Nathan M. Greenfield - The Damned

U nder a scorching summer sun, just over twenty uniformed men marched forward. They had done it before. Almost seventy years earlier in Vancouver, they had marched up a gangplank to the SS Awatea, and three weeks later and half a world away, down another in Hong Kong. Three more weeks passed and with bayonets in place and bullets in their rifles chambers, they had advanced in places with familiar-sounding namesMount Butler, Red Hill, Mount Parker and Notting Hilland some with decidedly unfamiliar namesTai Tam Gap, Wong Nei Chong Gap, Wan Chai Gap. In these places and in others, including nameless rises and gullies, they had left brothers, cousins and lifelong friends, for that is what many of the men in the regiments raised chiefly in the small towns of Manitoba and eastern Quebec were to each other. A few days after Christmas 1941, they had marched in formation into North Point Prisoner of War Camp, close to the Japanese troops first landing point when they invaded Hong Kong Island on 18 December 1941. Ten days earlier, the Imperial Japanese Army had thrown the British garrison, which included 1,974 Canadian troops, off the mainland.

Then, the men had been young (some only sixteen or seventeen), strong and straight.

The distance these men walked to the Memorial Wall that stands just off Sussex Drive in Ottawa wasnt far. Seventy years ago, even with sixty-pound packs on their backs and carrying nine-pound Lee-Enfields, theyd have covered it in seconds. Still, on 15 August 2009, as they fought the bend of agethe youngest had already seen his eighty-fifth birthdaythey moved with a precision that recalled the military tattoo theyd learned decades earlier. Those in wheelchairs held their heads as if on parade.

When they reached the Memorial Wall, the western side of which is topped by a representation of the stark, volcanic hills that absorbed so much Canadian, British, Indian and Hong Kong Volunteer blood, their eyes were searching. Each saw his own name chiselled into the Wall, for, uniquely among war memorials, it lists the name of every soldier and the two Nursing Sisters who made up C Force. But these were not the names they touched. Tears welling in their eyes, they felt the names of fallen friends, cousins, brothers, comrades.

The veterans were followed by widows, who cried as they touched their husbands names. The fingers of sons, daughters, nephews, nieces, grandsons and granddaughters traced the font that etches their families stories into our history.

Some 290 men died during the battle: many were bayoneted in cold blood or shot long after they had raised their arms in surrender. Another 267 died in other places Canadians have never heard of: Shamshuipo, Oeyama, Niigata, Narumi, Omine, Tsurumi, Kawasaki 3-D. At these and other Japanese POW camps, the Canadian (and British, Indian, American and Dutch) soldiers were turned into slave labourers. They were systemically starved; often, what food they were given was unfit for human consumption. Hundreds suffered from diseases associated with malnutrition; many died from them. Dysentery alone killed almost a hundred. With the full knowledgeindeed, with the approvalof the camps commandants, they were beaten and tortured. Four Canadians were executed for doing the soldiers duty and trying to escape.

The story of C Force, as the Canadian military contingent sent to Hong Kong was designated, is little known, and what is known of it is often wrong. They were poorly trained, goes one legend, the foundation of which was laid almost as soon as the guns fell silent by none other than Brigadier Cedric Wallis, the British officer who commanded East Brigade, which included the Royal Rifles of Canada. By the standards of 1944, when Allied armies slugged their way up Italy and invaded Normandy, and American Marines liberated islands like Guam, C Force was indeed not well trained. But by the standards of 1941, they were as well trained as any part of the British or Canadian armies.

Another legend holds that they were sent into battle without proper equipment. This one has some truth to it; they lacked both trucks and universal carriers, and they had few mortars and almost no training on them. But both the Rifles and the Winnipeg Grenadiers had more than their full complement of rifles, ammunition, and Bren and other guns.

Perhaps the most egregious misconception is that, like their fathers and uncles who joined up to fight the Kaiser a quarter-century before, the men who took the Kings schilling after the Second World War broke out in September 1939 were dupes in the grip of mindless nationalism. Some octogenarians freely admit that they heard the call of adventure. Others recall the deprivation of the Great Depression and the lure of three squares a day. Manyand this needs to be emphasized, not only those then enrolled in university or in the media centres of Montreal or Torontojoined up because they saw Nazi Germany for the threat to morality and democracy that it was. It is one of historys great ironies that the men and women of C Force ended up fighting an equally dangerous and pernicious foe in Asia.