Letters Across the Sea

by Genevieve Graham

  The Canadians sent to Hong Kong were members of the Royal Rifles from Quebec and New Brunswick and the Winnipeg Grenadiers. Together, they made up C Force. Before they sailed to Hong Kong in November 1941, C Force was officially labelled “unfit for battle” due to undertraining and inadequate weapons. They were told that was all right; they had nothing to worry about. After all, they said, there were only about five thousand weak, poorly trained Japanese soldiers, against which the Brits who were already stationed there could easily defend. In fact, there were ten times that many, and they were hardened Japanese veterans loyal to the unflinching Bushido code of conduct, known as “the way of the warrior.”

  The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, was a signal to the rest of the world that Japan was in the war. Just ten hours later, they turned their attention to Manila, then Hong Kong, of which they took control within five days. They demanded the British surrender, but despite there being no hope of relief from outside the colony, Hong Kong’s military commander refused, choosing instead to depend upon the remaining, inexperienced soldiers to defend Hong Kong. That included C Force.

  The December 11 ferry ride across the Lye Mun Passage was only three kilometres long, but it must have been a terrifying journey for the Royal Rifles and the 7th Rajput Regiment, one of two Indian infantry battalions also assigned to Hong Kong. When the Japanese attacked one week later, sending four boatloads of seasoned fighters through the dark night, the defending forces had no chance. Arnie and Max said they didn’t know how to throw a grenade, which echoed what many of the survivors later recorded. Despite their serious shortage of weapons, the undertrained Canadians fought back as hard as they could, but the Japanese inflicted heavy casualties right away, and they kept on pushing. After an impossible week of fighting in the brutal, unfamiliar mountains of Hong Kong Island, the Canadians finally withdrew to Stanley Fort, on the Stanley Peninsula. On Christmas Day, they fought it out at Stanley Village, where those who didn’t die were taken as prisoners.

  While that was happening, two hundred Japanese soldiers carried out the atrocities at St. Stephen’s College hospital. I had Ian hold back some of the most gruesome details, but the horrifying truth is that the Japanese army killed sixty or so wounded men in their beds, dismembering many of them as they lay motionless, anesthetized in preparation for surgery, and then they gang-raped and murdered most of the nurses. Incredibly, there were survivors, and when I read their personal reports, I wept.

  When it came time to write about the valiant soldiers in the ranks of C Force, I couldn’t leave out Gander the dog. In order to bring him into the story, I took a little creative license and transferred Max, David, Arnie, and Richie from the Royal Regiment in Toronto to the Royal Rifles and posted them to Gander, Newfoundland, in 1940. In reality, the Royal Rifles picked up men later, when they made their way west to Vancouver in 1941. At the time, Gander air base was the largest airport in the world, and when the Royal Rifles were stationed there, they were given a purebred Newfoundland dog, whom they named after the base. Before departing for Vancouver, they promoted Gander to the rank of sergeant so they wouldn’t have to leave him behind.

  The Royal Rifles with their mascot, Gander, aboard HMCS Prince Robert en route to Hong Kong on November 15, 1941. Canada. Dept. of National Defence / Library and Archives Canada / PA-166999.

  Sergeant Gander, with his fondness for cold showers, beer, and a good scratch, would prove to be a hero. Almost invisible in the dark of night, he charged at enemy soldiers who usually fled rather than face him. Later, when the men were taken as POWs, the Japanese interrogated some of them about the “Black Beast,” thinking the Allies were training vicious animals. Eventually, Sergeant Gander made the ultimate sacrifice, rushing in to retrieve a grenade, then carrying it away, saving the lives of seven Canadian soldiers.

  When Ian and Molly interviewed Max, Ian mentioned that C Force had been accused of fleeing like cowards, and I felt Max’s indignation at that. I read personal accounts and listened to interviews in which survivors argued vehemently to the contrary. For eighteen days, the Canadians had been continuously bombarded by the Japanese’s heavy arsenal of artillery on land and in the skies. It is a testament to the Canadians’ bravery that they never surrendered, despite their own lack of reinforcements, food, water, rest, battle training, and adequate weapons.

