Diseases

I seen a lot of our guys in Sham Shui Po there with wet beri beri and that dry beri beri and they walked around all night there, out there crying, even Doug Martin here from Campbellton, I don’t know if you had his name down here to come in here. And diarrhea, dysentery, oh dysentery was bad all that stuff and diphtheria broke out and a lot of our guys were dying with that, something awful, but I didn’t seem to get none of that, but I got the wet beri beri, I got that, and my feet all swelled up and everything like that but I didn’t suffer that much like the other ones. I wasn’t that long out of the hospital. I’d been getting those vitamins in the hospital so it kind of helped me out some but those guys when they moved them over to the, I call it the hospital or whatever it was, it was a long time ago I don’t really remember but we knew they would never come back.

Mr. Lecouffe describes several of the diseases which afflicted the POWs, and attributes his relative immunity to the vitamin he'd received during his recent recuperation.

Lionel Lecouffe

Lionel Lecouffe was born in Campbellton, New Brunswick on March 23, 1922. His father was a First World War veteran and his mother a war bride. Mr. Lecouffe worked on the road for food vouchers before becoming a deliveryman to Easton Bakery at $2 a day. Only seventeen and already a member of the Campbellton militia, he lied about his age to enlist with the Royal Rifles at Matapedia. Ironically, after his release from a Hong Kong hospitalization, Mr. Lecouffe found himself attached to the Winnipeg Grenadiers with whom he finished the war.