As Remembrance Day approaches, a tale of valour and sacrifice is emerging from the fog of military history, thanks to a new book that finally gives a group of Canadian soldiers their due, nearly 70 years after the Battle for Hong Kong. About 2,000 troops from the Winnipeg Grenadiers and the Quebec-based Royal Rifles of Canada were among the forces defending Hong Kong when the Japanese attacked in 1941. They were pitted against a better-trained foe, and held up longer than anyone thought they could. In the end, 100 per cent of the force was dead, wounded, missing in action or taken prisoner. The worst indignity was yet to come: The commander of the brigade to which the Rifles belonged wrote a report that put a blot on the regiment's reputation. In a bid to set the record straight, Ottawa author Nathan Greenfield is also calling on the British Parliament to repudiate that report. Here is a passage from his account:
The battle begins
On Dec. 8, 1941, at 7 a.m., Hong Kong's Kai Tak aerodrome received a warning of an impending air raid. Almost an hour later, as Honorary Captain Francis Deloughery celebrated mass on the parade ground for Catholics who had not yet deployed to their war stations on the island, a Japanese infantryman, Masakazu Nakamori, looked up from where he was lying in wait for the attack to begin. Later he recalled the "beautiful sight" of a dozen Ki-36 bombers, each carrying a 500-pound bomb, escorted by nine fighters flying in formation low over Hong Kong.
Only hours earlier in Hawaii, an American radar operator had mistaken some unexpected blips on his radar screen for planes due in from San Francisco. In fact, those blips were Japanese planes bound for Pearl Harbour.
When planes neared Hong Kong's Shamshuipo neighbourhood, Rifleman Bill MacWhirter, a sturdy 17-year-old from Quebec's Gaspé region, heard his friend call out, "Look! Our planes from Singapore."
By the time MacWhirter reached the door of the building he was in so he could see the planes, the formation had broken up as planes peeled off to head for their targets. Each incoming pilot, with his target clearly in front of him, put his plane into a power dive. The bombers released their payloads a few seconds before they roared over their targets at less than 500 feet; inertia carried the bombs the rest of the way. The fighters flew even lower, strafing the ground.
"The explosions were terrible. But even worse was the plane that seemed to follow a Chinese man who was running for a fence about 150 yards to my right. He probably thought the trees would hide him," MacWhirter recalls. "To get there, he had to scramble under the fence. There was a little hole, so he had a chance to get under it. The bullets caught up to him when he was halfway through the hole and cut him almost clean in two. That was the first man I ever saw killed."
Moments after the Chinese man died, MacWhirter's sergeant ordered him and other soldiers close by into a nearby barracks and under the iron beds. A few minutes later, the raid was over, and MacWhirter and Rifleman Jackie Coull ventured outside. "We could see the smoking holes where the bombs had fallen and damage done to the Jubilee Building, where the officers would have been if they had not been sent to the island. The bombing was timed for the morning parades, so if the boys had been there we would have been blown apart," MacWhirter recalls. (Most of the troops had been deployed to war stations in response to news of Japanese troop movements.)
The attack destroyed or badly damaged all but one of the Royal Air Force's few planes, and destroyed all but one civilian plane. The bombs wounded two Canadian signallers who had been loading radio sets into a station wagon. Chinese merchants in a nearby market were less fortunate. They and their shoppers were covered in blood and bits of bone and flesh.
The battle for Hong Kong that began that day continued until the surrender on Dec. 26, 1941. Of the 1,974 Canadian troops who were there, 290 were killed – many bayoneted after they had surrendered. The rest became prisoners of war in camps where they would be beaten, starved and turned into slave labourers; 250 died in these camps.
Prisoners of war
Beginning in January of 1943, 1,320 PoWs – more than half of them Royal Rifles and Winnipeg Grenadiers – were removed from camps in Hong Kong and sent aboard the first of five "hell ships" that took Canadians to Japan to labour as slaves in factories, mines and shipyards.
The Japanese divided this first draft of prisoners between two camps: Omine and Tsurumi. For men used to squalor and damaged buildings in the Hong Kong camps, Omine, a new camp, was something of an improvement. It lacked furniture, however, which meant that Bill MacWhirter and 162 other Canadians had to sleep on mattresses on the floor. Fleas soon infested their mattresses. Not until mid-August were the men able to raise them off the floor using the wood from the crates that held Red Cross parcels. Each parcel, in violation of the Red Cross rules, was divided among four men.
At each camp, the Canadians were welcomed by speeches like this one delivered via an interpreter by Lieutenant Yoshida, Commandant of Niigata PoW Camp: "You are prisoners of the Imperial Nipponese Army. The war will last 100 years and you will be here forever. This is the punishment for disobedience." The last sentence was accompanied by theatrical slashing through the air with his sword.
The soldier spirit
To resist, to remain soldiers at war, which is how the Canadians never stopped thinking of themselves, meant not giving in to malnutrition, sadistic guards, despair and ironically, given Japan's reputation for lotus flowers and kimonos, an old Canadian foe: winter. With only thin work clothes, thin running shoes and thin cotton socks, on Jan. 31, 1943, at 5 a.m. they were mustered on parade to salute the rising sun, the symbol of Imperial Japan. In the snow, the saluting was the hardest part of the freezing morning ritual.
Just days after the Canadians arrived at Omine, a foreman zeroed in on the Métis Marcel Chaboyer, one of three brothers who had enlisted in the Winnipeg Grenadiers.
