Poorly Armed for War

The morning it happened, it would be December 8th over there and December 7th over here because of the date line. Young, I think his first name was Earl, Earl Till, he was from Minitonas, Manitoba. He and I were on guard duty at the pillbox we had and the phone rang and I was up on the top and the hole we had dug with the Bren gun and he was down at the door and the phone rang and he went in and the call was for Lieutenant Mitchell and the message was that we were at war with Japan and this would be 6:30, 7:00 o’clock in the morning. And we had no Vickers guns with us. We got Vickers guns from the British, those Vickers guns were in the pillboxes. Each platoon had at least one Bren gun and the NCO’s in most cases in D-Company, each of our NCO’s, the sergeant, the corporal and the lance corporal and maybe another lance corporal would have Tommy guns, Thompson sub machine guns. The rest of us had our .303’s Lee Enfields. In our case, our platoon had no mortars, no two-inch mortars. We had mortar sections that had three-inch mortars but they had no mortar bombs until after, they never got no more mortar bombs until after the battle started and then they got very few for each mortar.