  In the Japanese Bushido code, it was considered better to endure death rather than live with the shame of surrender. So when the British surrendered to Japan on Christmas Day 1941, the Japanese automatically considered the Allied POWs to be worthless, contemptible cowards, and they were treated accordingly. There were occasional reports of some Japanese guards who treated the prisoners better, engaged in friendly conversation, even befriended them, but they did so at risk of their own lives—and those of their families.

  The Geneva Convention is made up of four conventions. The first protects wounded and infirm prisoners of war as well as captured medical personnel. Without discrimination, it grants rights to proper medical treatment, and it prohibits torture, assault, and execution. Japan did sign the Geneva Convention; however, they never ratified it. While some countries showed an occasional lack of regard for the rules (as evidenced by the reason for the Battle of Bowmanville), the Japanese paid no attention to them at all. They committed horrible atrocities in the POW camps.

  The descriptions shared with Molly by Sergeant Cox and Max about what the prisoners ate in the camps come directly from journals and interviews with POW survivors. A soldier or average male doing manual labour requires 3,500 calories per day. At North Point Camp on Hong Kong Island, each prisoner was reluctantly given 600–1,200 calories, which consisted almost entirely of rice and chrysanthemum tops. If men were sick, they were given half portions. In the German POW camps, Allied prisoners relied on the Red Cross parcels to help them survive their incarceration, but the Japanese rarely allowed any of the parcels to reach the prisoners. They were usually stolen by the guards, and often sold on the black market.

  During my research, I came across a typed-up list of infractions the Japanese captors considered worthy of immediate execution. Sergeant Cox listed some of them off for Molly. Among the offences were: talking without permission and raising loud voices, walking and moving without order, and using more than two blankets. All were punishable by death.

  The camps in Hong Kong were horrible, but those who were shipped to Japan on board hell ships fared even worse. Max was one of more than 1,100 Canadians who were stuffed into the boats like sardines and given barely any food or water. When they arrived at the camps, they were covered in waste and vomit. Max was imprisoned at Niigata, where prisoners worked in a mine ten to twelve hours a day, swinging a sledgehammer by a white-hot furnace, pushing hoppers filled with coal up steep railway inclines, or other similar tasks.

  Besides the physical beatings and punishments, and the lack of nourishment, medicine, and sanitation, the Japanese were also extremely lax in reporting to the Red Cross exactly who they had in their camps. For months, even years, Canadian families like the Ryans and the Dreyfuses had no idea if their fathers, brothers, and sons were dead or taken prisoner.

  Emperor Hirohito’s original plan had been to execute all POWs if the Japanese were forced to surrender. Some reports claim the mines the men were digging were actually large burial caves for the prisoners. But because the atomic bombs were so quickly and unexpectedly dropped, the war ended too abruptly to carry out that plan. That’s not to say they didn’t manage to kill the prisoners in a more drawn-out manner.

  Canadian and British prisoners of war being liberated from Sham Shui Po in Hong Kong in August 1945. Despite the smiling faces, you can see how thin some of the men are—and this was after a month of receiving food drops. The men who would be liberated from the Japanese camps were in even worse shape. PO Jack Hawes / Canada. Dept. of National Defence / Library and Archives Canada / PA-145983.

  Two hundred and sixty-four POWs died in those camps. Her
e’s a statistic that Molly didn’t know, but we do now. During WWII, 4 per cent of Allied POWs held in German and Italian camps died in captivity. In the Japanese camps, that number was at least 27 per cent. Some reports I read suggest it was up to 38 per cent. Between May 1946 and November 1948, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) took place in Tokyo. Eleven justices from Canada, the United States, Australia, China, France, Great Britain, India, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines, and the Soviet Union tried twenty-eight Japanese military and civilian leaders for war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity in what is known as the Tokyo Trial. All twenty-eight were found guilty. Two died of natural causes during the trial. One had a mental breakdown during the trial, was sent to a psychiatric ward, then was released in 1948. Seven were found guilty of inciting or participating in mass-scale atrocities and sentenced to death by hanging, including the former prime minister of Japan Hideki Tojo. Sixteen were given life imprisonment, and two, lesser terms. Three of those sixteen died between 1949 and 1950, and the rest were paroled between 1954 and 1956. They committed crimes against millions of people, and they served fewer than eight years in prison.

