Surgery in a Japanese Hospital

I got a sore side. So I, no food that way you can get a pain anywhere. So anyway I, the doctor, our MO, he had an awful job. He had no medicine. He didn't even have a pair of pliers to pull your tooth out if it was aching. So anyway, I got this side was sore, so I toughed it for a day and the next day it was worse. So I walked around in the North Point camp there around the cookhouse and that. Try to exercise it out, but it wouldn't go away. So then I had to go to the MO the next morning. So I waited and waited till he was through with whoever was there and I told him what I came for and about this pain in my side. So he got me down onto a board that he had there and he pushed my stomach down. He said, “Relax completely.” So he pushed my belly down and he pushed it down. He pushed it down as far as he could and then he just pulled his hands off. So when he did that, naturally my belly went like that and I grabbed my side. Cause I thought the pain was some place here, but whereabouts. So then he said, “You got appendicitis.” Well, and he said, “We're in bad shape.” He said, “I got nothing to operate and there's no hospital here.” Now anyway he made me wait a while and they got an interpreter and he had lived there for years, this interpreter, and explained that out to the Jap guard. So they went and they got an old car, an old English car and they got me in the car and two or three guards and they took off. So they took me up to this old hospital, old Bowen Road and they took me in there and right away, that same afternoon, they operated on me. So I'm here yet today, all I got's the scar.

Mr. Ross describes being diagnosed with appendicitis by his battalion’s doctor and being sent to a Japanese hospital to be operated on.

Lancelot ‘Lance’ Ross

Mr. Lance Ross was born in Lac-Megantic, Quebec on October 7, 1911. His father was a carpenter and a family farmer. Mr. Ross went to work at the age of fourteen, holding many odd jobs that paid $1.00 to $1.50 a day. Impatient with the wait for joining the air foce, Mr. Ross joined the army and went overseas to Hong Kong. He was captured and spent time in POW camps. During this time, Mr. Ross kept a diary that was used for the prosecution of Japanese war crimes. After the war, he was active in getting recognition for Hong Kong Veterans.