they threw this half pig in. This was going to be my supper! I was a finicky eater. How am I ever going to eat this pig with bristles thrown in with it? That was just the start because I said four years later, 'If I could have had a piece of that pig.' Anyway we got it down.
Then the rumours started. People who believed a rumour would get all discouraged. I remember this chap, they had stories you were on the list to go and he'd write a letter to his mother but then, when the rumour fell through, he'd lose hope. You have to have a will to live.
The diphtheria epidemic started. The British were dying on the mainland, eleven a day. Our sargeant had had it, and I had to replace him. So I had to sleep in his bed. One of the acting sargeant's duties was to take the sick parade and this day I went in at the end of the line. I had a sore throat - a catch in my throat, and that was diphtheria.,BR> We were sent over to the building where all the diphtheria cases were. I was one of the fortunate ones. The epidemic got quite bad and had started to get out of hand, so the Japanese got a serum and I got some. The windows in that building were gone and they were covered over with tin and these poor kids were lying there choking to death. There wasn't a thing the doctor could do. There were about 20 that actually had no serum and made it. I know one guy from Drummondville who's sight is gone and whose heart and sense of balance are bad. It effects you one way or another.
While I had diphtheria, it was around Christmas 1942 and I was drafted to work in Japan. They loaded us last on the boat so we went down into the hold of the ship. When I left Hong Kong it was 91 degrees. I had been in Japan about 3 weeks before they sent us to work in a ship yard. There was snow on the ground. There were 500 of us in the camp. Out of the 500 they would allow to keep eight who were sick. Everybody was in pretty bad shape. I came into a fever, and I was one of the eight who they kept. Our own doctor was still looking after us, but the Japs wanted us to report to the Japanese doctor. I had stood out in the cold waiting to see this Japanese doctor when they told me to go back, he wasn't seeing any more. I laid down on the bed and at one o'clock they told us the doctor was seeing people again. When I tried to get up I couldn't. A pain hit me and I couldn't get my breath. I got up and managed to get into the building and sat down. We were in there about fifteen minutes and the Japs said, 'Get out. We don't want to see any more beri-beri cases'. That was what they were checking for. I thought if I go out I'm dead. I stayed. The captain said, 'You can go now.' I said, 'I can't breathe.' So he called the Jap over and he was trying to tell him I had pneumonia. The Jap let me stay in camp. They had no hospital, no medicine. All I had was my cantine with hot water and some aspirin. It was two and a half years before I could take a deep breath. I was in camp for 3 or 4 weeks. Then I went back to work.
We had to climb 80 feet into the air on these ships. I weighed 101 pounds. Before I had weighed 140. Sargeant Major Magdenell made me go on sick parade because I was in such poor condition. Our doctor gave me some of his rations. If you couldn't work they sent you to what you call a hospital camp. It wasn't a working camp but you had very little to eat. The fact that I went to that camp got me out of the ship yard. I was in that camp five months. One of the treatments for beri-beri was to strip you down, put little balls of lint in the small of your back and set fire to it, it would burn right into your back. This was a pretty bad camp, a lot of fellows died and they cremated all the people.
I got out of that camp and went back to work. I was back on my feet and I felt I had made it fending any real disaster. Twenty pairs of boots filtered through the American Red Cross. Finally they brought out the boots. The people who had boots had to take them off and give them to the people who didn't have any. They also brought in shoes that were made out of awning canvas and had cardboard soles. They looked like something a clown would wear. They said they were going to have a riveting contest and see how many rivets we could drive in a day. We kept on working in that yard, steel got shorter and we were getting news. We never saw any planes but we'd hear all this jazz about it.
