Stealing Food was Worth the Risk

The Canadians were split up into a foundry gang, a coal yard gang, a shitutzu gang, the wrinkle coal yard gang and the maratsu dockyard gang. Our dockyard gang was 50 men and we stevedored. Luckily enough again, another part that actually saved my life. The coal yard gang, oh there must have been about 150 men in the coal yard gang and the balance of the 300 odd were in the foundry gang. I can only relate little instances about the other two but the dockyard gang, I’m an experienced stevedore and an experienced thief. We handled food and everything else through and we stole our share and we got our own beatings for stealing when you got caught. But we got away with a hell of a lot more than we got caught with. Anytime a bean boat came in, they would steal a bag of beans and down to our mess shack. Because they told us if we were going to carry 90 kilos bags of soy beans from the dock into the box car, we had to eat them and those of us that survived that dockyard gang, every day at noon, the little ration of rice we got from camp, the ration of grain we got from camp, we got a Klim powdered milk can full of cooked soy beans. In fact, they were so good they, Kabiason put one of our fellows in there as a permanent cook in our little mess shack.