Among Japanese Bombing Forces

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.