  The list of those not indicted is disturbing. For example, Emperor Hirohito was never tried; General MacArthur decided to leave him on the throne in an attempt to help the Japanese people accept their defeat and occupation. There were other notable exceptions, such as the heads of the Japanese military police, or Kempeitai—the Japanese equivalent of the Nazi Gestapo. Those responsible for rounding up tens of thousands of young, non-Japanese women to serve as “comfort women” were never pursued, nor were those who forced non-Japanese men into military service. Secret immunity was granted to a group of officers and scientific researchers in Manchuria who conducted lethal experiments on thousands of prisoners and civilians, on the grounds that they share their research results with the Americans. A number of the guards at Niigata, where Max spent most of his imprisonment, were tried and found guilty of mistreating or causing the deaths of prisoners; however, no one was ever charged for what happened on board the infamous hell ships.

  On the other hand, not everyone turned a politically blind eye. The victimized Asian countries sought justice beyond the Tokyo Trial. They tried an estimated five thousand Japanese, executed as many as nine hundred for war crimes—including acts of cannibalism on Allied POWs and civilians—and sentenced more than half to life imprisonment. Reports vary, some saying the cannibalism was done purely out of hunger, but others claim the flesh of Allied prisoners was given to Japanese troops by their commanders to give them a sense of victory.

  Of the 1,985 Canadians sent to Hong Kong, 1,425 eventually came home. Initially, Canadians were outraged at the treatment of their men, but their attention was quickly drawn elsewhere. After all, far more men had been killed, wounded, and taken as prisoner in Europe. The world was also in shock over the revelation of the atrocities carried out in Nazi concentration camps as well as the human toll of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Japanese civilians.

  After I completed writing this book, I made the most astounding discovery: the great-uncle of a close friend of mine, Lance Corporal Philip Doddridge of the Royal Rifles, is one of the five Canadian Hong Kong veterans still alive today. It broke my heart to hear him say in an interview, “I think we’re largely forgotten, if not ignored.” The terribly sad fact is that Molly’s POW series was fictional; there were no substantial articles written about Doddridge or the other Hong Kong POWs until decades later.

  Every returning Canadian prisoner suffered chronic health problems. Eighty-seven of the men came home blind. Two hundred died before the age of fifty. After nearly four years of being denied calories and essential vitamins, the survivors suffered from avitaminosis, which caused wet beriberi (shortness of breath, rapid heartbeat, swollen limbs, possible heart failure) and the unremitting stabbing and burning agony of electric feet. Two years after they returned home, more than 70 per cent of Canadian POWs still had intestinal parasites, whipworms, hookworms, and threadworms. Very few doctors of the time had experience dealing with tropical parasites, and since the POWs had gained back most of their weight by their return, thanks to the American care packages, the doctors didn’t think to worry about starvation.

  All this was made much more difficult by the fact that the men were so traumatized by what they’d survived, they often chose not to tell anyone about their experiences, so their doctors saw little need to follow up. As a result, many veterans didn’t have medical records to prove that the increasing health problems they experienced over the years stemmed from their incarceration and maltreatment.

  For decades following their return, the dwindling number of veterans battled the Canadian government to demand compensation and an apology from the Japanese, but they heard only crickets. In fact, the Canadian government legally absolved Japan of any financial responsibility in 1952. Over fifty years later, the Japanese prime minister expressed “deep remorse” and stated “heartfelt apologies” to the people who suffered in World War II, but he did not specify the Allied POWs. Finally in 2011, Japan’s Parliamentary Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs issued an apology to the POWs.

