Among Japanese Bombing Forces

Heroes Remember

Among Japanese Bombing Forces

Transcript

We were going, I was classed as a truck driver but we didn’t have our own trucks. But I was assigned to this truck and the Chinese person, he was driving for us, and we went across the bay into the hills of Hong Kong, into Wong Nai Chung Gap. That was one of the hills that we were supposed to take and not give up for any cost. And then we stayed the night there. I slept in there with a box in the truck with my bedroll, and where the Chinaman went, I don’t know. But, next morning he was there, and I was told to take the truck, and go back to Sham Shui Po barracks, go to the ferry, and go back, and by this time they were bombing. They were bombing the barracks. And when we got to the barracks, which, we missed a few close calls. There was nobody at the gate and there we seen one officer there and he says, “Get out of here as fast as you can because you’re not going to pick nothing up because they are bombing the living daylights out of us.” They start bombing from the air a lot heavier than they did before. What they were doing in Kowloon they were starting to do on the island. And then you’d get reports that they had landed on certain spots and we would go and try and find and draw them out. We were on Wong Nai Chung Gap. That was that high point of the island that was never supposed to be give up. And they were bombing it real heavy and then there was a couple of officers, I forget who they were, I think one was Colonel Hughes and one was Baird, Major Baird. They came along with a jeep. They had stolen a jeep somewhere and they had been driving and they told us to go down, to get down that hill and get to the university grounds. And we didn’t know where the university grounds were any more than we knew where Joe Blow, that my buddy was on the island. But anyway, by the time we got down that hill, it was maybe an hour or two hour walk, we knew where it was, because we just followed the crowd. They were all heading for the university ground. That’s when we knew, that’s when they told us that the island had surrendered.

Description

Mr. Friesen describes how heavy Japanese bombing forces the Allies to surrender Hong Kong.

Isaac ‘Ike’ Friesen

Isaac ‘Ike’ Friesen was born on a farm in the Russian Ukraine on October 19, 1920. His father died while Ike was an infant, leaving his mother to run the farm. At the onset of the Bolshevik Revolution, Mrs. Friesen sold the family farm and emigrated to Winkler, Manitoba, later moving to and buying a house in nearby Pomcooley. Mr. Friesen attended the four room school across the street, completing grade eight before becoming a farm laborer to help support his mother. He eventually tried working on a sugarbeet farm in Carmen, Manitoba, but quickly decided joining the armed forces was a better option. He tried to join the Royal Canadian Navy, but was deferred to the Army. He took basic training as a member of the Eighteenth Manitoba Reconnaissance Regiment at Shilo. He was designated as “D” - unfit for overseas service, until being recruited by the badly depleted Winnipeg Grenadiers where his status suddenly became “A1.” Once the conflict in Hong Kong ended with the Allied surrender, Mr. Friesen worked as a laborer at Kai Tek airport. He was eventually shipped to the camp in Niigata, Japan, where he labored as a stevedore. After being liberated and returning to Canada, Mr. Friesen, as the result of a chance meeting while hitchhiking, was offered and accepted employment with what is now Shell Oil.

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