Description
Mr. Emslie tells a story about his co-pilot Roy McCloud and a Japanese Admiral in Singapore who refused to accept that the war was over.
John “Jack” Emslie
John Emslie was born in Vermilion, Alberta in 1924 with the military in his blood. His father was a WWI Veteran and Federal Government employee in the Soldier Settlement Branch. His grandfather was in the Boer War. Mr. Emslie joined the Air Force in 1943 with the entire male component of his high school graduating class, all on the same day. He trained as a navigator in Edmonton, near where he grew up. Mr. Emslie took part in the Burma Campaign, where he flew in the Wing Commander’s crew. After the war, he finished his education in Alberta and Toronto and became a meteorologist.
Transcript
Interviewer: Did you ever loose any of your crew? Not our own crew, but our navigator. Pardon me, co-pilot Roy McLeod. When we got to Cocos Island, after we left India towards the end of the war, we went down to Cocos and he got his own crew because we were almost too expired by then. He went to a supply mission just north of Singapore dropping supplies to the partisan troops there and his aircraft was badly hit by Japanese flack. This was, I don=t have the date here, but it was into early September which was after VJ-Day. But if you look in the records, you’ll find that the admiral who was in charge of the Japanese in Singapore refused to accept the terms that were given in Tokyo and he kept the war going. And we lost several airplanes after VJ-Day. Roy being one of them. And his, he radioed us, radioed back to Cocos that he could not make it. He’d have to ditch in the ocean. So we took off within about an hour, about four airplanes to go and search for him and drop rubber dinghies if we could. We couldn’t find him and so he and his ten crew members were lost. He=s possibly the last RCF death in the war. I couldn’t say for sure, but it was certainly well after VJ-Day.Incidentally, there was a Reader’s Digest article came out giving Commander Grey, I think it was, of the Royal Navy, a Canadian, who got the VC and it’s been in the paper recently. And they called him, in the Reader’s Digest article, the last Canadian to die in World War Two, but obviously he wasn’t. I wrote the Minister of National Defence and passed him on these comments. He wrote back to me and said he looked it up and the facts were as I had said.