It Took Them Quite a While to Find Us

Heroes Remember

It Took Them Quite a While to Find Us

Transcript

There was Americans in this camp too. And this American navy officer, he was a doctor, but he hadn’t, he wouldn’t do anything for the Canadians. He looked after American navy people, it was all navy people. And his, one of his men was a radio operator on a ship, and they had made a radio in a water bottle, a Canadian canteen and they knew that when the war had ended, the Americans did. They told us that they’d dropped the atomic bomb, that the war had ended. And then, well, it took them quite a while before they found us, guess they didn’t know where the camp was. See, we were isolated right up in the northern part of Japan. I forget what they even called that island now. It’s a northern island anyway. They had no way in there except by ship. The Americans, their B-29's started dropping food down to us by parachute. It was a while before they could get us out of there. The paratroopers come in there and they got us down to the ocean where they loaded us onto these landing crafts and took us onto a hospital ship where we were disinfected and deloused. Got American uniforms put on us. We were taken off the hospital ship, we were taken onto the King George battleship, British battleship. There were navy guys on the battleship, they collected money for us. They gave us each so much money to spend so we could get cigarettes and something to eat. We got enough to eat because they fed us good on the ships, the American and the British ships. But then we were taken back to Tokyo and from there we were flown to Guam, where I was a week in the hospital in Guam, in the navy hospital in Guam. And from there, after a week we flew to, well we stopped over at Quajeilin for refuelling, then to Hawaii where we were in a navy hospital in Hawaii for about 3 days. And then from there we flew to San Francisco. Well we were supposed to land in San Francisco but it was fogged in so it landed in Oakland. And then we come up the coast, up to Seattle, Washington where we were on a ferry over to Victoria.

Description

Mr. Agerbak describes how a hidden radio informed them the war was over and discusses his voyage home to Canada.

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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