  When it became obvious that the veterans were passing away so quickly there would no longer be anyone left to tell their story, a group of their sons and daughters established the Hong Kong Veterans Commemorative Association, a registered charity, in 1995. They lobbied for better pensions, benefits, and compensation. Because of their efforts, in December 1998, the Canadian government granted compensation of $24,000 to each surviving Hong Kong POW or POW’s widow. The association also pushed for greater recognition for the veterans and education about their experiences, and in 2009, more than sixty years after the men returned home, they erected a memorial wall in Ottawa. Sadly, by then, most were dead.

  As for Sergeant Gander, in 2001 he was posthumously awarded the Dickin Medal for Gallantry by the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (essentially the Victoria Cross for animals) and the twenty surviving members of his regiment attended the ceremony. His medal is now on display at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, and his name is listed on the memorial wall along with the other slain Canadians.

  Letters Across the Sea began as a novel about the Christie Pits Riot. In the years following that event, many of the same men who had come to blows in Toronto fell against a common enemy and were buried side by side, Jews and Gentiles together. On Remembrance Day each year, we honour those who gave their lives so that we might live ours. The men who not only fought at the Battle of Hong Kong, but also endured forty-four months as prisoners of war at the hands of the Japanese, came home and were largely forgotten. Their story is not taught, and it is barely told except by their children and grandchildren. Learning about these men has added another dimension to that day of remembrance for me, and I hope it has for you as well.

  Acknowledgments

  First of all, this book never would have become what it is without the brilliant, dedicated, and creative work of my incredible editor, Sarah St. Pierre. I can’t say that enough. This was the most difficult book I’ve ever written, and she was instrumental in helping me find the story within all the pages and pages of research. We were partners through it all.

  Thank you to the generous Jewish readers Nicole, Cori, and Merle for sharing their time and cultural expertise, and to suspense author extraordinaire and fellow Simon & Schuster Canada author, Samantha Bailey, for helping me out with my ongoing Jewish queries! The author community is truly a wonderful place to live, where everyone helps each other.

  There’s a lot you can learn online via websites, but nothing beats personal connections. The moment I posted on the official Facebook page of the Hong Kong Veterans Commemorative Association of Canada, I wondered why I hadn’t headed there long before. Just like with the British Home Children descendants I talked to for The Forgotten Home Child, I discovered people who are passionate about learning and teaching the history of the Battl
e of Hong Kong and the subsequent prisoner of war camps where the brave men of Canada’s C Force spent so many horrible years. The members of that page, most of whom are the children and grandchildren of the soldiers, are determined not to let the sacrifices of the Canadians in Hong Kong be ignored or forgotten. When I asked for personal stories, I received messages and emails right away, full of information about and letters from their dads and granddads. They’re still coming in, but I would like in particular to thank Lincoln Keays, and salute his father, Rifleman Richard Keays, as well as Judy James, Wendy Jarvin, and Mona Thornton, who helped me see into their fathers’ lives. Wendy and her friend Wilma were keen to point out that, just like with the British Home Children and Canada’s residential school system, those who returned from the POW camps had deep scars that affected future generations. Intergenerational trauma is a very real, very underestimated issue, and I’m glad that it is finally being recognized, at least for some.

  Thank you to Em Gamelin and Sarah Glassford from the Canadian Red Cross Archives for helping me with research on the precious Canadian Red Cross POW parcels—very few of which ever made it to the actual POWs, since they were mostly taken and often sold by the Japanese guards.

  I already mentioned my editor Sarah (her name bears repeating!), but I also need to thank the talented and enthusiastic team behind me at Simon & Schuster Canada. President Kevin Hanson has a wonderful group of experts, including publicist Mackenzie Croft, marketing associate Allie Boelsterli, cover designer Elizabeth Whitehead, director of sales Shara Alexa, sales rep Sherry Lee, and the manager of library and special sales Lorraine Kelly, all of whom babysit me beautifully and make sure to get the stories out where they belong.