Impressions of Hong Kong

Hong Kong was a, oh it was an amazing place. The Japanese had come down through from Nanjing, through the interior of China and there was hundreds of thousands of Chinese had fled ahead of the Japanese armies into the city of Hong Kong where they all felt they'd be safe as a British possession, and oh, the place was just alive with people, it was unbelievable. We'd never seen anything like this in our lives. There were so many people in Hong Kong that there was no housing for them, they were sleeping on little mats up and down all the streets. It was really something, it was amazing, especially to us boys. And, of course, we were having a great time because the Canadian dollar was so much higher than the Hong Kong dollar, and things were so cheap that we... this was something new to us, it was great, you know. It was wine, women and song, it was really something. Guys were all young and eager and willing, go downtown, get a little tanked up and get a little mischief and stuff but these military police guys of our own men, they were good with our own guys, you know. They did, they weren't all out for charging you and all that kind of crap, you know, they'd get you back to your barracks and everything went quite smoothly. It was a good system, a good setup.