Heroes Remember Presents The Battle of Hong Kong POW

Jean-Paul Dallain: On est devenu prisonnier le 25 décembre 1941, le jour de Noël.

George MacDonnell: The Japanese culture has little regard for prisoners of war, the Japanese treatment of the Canadian prisoners and all of their prisoners was savage in the extreme.

Garfield Lowe: I also seen them take the nurses out of Bowen Road Hospital and rape them while they held machine guns on us and then slit them wide open with the bayonets and I still have nightmares over it, I wake up just screaming.

Nick Zytaruck: And we couldn’t do nothing because they had two machine guns there and two on the other side, like so, in case anybody moved.

Harold Atkinson: Kilfoil had been wounded and couldn’t keep up and all that the Jap guard did was just cut him out and we continued on and we heard Kilfoil scream but we just can imagine what happened.

Edward Grantham: And they would bayonet them right there and then. One would hit him from the front and one would hit them from the back and the guys never yelled out or anything, they just gave a grunt and went down.

Renaud Côté: Pis là les Japonais ont pris le contrôle, pis ils nous ont emmené dans les champs je ne me rappelle pas à quelle place sur l’île de Hong Kong, pis là ils nous ont toute déshabillé, toute la maudite gang, pis ils nous ont passé un G string, pis on a eu ça pendant quatre ans de temps.

Lucien Brunet: On s’est fait battre pour des raisons aussi stupides l’une que l’autre.

Renaud Côté: On avait un interprète, ils l’appelaient «Slap Happy», il nous fait lever en pleine nuit, toute la maudite gang, et puis là il en passait un, il en tabassait trois ou quatre, puis après ça on restait là pendant une heure, une heure et demie, puis après ça tu allais te coucher.

George MacDonnell: It takes about three thousand calories to keep a person, a hard working person alive. We were fed about twelve hundred.

Renaud Côté: On a toute souffert de faim, on se réveillait la nuit parce qu’on avait faim.

Douglas Rees: It was just boiled rice but it was full of rat dirt, maggots.

Lucien Brunet : Quand ce qu’on a vu ça, le cœur nous levait, on ne voulait pas manger ça, toute des petits vers blanc comme le riz.

Hector Hunt: And we had to eat that, eat it or starve to death.

Jean-Paul Dallain: Il n’y avait pas de viande ou ben, de temps en temps, une goute. Une fois un prisonnier a été ravagé par la maladie comme la diphtérie ou de quoi de sérieux, il perdait disons, si vous voulez, ses forces, ses muscles tout ça, ça ne revenait pas. Il n’avait pas de protéines, il n’avait rien de même.

Lance Ross: A big man needs more, so you could see these big men, two hundred pounds and up, they didn’t last too long.

Garfield Lowe: He lost his weight so fast he went down to under a hundred pounds. His hide hung right almost to his knees like a skirt.

Lucien Brunet: S’ils demandaient 500 gars pour travailler, seulement 500 étaient nourris. Si tu travaillait pas au Japon, tu te nourrissait pas.

George MacDonnell: There was almost no medical supplies, people died of things like diphtheria because the Japanese refused to give us any serum.

Alfred Babin: And these people were lying there just skin and bones and it’s no word of a lie, there was just skin and bones.

Renaud Côté: Là c’était effrayant. Tu parlais un gars un soir, le lendemain il était mort, il étouffait. On avait rien à leur donner, excepté de les encourager et une petite tape dans le dos.

Samuel Disensi: If we had a sickness you had to either pull through or die, I’ve seen guys in the huts and die right in front of me because they were spewing out blood.

Alfred Babin: You can’t imagine the smell of dry blood in the heat. It was sweet sickening smell, it was terrible, really terrible.

Lloyd Doull: If you had a decent pair of boots or remnants of a uniform you would be called upon to carry a body maybe as many as four or five times in a day.

Leo Murphy: There was guys that was 6 foot 2 and there was little coffins about 5 foot long.

Léo Bérard: But with a bayonet in my back the Japanese asked me to saw their legs off so they would fit in there, how could I do that...I just....I just....

Philip Doddridge: They didn’t do military burials anymore because the sound of The Last Post was too much, couldn’t take it.

George MacDonnell: Now war is a terrible thing but slavery is a hell of a lot worse, they refused to obey the principles of the Geneva Convention.

Jack Rose: Well I would say that probably Dante’s Inferno would have been a picnic compared to that coal mine.

Lucien Brunet: Tu arrivais en haut de la mine et tu voyais la vapeur qui sortait de là tellement que c’était chaud. La température variait de 95 à 120 degrés de chaleur, on travaillait dans l’eau jusqu’aux genoux parce que c’était plein d’eau, la pompe ça ne pompait pas comme il le faut. Notre corps enflait par la chaleur. Là après trois mois là dedans, j’avais plus de moral, on voulait tous mourir, quasiment toute.

James Jessop: They would tell you, “You had a good day’s work.” Tomorrow instead of doing 10 cars you’ll do 12 cars so we do 12 cars and it just kept going, they always wanted more.

Aubrey Flegg: It’s unbelievable how much work a human being can do when we were as skinny as we were, we were skeletons walking around with skin pulled over us and we still worked like slaves, if you didn’t you died.

Jean-Paul Dallain: Les prisonniers s’entraidaient, il fallait bien, d’autres étaient toujours en meilleure condition que d’autres.

Douglas Rees: And I said to Mount Fuji everyday, “You didn’t get me yesterday you so and so you won’t get me today either.” And I think this was the attitude of most of our guys, you know, it was a will to live.

George MacDonnell: So the story is about the Canadian spirit three thousand miles from home with no hope, they never gave up.