Description
Mr. Murphy describes North Point POW camp - poor accommodations, meagre rations and disease.
Leo Murphy
Leo Murphy was born September 3, 1919 in New Richmond, Quebec, where he grew up and completed his elementary education by 1931. He was one of nine children. Before enlistment he was a day labourer working in a sawmill, construction, excavation, farming, and a lumber camp. Mr. Murphy enlisted with the Royal Rifles on Nov 25, 1940, and took his basic training in Newfoundland and Val Cartier, Quebec. He was overseas for four years, spending all but the first three months as a POW in Hong Kong and Japan. The emotional impact of the Hong Kong deployment started early for Mr. Murphy, when on the same day his brother was killed beside him and he took the life of a Japanese soldier. During his captivity, he suffered from beri-beri, dysentry, pellagra, had his foot crushed in a mining accident, and developed liver problems. At the time of his liberation, he was a mining coal in Omini, Japan, as a slave labourer. Mr. Murphy arrived back in Canada in October, 1945 and was discharged February 5, 1946. From 1947 to 1960, he was employed as a brakeman with the Canadian National Railroad. Mr. Murphy was married on Sept 1, 1947, to Yvette Savoie. He died June 26th, 2001.
Transcript
We laid, I laid on the floor for about three months, three, four months, laying on a cement bag, not a cement bag, on a potato bag, you know. They called that in French ‘la jute’. That was my bed and mostly all our beds. But then after that they brought in Chinese beds with double-deckers, but we had to make, fix them up you know. And they were full of bed bugs, and we got lousy as hell. Oh, we had lice all over us, in the crotch of our pants. And we’d steam our clothes, we had a steamer. We’d steam our clothes, but a week after, they were just as bad. Yeah, but North Point was a terrible place and we were fed twice a day. I was given about the equivalent to a bowl of rice in the morning and a bowl of rice at night. And you know something? My bowels never worked for sometimes twenty, twenty-five, thirty days but you urinated often, because rice would turn to water. But in North Point there, we were put in with a bunch of, there were soldiers from different categories. There was navy, there was air force, there was everything in North Point. And we had only a couple of toilets. And then I contracted dysentery twice. And I was in a place, the last time I was in this place, I was so weak, I was laying on the floor and I had to crawl to the wall and hold on to the wall to stand up and hold on to the wall to get to the latrines. And all you’d pass was blood and throw up, like you know. And, my God, the people was dying off like flies. They would sound the bugle seven, eight times a day. But there was not only Canadians there. There was English fellows in there. But the funny part, I went on burial party, and the funny part of it, on the burial parties, there was guys that was six foot two, and there was little coffins about five foot long and they would break their legs in two in order to get them in the coffins. And then those coffins wasn’t sealed. You’d carry that on your shoulders and you’d have this stuff run out of the coffin, you know, it was hot there in them places, and run down on your back and on your shoulders and that. And then we’d take them out to this place and they would dig them, have a place, dig a grave for them, and put them in the grave. But, now I don’t know, I was told after that, that some Chinese would go at night and dig them up to steal the coffins.