Taken Prisoner

Heroes Remember

Taken Prisoner

Well they were fantastic mountain fighters. That’s for damn sure and we were all lined up there ready to march off and when we started to march off, all of a sudden, like we were down this road and this hillside beside us, all of a sudden this whole hill side moved, they were all Japanese, with all this stuff inside their webbing of their uniforms and so forth. They were marvelous with camouflage, fantastic. So then we marched and marched, we marched up this hill, as we got to the top of the hill there was a bunch of Japanese given us rifles to carry and so forth and so on. Oh pardon me, I got to go back a little bit. Seeing that we were captured, we started to go through the seized luggage and stuff like that, the kit bags and so forth picking up different things. I had two kit bags and a haversack on my back. I was a pretty strong fellow then, 180 pounds and well equipped with muscle and I had this all on my back and as we marched up the hill and then they gave us a bunch of rifles to carry so we had to carry them down to this building that we spent spent a night or two there and I found a Gurkha knife there and a scabbard and everything else. I put that in my kit bag. I don’t know what made me do it but I did it. The next morning we marched along and marched along and went into Sham Shui Po Camp.

Mr. Harrison describes the details of his forced march to Sham Shui Po camp.

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.