Final Battle

Heroes Remember

Final Battle

And that night they came up the hill real… We sent out a couple of flares and you could see these little buggers they’d go straight down in this valley, straight down to get in there and, of course, we just raked the whole thing with machine gun fire. We had a few…but we had a Lewis machine gun and it has a round, well Bradshaw and Leblanc were trying to load this magazine, it was comical actually to see them. “Keep shooting because the flashes are telling us where to put the bullets!” Their heads were right underneath the machine gun. “You crazy buggers, you’re supposed to know how to load those things.” “But we’re not used to these machine guns. It’s the Vickers that we are used to,” you know. Anyway, they told us all to get our grenades and more or less line up in a big sort of a line by this gap and everybody throw, count three and throw your grenade and from what I understand we took out a whole bunch of Japanese as far as I understand. It was one of the bad places for them. And then we were told to retreat down to the Aberdeen Reservoir and I’m glad we got so many of the Japanese because they weren’t firing over the hill with their mortars and so forth. So we got down and then we got into the Aberdeen Reservoir and it was empty. All of a sudden we were in there and we were taking some of the rations, finding rations to eat and so forth and all of a sudden we hear a big voice called me, “Leave all those rations alone. They belong to C Company.” “Well, why the hell don’t you guys come down here. What did you run away from here for?” And so there was a big hullabaloo and that night it seemed like there over to the south of us or the west of us there was a big bayonet charge by a bunch of the Grenadiers at the Japanese and then the next morning we were told to lay down our guns, that the white flag had been flown.

Mr. Harrison describes raking the advancing Japanese with Bren gun fire and grenades, exacting a heavy toll on the enemy. This allowed the Canadians to safely retreat to the Aberdeen Reservoir. The following morning the island of Hong Kong is surrendered.

George Harrison

George Harrison was born on April 4, 1920 in Winnipeg, Manitoba and was youngest of three children. His father died shortly after his birth, forcing his mother to place him and his siblings in an orphanage, where he was at times badly beaten. Learning this, his mother took her children back home. After completing grade 9, Mr. Harrison went to work to help support his family. Eventually, he gained employment with CPR Telegraph. On September 13, 1939, Mr. Harrison enlisted with Winnipeg Grenadiers, becoming a specialist on the Vickers machine gun. During the battle of Hong Kong, Mr. Harrison was made a sergeant, and was involved in deadly fighting. Along with the general misery and persecution suffered by all of the POWs, Mr. Harrison faced down both blindness and potential amputation of his toes.