In November 1944 I remember I was working in the ship yard, and the air raid siren went off. We didn't know what was happening. We came up on deck and we could see the Japs running. One of the boys yelled, 'Uncle Sam is up there.' We could see this B29, the first plane that I had seen. He was a path finder, then the raid started. Eventually it got so that we couldn't work at all. At ten o'clock that night when the siren went off again we stayed in little dug-out shelters in the camp. That air raid lasted until three o'clock in the morning. We didn't go back to work for three days. But half way through the raid they made us get up and move the rations out of the building, because they thought the rations were going to catch fire. We were in a suburb of Tokyo. You could hear the people screaming in the houses. The Americans were using fire balls. I counted 12 B29's shot down. I think there were 500 planes. They would come in at about 400 or 500 feet, you could see them in the cockpits. Some planes burst into fire and would try to head out to sea to be picked up. The raids kept coming and coming. I had the mumps during these air raids.
Christmas was coming. We got the usual diet of rice soup and greens and we used to hang onto the light bulbs for warmth. The men working in rigging stole canvas and another man working in the paint shop stole paint, and they stole wire and candles. There was a man who could paint and he painted Christmas scenes on the canvas. We made imitation fireplaces. Did this all in one night. We also had tablecloths. Men started to cry when they saw how we had transformed these barracks into a beautiful Christmas scene.
Then the crunch came; the Japs came in to take the roll call. 'What is this?' They marched back out and we thought, 'Will they start the beatings standing in the rain?' They came back in about an hour and they had a camera. Then it came out in the paper, 'See how well treated the prisoners are.' All they said was to put it all back when we were finished. That Christmas was really something to remember. I had come down with tropical fever and I was quite delirious with that.
We got bombed out of Tokyo. We had an interpreter who spoke English with an Oxford accent. He hated us. He would interpret wrongly so we would get in trouble. He said, 'You are going to a new camp and I believe they have hot springs there.' The camp was a coal mine and the hot springs were down in the mine.
The Japanese wouldn't let you keep a diary. If they caught you it was just too bad. When I switched camps they made us strip off completely and they searched us and picked up my diary, but somehow they just gave it back to me. We weren't allowed any news but we smuggled in a British newspaper and read it and took down notes. One time the man who was supposed to be watching, wasn't. I was reading and I looked up and there was a Jap standing there. He asked me what it was and I told him that it was the names of the men who were sick tomorrow. He looked but he couldn't read it. If he had brought an interpreter we would have been dead. Magdenell was as white as a sheet.
They sent us to work in this coal mine. It was 2000 metres down. I was on the rock face which is a level above the coal face. The mine was forever shifting. I was picking at the ceiling and you'd get to a point when you thought it would all fall down, and you'd run and it would fall down. I was underground May, June and July. They made you shovel as many cars as possible until you couldn't shovel any more. Then they'd fix your quota.
We were digging into this hill and we came across what looked like a tomb with some old bones and pottery and I had just gotten over diphtheria, and all I could think of was not to get the plague. The only time I ever got a severe beating was in this camp. There were a mixture of prisoners who were Japanese and Dutch, Javanese. They were in a bad way too. They said to us, 'You're lucky, your wives and children are safe at home. Ours are in Java', which was occupied by the Japanese.
They had to issue us mine hats. These Javanese had been in that camp before and had older equipment. Since we were working on the surface we didn't really need a cap with a light. This Javanese said to the Japanese sargent that his bracket was broken on his hat and he wanted a new one: the sargent came down the line and took my hat and gave me his hat. The reason he picked me, I think, was because I have blue eyes - the Japanese didn't like blue eyes.
So we started to the mine and the Dutchman handed my hat back and he said, 'I didn't want to take your hat.' So I put the hat back on. When we came back into camp that night the same guard was standing there. He didn't say anything but the Dutchman went back and said something about his hat again. So the Jap said, 'What did you do with the hat I gave you?' He said, 'He took it back.'
Well, that was disobedience of the Japanese order. So whoever is in charge doesn't have to answer to the colonel, he's in charge. So I had gone to my hut and I heard an awful roar calling my number. Here was this Jap, I knew enough Japanese to understand what he was saying, but I couldn't tell him that the guy didn't want it so he started to swing at me. I knew they go kind of crazy if they get you down so I tried to swing with the blows and finally he quit. When we were lining up for the roll call a Dutch officer came over and said he was sorry. I told him to get away from me. Four years I kept out of trouble - my jaw would crack for six months after that.