Exactly what Chaboyer did is unclear. One version has it that he punched the guard who was beating him. In any event, Chaboyer was dragged away, and his fellow Canadians never saw him again.
Some time later, Sergeant Kabachi, whom the PoWs called "Snake Eyes," caught MacWhirter skirting the rule that each PoW's tag had to be placed on the peg indicating where he was. Sick with dysentery, MacWhirter had run to the latrine without stopping to move his tag. Kabachi noticed the infraction and with other guards confronted the six-foot-six rifleman, who now weighed only 95 pounds.
The guards unsheathed their bayonets and stood behind MacWhirter while Kabachi pummelled him. "He blackened my eyes and knocked out several teeth. Each time he drove me backwards, I pushed against the bayonets and had to step forward and take the next punch."
The beating destroyed the cartilage in MacWhirter's nose and damaged his trigeminal nerve, leaving him with a lifetime of facial neuralgia. The bayonet pricks are still visible; black marks were left by the coal dust that seeped into the cut skin as he loaded coal in the mine at Omine.
Scars and souvenirs
The two scenes could not have been more different. I was sitting in a warm, well-furnished living room. Beyond the large picture window lay an almost blinding whiteness, the reflection of the early afternoon sun off the huge mounds of snow that had fallen in the harshest Gaspé winter in memory. On the coffee table before me was a spiral-bound book open to a picture of a badge with three rough-hewn two-inch square wooden pieces. One had a black square, the others numbers: sanjou shichi. "Thirty-seven; I had to wear it at all times."
A few moments earlier, Bill MacWhirter – who, though in his 80s, was still a tall, powerfully built, gentle man – had shown me a picture from November, 1941. He stands in a field, proudly wearing the uniform of the Royal Rifles of Canada, his cap on an angle that, had he been more than 17, could be called rakish. And a few minutes before that, he'd chuckled when he pushed on the bridge of his nose, flattening it, an all-too-physical reminder of the efforts by Sergeant Kabachi, and many others, to break his will and that of the other Canadian PoWs.
Earlier I had to put down the cookie he insisted I take; it seemed disrespectful even to have it in my hand while he described how, for such a long time, he was so terribly hungry. Typed, these words hardly convey his meaning. Neither would starving or ravenous. He showed me sketches of Omine, the camp where he lived for the final two and a half of his nearly four years in captivity. One sketch was of gaunt men trudging their way into a mine where they worked at gunpoint. Another depicts shirtless, shoeless men summoning up the strength to wash their clothes at a wooden trough in a hut with paper-thin walls. There was a sketch of two emaciated men fitting into one pair of Red Cross pants, but it, too, fails to impart the meaning he and the other veterans I interviewed give when they speak of hunger. In their mouths, the "u" opens up and is filled by a mournful tone; a word we use every day becomes the description of a state of being. When MacWhirter spoke of hunger, it became almost as solemn as when he told me how his faith kept him going.
As did so many of his comrades, MacWhirter went to war with family – his half-brother, Arley Enright – and friends from just down the road. Along with them, MacWhirter ran up hills he'd never heard of and crouched on a dozen roads while under fire, knowing that if he could still hear the war he was alive – but straining eyes and ears to tell if his kith and kin were. The importance of these men's lives to MacWhirter could not be missed, for despite the decades that have passed, after describing an engagement, his voice dropped as he recalled the living.
He laughed a little when he told me that a bullet split Pierre Delarosbil's helmet. (Delarosbil winked when he told me the same story.) MacWhirter's eyes moistened and his voice broke when he told me of the blood Wilson Major, Ralph McGuire and Leo Murphy poured onto the ridge the Rifles attacked on Christmas Day, mere hours before the surrender.
It is not easy to ask a man on the other side of 80 to continue when he has just asked you to turn off your tape recorder so he can compose himself. But I had three questions left. The first was the most difficult: "What did it feel like to be a slave labourer?"
He answered by getting out of his chair and saying, "Come, let me show you something," and led me to a room in his basement where he keeps his wartime memorabilia. After showing me his badge, he handed me a small book, the pages of which are a dark cream colour. The lower right corner of each page carries a red stamp of six Japanese characters.
He'd handed me the diary he'd risked his life to keep. Then he showed me his mess tin and a few other items that he kept during the terrible years at Omine. MacWhirter did not answer my question in words. But by putting his diary in my hands, by showing me his few meagre possessions, including the chopsticks with which he ate what food he was given, he answered my question. He may have been a forced labourer, he may have been beaten, tortured and starved, but he was never a slave, if by that one understands a man without a will.
MacWhirter's wife called down to tell us that she had prepared another pot of tea, so we were back in their living room when I asked my second-last question. Knowing that in the hours before the surrender he'd lost three close friends, I expected to hear him speak of relief or even reprieve when I asked, "What did you think when you surrendered?" MacWhirter took me up short when, his voice cracking, he replied that when he got the order to lay down his arms, what went through his mind was "What would my father think?"
And when I asked him what happened after the surrender, MacWhirter ignored the context of the question: the mechanics of surrender. This gentle old man, sitting in a comfortable easy chair in a Canadian living room now cast in orange by the setting sun, sat up ramrod straight and, for the one and only time in our several hours together, spoke in clipped military cadence: "I never surrendered."
Abridged excerpt from The Damned, published in Canada by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. Copyright 2010 by Nathan M. Greenfield. All rights reserved.