| In 1941, my father was sent from Victoria, B.C. to be a soldier in Hong Kong. He was in the Signals Corps and as he said, “Most of us were green and didn’t know one end of a rifle from the other”. He was soon involved in a battle for his life. His capture by the enemy just three weeks after landing in Hong Kong, resulted in a tortuous, mind-numbing four years as a P.O.W., first in Hong Kong where he helped build the old airport, then in Niigata, Japan, where he worked in a mine. There are gruelling accounts of the forced labour, torture, disease, starvation, lack of antibiotics and death suffered by these Canadian soldiers and others. When he was finally liberated by the Americans and taken back to Canada, my five foot ten father weighed 79 pounds and couldn’t count to ten. He met with doctors who knew little about tropical diseases such as beri beri and even less about post traumatic stress syndrome which didn’t exist in 1945. As one of my father’s fellow signalmen told me, “You were handed a bunch of tranquilizers and told to go away and try to have a good life”. My father had a lifelong struggle to get a pension from the federal government. He was told he was faking it and was sent to psychiatrists until he was fed up. My mother stepped in and wrote countless letters along with the help of the Hong Kong Veterans’ Association. My father finally received a small pension for a shrapnel wound but if they couldn’t see it, it didn’t exist, so he still had to work. | It was difficult for him to hold down jobs, he had nightmares and chewed in his sleep, he had malaria and was often ill, he was a psychologically wounded man who finally sought prescription drugs of all kinds to get him through the day. He would not talk of his experiences in the war but he often said that he would have taken his own life sooner if it wasn’t for his wife and children. My father died at age 70 and doctors showed that his death was a result of injuries sustained as a P.O.W. He was awarded a full pension post-humously that went to his widow. There are so many horror stories of war recalled by soldiers who went to battle in WW II, the Korean War and now, Afghanistan. It is a terrible thing that scars you for life, no matter what your experience is there. This November 11th, let’s remember all of the men and women who didn’t make it home or who have made it home with parts of themselves missing, physically, emotionally, mentally. They deserve our highest gratitude and our continuing support.
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