In July 1945 we were working out on this dump and they gave us a half an hour to break for lunch. We could see all these people walking into town, they were all dressed up. The man would be walking and the wife three paces behind him. They hadn't called us back to work. 'I wonder what's going on,' I thought, 'It must be a ration day.' The Japanese said, 'You're going back to camp.' We had to stop by the mine on the way back. There were girls working in the lamp shop and they were crying. Whenever they were crying it was good news for us.
The next day they got us up again to go back to the coal dump. They used to make us go a certain way, but today they made us go a different way. The old man who was in charge yelled at us but with no heart in it, so we just sat down and didn't do anything. They brought us back to camp.
The Emperor had agreed to surrender because the Americans had used a terrible, cruel, inhumane weapon, the bomb they had dropped on Hiroshima. So all these guards had just taken off and disappeared.
We were actually in worse shape after the war was over because we had nothing to eat. There was nothing in the camp. I remember one morning I got up and I wasn't feeling well. The Japanese had had a duck and no one could kill it. It was about four o'clock in the morning and I heard the duck. It had laid an egg, I picked that egg up and threw it in hot water. It was partially cooked, but I ate it. It was the first egg I'd had in four years.
When the war was over, our organization was back together and I was Corporal again in charge of so many men. We started to go scrounging around town to see if we could find some food somewhere. We heard this roar and three planes came in off the aircraft carriers and they were circling and we didn't know it but there was another camp about 3 miles away from us. We had to put up signs, P.O.W. They came over the camp and this fighter plane dipped and I saw the pilot with his thumb up. He threw out a box of Lucky Strikes from the cockpit and a bunch of pin-ups, and a note that said, 'We'll be back later.'
Then they started dropping bread and stuff that they picked up off the carriers. Then they got a program with the B29 coming in with rations, cocoa and condensed milk in big drums and clothing. They gave us instructions to get a train.
We were about 135 miles north of Tokyo. We got on this train and they brought us down into Yokohama. There American bands there. We thought they would shove us off in quarantine, but we got off the train and the band was playing. They gave us a good bath and de-licing, we were fairly clean anyways.
I remember an American intelligence officer said, 'I don't want to hear about the good Japanese, I just want to hear about the bad ones.'
The Americans were good to us. They got us on a truck and they put one girl beside each soldier and this one soldier said, 'Do you speak English?' and she said, 'I shore do.'
Then they were going to fly us to San Francisco. The typhoons started so they flew us as far as Guam, farther away than ever from home. Then they put us on board a ship. I left Guam, I think, September 11. We went back through Pearl Harbour, landed at San Francisco, came up the coast to Seattle and then took a boat to Victoria, Vancouver Island. The way we were welcomed back you would think we had won the Battle of the Bulge. A little girl put a bunch of flowers in my hand. When you'd go through the cities, kids would come up and ask you for your autograph.
I came back and met Jean in Montreal on October 11, 1945. Suddenly it was a long, long time. The thing that struck me the most was how beautiful the Eastern Townships is. Hawaii was spectacular, and down through the Sierra's beautiful, but when you come back and see the Townships! And to be free!
Freedom is something you have to cherish. Freedom is something you can't abuse. We gave up our freedom when we went in the army. We give it up because we believe in protecting freedom. This is where some of the young people are abusing their freedom. If it gets chaotic, someone like Hitler is going to step in.
This sense of being caged in, all the beatings, all the starvation, all the trouble in the war, the danger, was nothing to the fact that you were a prisoner and you couldn't do what you wanted to do.
When we came back there was a concentration camp in East Sherbrooke for the German soldiers. They had some of the First World War veterans who were more or less guards there and they used to have parties on Friday night. The East Germans were still here; they hadn't sent them back home. We were invited to a party and I don't know whether this particular sargent was trying to impress on me how well treated the Germans were compared to us, but the Germans were playing in the orchestra and they were also waiting on the tables. The Canadian sargent, he started ordering this German waiter around and I said to Jean, 'Let's get out of here.' When I went out I said to the German, 'I know just how you feel. I was a prisoner for four years and the way that man talked to you, I can't stand it.'
