There Were no Toilets and we all had Diarrhea

Heroes Remember

There Were no Toilets and we all had Diarrhea

Transcript

When the decision was made to send us to Japan, the Japs all gave us a oh what they’d call a medical. All they did was they’d have a piece of cotton batting up your behind and pull it down and see if it was I guess they didn’t want to take dysentery back or diseases back to Japan. I’m not too sure but I think I was on the second group. There was one group that got torpedoed on the way but no I wasn’t on that I was I think I was on the next allotment. But I guess by that time when I wound up, the group that I was in, when we went, we were, the Japanese were making convoys. We were in Formosa for about three weeks waiting for a convoy to be formed. Oh that was a horrible, it was just a great big hole and we didn’t have enough room to sleep. When you’d sleep, you’d sleep partly on top of somebody. At first there was no toilet facilities and we all had, I think we all had diarrhea. It was a real heck of a mess. Eventually the Japs brought down a big barrel looked like a 45 gallon drum and we had to use that as a washroom. And we stunk so bad I think the Japs couldn’t even take it. So they built a sort of a platform off the side of the ship. They made us stand on there and then they would hose us down with a water hose. We were all in such a, you would look at this guy and there is really nothing there. He was so skinny. It’s hard to visualize you would have a bunch, a group of people like that down there in the hole. They would never let us out of this bloody hole. You’d stay down there. There’s no life, no nothing. They brought down a bucket of rice, lowered that into the hole and there we had to, we had some sort of a system established to give each man a certain amount of this rice.

Description

Mr. Peters describes the environment aboard the ship which took the labour gangs to Japan.

Abraham Peters

Abe Peters, one of six children, was born in Lowe Farm, Manitoba, on November 12, 1919. His father was a farmer. Mr. Peters worked on the family farm, and was entrusted with the care of the horses. He left school after completing Grade eight to become a farm labourer. His parents were very upset to learn that he had enlisted in the Royal Winnipeg Rifles in June, 1940. Mr. Peters took basic training at Shiloh, Manitoba and Debert, Nova Scotia. He was ill in hospital when the Rifles shipped overseas to Europe, and once healthy, was sent to reinforce the Winnipeg Grenadiers, with whom he was sent to Hong Kong. As with other survivors of the Hong Kong theatre, Mr. Peters experienced poor training, inferior weaponry, capitulation and a life of misery in the Japanese POW and labour camps. He agrees with many of his comrades that it was a hopeless deployment.

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