Emo vet recalls Hong Kong ordeal

They stood there in the bright sunshine, but chilling wind, as the wreaths were laid and speeches made on Remembrance Day last Thursday.
Lost in their own thoughts, several district veterans—fewer every year now—bowed their heads and remembered bygone years and fallen comrades.
There was a different group at each cenotaph in the district—La Vallee, Emo, Barwick, and Stratton—since few of them were strong enough to attend all four ceremonies.
One man did, though.
John Edward “Jim” James of Emo was at them all. Sure, he stayed in his heated van because his health doesn’t allow him to get around much (James is pretty-much confined to a wheelchair these days) but at 82 and with only one leg, perhaps that’s not surprising.
What is surprising is that he was there at all.
In 1941, James was a 19-year-old private in the Winnipeg Grenadiers. Like thousands of other Canadian boys, he enlisted as soon as he turned 18 and in November, he arrived on the merchant ship Prince Robert at the port of Hong Kong.
But what started out as a routine assignment soon turned into what could only be described as hell on earth.
On Dec. 7-8, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and Hong Kong, and suddenly James and the Grenadiers were in the war.
“We were the first Canadian [ground] troops in battle,” James recalled over lunch at the Emo Legion on Remembrance Day.
The battle was pretty one-sided. Outnumbered and with their supply routes cut off, the British and Canadian garrisons fought bravely, but it was just a matter of time before they were forced to surrender.
On Christmas Eve, the troops were in danger of being wiped out. James was involved in a desperate rear guard action when he surprised a Japanese patrol holed up in a pill box.
In the ensuing scuffle, his leg was severely broken by a grenade blast.
He was not able to receive medical attention until the next day and at about 8 p.m. on Christmas Day, his leg was amputated.
In hindsight, that may well have saved his life.
A few hours earlier, the British and Canadians formally surrendered and began an ordeal that remains one of the blackest periods in history.
Most of the prisoners were forced into slave labour, where thousands died of beatings, malnutrition, disease, or were simply worked to death. The conditions under which they lived were little better than those in the infamous Nazi concentration camps.
Because of his invalid status, James was spared forced labour and worked instead in the infirmary alongside Maj. John Crawford, who did his best to take care of the men.
But it was no easy out. “If you didn’t work, you were given less food,” James recalled.
As it was, the labourers were given only a level cup of rice a day, plus occasional tops from turnips and sweet potatoes, which the men used to make a thin soup.
Somehow, James survived on even less than that—perhaps because he wasn’t treated as brutally as others.
“I got slapped around a few times, but it was no big deal,” he shrugged.
James noted corporal punishment was common in the Japanese army at that time, so it was no surprise to him that they beat their prisoners, as well.
One of the jobs the prisoners had to do was extend the runway at Kai Tak Airport at Kowloon on the mainland. This was done by hand by taking down a sacred Chinese hill and using the material as fill.
It was back-breaking labour, and many died from overwork and starvation. James said if a man fell down on the job, he often was beaten to death on the spot.
James recalled one Japanese soldier who was particularly vicious, especially to the Canadians. Known in the camp as “The Kamloops Kid,” this man was born and raised in British Columbia, but moved to Japan in the 1930s.
There, he married a Japanese national and when the war broke out, he joined the army.
James speculated his brutality was a form of payback. He apparently had been subjected to racism and abuse as a boy in Canada and seemed to relish dishing it out.
But justice finally caught up with the Kamloops Kid after the Japanese surrender in August, 1945.
Fearing a trial for war crimes, he opted for another way out. “He claimed Canadian citizenship after the war,” James recalled with a chuckle.
It proved to be a fatal miscalculation. Instead of facing an international tribunal, the Kamloops Kid was tried for treason by a Canadian court martial, convicted, and hanged.
James said not all the Japanese were mean, however. “I met a few good ones,” he acknowledged.
He recalled one sergeant-major who used to sneak the men extra rations and stayed after the others bugged out in the middle of the night in August. By then, rumours were circulating concerning the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“I didn’t believe them [the rumours] at first,” said James. “It seemed impossible. This guy [the sergeant-major] told me they were destroyed by a single bomb.
“I told him he was crazy. He said, ‘No, no. One plane, one bomb.’”
As luck would have it, when the troops finally were liberated on Aug. 20, James and another man were the first to board the ship—once again, the Prince Robert.
“We just happened to be down by the harbour getting supplies when the ship pulled in,” he said.
James and the other survivors were shipped out to Manila to regain their weight and strength before returning to Canada. Maj. Crawford was promoted to colonel and remained in the army for as a surgeon for many years.
Of the others, there are few left. James said of the 1,500 Canadian survivors of the Hong Kong campaign, fewer than 150 are still alive today.
He is the only Hong Kong veteran still living in Rainy River District.