Description
Mr. Peters describes being pessimistic about their chances to defend Hong Kong against overwhelming Japanese superiority.
Abraham Peters
Abe Peters, one of six children, was born in Lowe Farm, Manitoba, on November 12, 1919. His father was a farmer. Mr. Peters worked on the family farm, and was entrusted with the care of the horses. He left school after completing Grade eight to become a farm labourer. His parents were very upset to learn that he had enlisted in the Royal Winnipeg Rifles in June, 1940. Mr. Peters took basic training at Shiloh, Manitoba and Debert, Nova Scotia. He was ill in hospital when the Rifles shipped overseas to Europe, and once healthy, was sent to reinforce the Winnipeg Grenadiers, with whom he was sent to Hong Kong. As with other survivors of the Hong Kong theatre, Mr. Peters experienced poor training, inferior weaponry, capitulation and a life of misery in the Japanese POW and labour camps. He agrees with many of his comrades that it was a hopeless deployment.
Transcript
I think they were all surprised that this happened and happened so suddenly. We only had about four weeks, not even four weeks there to get acquainted with the locale. I was with the “E” company, yeah. It was a company formed by newcomers into the Grenadiers.
We were waiting for word and we knew darn well we wouldn’t have a hope in hell of getting even just the few troops we had. We knew the Japs they had massive amount of troops. We would just, we’d be just be overwhelmed. There was no way out. We all knew that.
Well the first thing I notice is the bombardment. They come over in broad daylight there. And too we didn’t have no guns or no machine guns, no military equipment to even shoot at those. They could bomb us the way they liked. By that time we had been fell down, well we went back to around Aberdeen. Oh what did they call Aberdeen, it was a big pool of water that the colony used for their water supply, and we went up there to try and protect that and we had quite a bit of struggle even there to . . . we eventually found and took over a station from some other group that had left and they had left a whole bunch of ammunition and we were fortunate to get that. So we used that and tried to defend the position. We both didn’t know, we all didn’t know where we were by that time.