I Was the One That Got the Beating

Heroes Remember

I Was the One That Got the Beating

Transcript

We worked about 12 hours a day and you got fed before you left, and you got fed when you got back, you didn’t get nothing in between. We got a little more rations there, we got, while we were in Hong Kong. But, like we were marched from the camp to the shipbuilding yard and back again, and course, the civilian people, they would spit at you and throw things at you, and everything else. You had to get to used to that stuff. I was put in a blacksmith shop where they formed the sheets for the sides of the ship. Swing an 18 pound sledgehammer on a dolly, hitting a dolly. See, they’d heat certain parts of it, and then the Japanese, he’d hold this dolly on there, you had to hit that where ever he held it so it shaped the . . . and trying to keep up to, if I didn’t keep up to, the other guy was a Japanese, swinging another hammer, there was two of us, like we’d . . . there’d be. If I didn’t keep up to him, well then I was the one who got the beating. But then, other guys were on the rivets, rivetting, and other jobs like carrying steel, and all this stuff.

Description

Mr. Agerbak describes various aspects of working as a blacksmith in the Yokohama shipyards, nutrition, responsibilities, and discipline.

Knud Agerbak

Knud Agerbak was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1918. His family of seven emigrated to Canada in 1927, settling in Manitoba where his father worked as a farm labourer. Mr. Agerbak started working on a farm at the age of 13. He then loaded freight for the railroad, and finally worked in a pulp mill. His sense of patriotism led him to enlist the day that war was declared in 1939. He tried to enlist in the PPCLI, but not having reached the age of 21 didn’t have naturalized Canadian status and was turned down. The Winnipeg Grenadiers did , however, accept him. He performed garrison duty in both Bermuda and Jamaica before his deployment to Hong Kong. Hong Kong quickly surrendered, and Mr. Agerbak spent time on labour gangs at KaiTak airport in Hong Kong, and the Yokohama shipyards and northern iron mines in Japan.

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