Manchurian Fever

In ‘52, I was never that cold in all my life. It's a damp cold and our . . . We had these nylon-type pants, and every time you walked, it would go "ssswhhh, ssswhhh", so we got rid of them. We used flannelette pyjamas and then our battle dress underneath it, which was the best to go on. And then we had parkas, but a tank . . . you ever been in a tank in the cold weather is something. And all of us in the infantry, the armoured corps and everything, all lived in bunkers or holes in the ground.

Interviewer: Can you explain to me what a bunker is?

Well, a bunker is a built-up area where we dug a hole or they dug a hole and then we'd fix it up, put sandbags all around it, a good roof on it, and that's where five of us, four of us, slept, but one would be on guard duty, so, at night. And it was . . . They had these little stoves. We called them "swoofs" because every time the fuel would drip to the bottom, it would "ptchoo", and they smelled and stunk, so this is why most of the guys had breathing problems, of this type of thing. The rats were that big. I seen one going up the, one of the poles in the bunker with a Hershey bar in its mouth, so. And he didn't get the Hershey bar . . . but the guy that ate the Hershey bar, he died of . . . we call it Manchurian fever. There's a different name for it, but the fleas on the, were on the rats go onto the food, and if you eat that food then . . . And quite a few of the guys died from that. It's . . . I really thought he had the flu. We might have saved him, but we didn't realize what he had. Gray was his name.