I remember a funny story. I could have gone to college for six years because I had six years service, but I decided since I was married, I had better get a job. So I took my trade as a machinist at the Rand. One of the machines I had to go to was a finishing grinder. There was this big French chap working on the machine; I was just an apprentice. I knew after I was there 5 minutes that this fellow didn't know what he was doing. We had more wrecked pieces flying out of the machine. He said to me, 'Are you nervous?' I said, 'No, but I'm getting that way.' And he said, 'Well, you know the reason I'm getting off this job is I've been behind the wire.' So I knew he wasn't in Japan and I said, 'Where were you in Germany?' He said, 'No, I was guarding these Germans up in East Sherbrooke.' I never told him where I had been.
That terrific beating I got in Japan, of course when the war was over, I looked for that guy. I was thin but in good shape. The guy had disappeared. So when I came to the Rand I was a bundle of nerves, I just wanted to get started, but I couldn't, my nerves were so bad. One day someone wanted to see me in personnel, and I really thought, this is it, I can't do the job anymore. I went down and an Army officer was standing there and he pulled out an album, 'Can you identify this photograph?' The first man on there was this guy Suzuki who beat me up. So Gen. Kay took the statement down. I guess they picked him up.
Our regiment was formed from the Quebec Royal Rifles. They took officers from the 7th and 11th Hussars. A lot of the officers were from the Price General Brothers Corporation and Price told me this story himself: The company lawyer was a way over age. He went to Brig. Price and said, 'Can you get me into the unit?' He said, 'We can't accept you Cecil, you're way too old.' He was in his fifties almost, but he got in as paymaster. He was a most gentlemanly man. I needed an advancement of $50.00 on my pay and he said, 'What do you need it for?' I said, 'I'm getting married,' and he said, 'I guess you'll need it', so he gave it to me. He went to Hong Kong with us. But as soon as that man got to Hong Kong he didn't bother with that payroll, he grabbed a Tommy gun and was up in the hills. This is so ridiculous! The Japs had landed on the island and they were cutting us in two. Brig. Price was down on the road and from the Brigade headquarters a colonel by the name of O'Hennessey came by and said, 'Where is your paymaster?' Brig. Price then answered, 'He's up in the hills.' 'Do you know he hasn't sent his pay sheets into Ottawa?' And Price said to him, 'Do you realize that we are about to be cut in two, that he might not even see tomorrow?' He said, 'That doesn't matter. He hasn't sent his pay sheets to Ottawa. I have to go back and report this.' Price told told him, 'You stay here. Your headquarters will have been overrun by that time.' O'Hennessey went back. Our brigade headquarters was immediately wiped out. Cecil Thompson was up in the hills fighting when I was in Repulse Bay. When we were out of ammunition he ran a truck down to us. He was a very quiet spoken man. Price told Thompson, 'I'm going to talk to the Japanese because you don't belong here, you're too old.' He said, 'If you do that, I'll never talk to you again.' So he stuck it out and he just died here a short time ago.
(When my husband used to talk about his experiences he'd have the worst nightmares and now he's been talking for how long!)
There was an excursion going back to Hong Kong on the 25th anniversary of our wedding and also of Hong Kong. I had sort of mixed feelings about going back, but my wife didn't want to go at all. Well, I had a dream that we had gone, and when we got there, the same things started all over again. We stayed home.
The Hong Kong veterans are a very close knit association. During World War II regiments left Sherbrooke and other places and went overseas, but the Hong Kong regiments stayed as group, stayed together all the way through. When we came back home, we were the smallest of any group but the most successful as far as trying to get pension for our men. We had more war-blinded (not by shells but from malnutrition). The government eventually got a dollar a day for every day we were in prison camp which wasn't too hot, but it was something. We got a fairly reasonable pension, most of us are at least 50% pension. I don't feel that the Liberal government at that time did us any disservice. When you signed on that dotted line you took your chances: We are a very close knit group and help each other. Only we had that unique experience together.
Walter Henderson, Sherbrooke
Excerpted from The Townships Sun, Special Remembrance Day Issue, November 1976, pages 36-40