Forced March to North Point Camp

Heroes Remember

Forced March to North Point Camp

Transcript

We went to this warehouse or whatever it was and we gave ourselves in. The Japs never bothered us at all, they were walking around us and everything else, they never bothered us. We went in there and they got us, there was an awful pile of liquor there, there was all kinds of it; Gordon Dry gin, Johnnie Walkers, there was everything there, and they got us to destroy the whole thing, everything that was there. The Japs, they weren’t all that bad there but after that, oh my God, when they put us on that route march when we were going we had to march into North Point and that was tough. We had no water, you had nothing to drink and it was a long walk and a lot of our guys, you know, they were sick and probably some of them wounded and the sun beating down on you and everything, it was tough. But then when we got to North Point we slept. We went to our own barracks in North Point, but it was something God awful there because we had nothing there because the Chinese had cleaned it out. They had broken all the windows in the place and everything. And in our parade ground in North Point they had a post in the middle of the parade ground and when a Chinese woman or a young girl would go by, they would get a hold of her and they would tie her to that post and the guards as they made their rounds they’d come back with their bayonets and they’d keep picking at her until finally during the night they’d end up killing her by picking at her with those bayonets. And where we had to go to the toilet was like you walk out on the harbor on planks and they had all their shacks there and down below you could see all the dead Chinese floating around in the water, all floating around all over the place.

Description

Mr. Lecouffe describes surrendering to the Japanese and having to dump a huge store of alcohol. The march to North Point is very difficult because of the heat and lack of water. Mr. Lecouffe witnesses Japanese guards tying Chinese women to a post and slowly bayoneting them to death.

Lionel Lecouffe

Lionel Lecouffe was born in Campbellton, New Brunswick on March 23, 1922. His father was a First World War veteran and his mother a war bride. Mr. Lecouffe worked on the road for food vouchers before becoming a deliveryman to Easton Bakery at $2 a day. Only seventeen and already a member of the Campbellton militia, he lied about his age to enlist with the Royal Rifles at Matapedia. Ironically, after his release from a Hong Kong hospitalization, Mr. Lecouffe found himself attached to the Winnipeg Grenadiers with whom he finished the war.

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