I think all Canadian families
were in the dark for the next year or so.
They didn't know, the wives, the children, the parents,
and the sweethearts, the relationship,
family relationships were all in the dark.
The Japanese never revealed what happened.
However, the word began to leak out through the Chinese
that there were some survivors, that the loss had been heavy,
that the Canadians had been overwhelmed but nobody knew who
if any names or anything but gradually the information began to leak out
that there were some survivors.
About two years later, after we'd been captured,
they let us send a radio message home.
We broadcasted a message in English that was picked up
largely by the people in California who had ham radios.
They wrote out what they had heard
and the addresses they had heard and they informed my parents,
my guardians that they had received this message
from Japan and that I was alive.
Then maybe a year later, the Japanese let us send letters home
and my family received two or three letters from the Japanese.
So for a long time Canadian families knew nothing.