We had Nothing, Absolutely Nothing.

Well, we didn’t know much till the bombs started dropping and then we were told that Britain had declared war on Hong Kong, on the Japanese. Well that was the same day as Pearl Harbour, they dropped bombs on us. And, after that, we were on the mainland, and, well there were only, I don’t know how many of us was on the mainland, because there wasn’t that many I don’t think. And we were told to evacuate to the island, we got over on the island, we didn’t know, we were putting pillboxes in different places on the island, but outside that we had no idea what the island even looked like. Like, on the western side there wasn’t, there were only about two pillboxes on the western side, there was several more on the northern side, the Kowloon side. One night we were sleeping in the one on the western side there, and this shell, it was lucky it didn’t explode, it come right through the cement wall and landed, landed on top of one of the guys in there. It burned him, it was hot, like it burned him, but it didn’t hurt any of the rest of us. There was no defense, outside they could fire out to sea, they had two big guns in the mountains and that was all the defence except what rifles and we had a few Vickers machine guns and that’s about all. Oh, and we had a couple of Brens. But if they had landed from the sea they would have landed just as easy as if they had landed from Kowloon. We had no communication, there was no such a thing as, you couldn’t talk to your commanding officer, or any other, or one of your platoons, even your section . There was no telephones in between. We didn’t even know where the British were. We didn’t know where any of the rest of them were. We had nothing, absolutely nothing. We had no transport, we had no air force, we had no artillery, and we had no heavy guns outside or equipment we’d carry around with us. And then essentials, we had Tommy guns, but we didn’t have no ammunition for them so we didn’t get to use them very much.

Mr. Agerbak describes falling back to Hong Kong island when the Japanese attacked, and the garrison’s totally inadequate defenses and weapons.

Knud Agerbak

Knud Agerbak was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1918. His family of seven emigrated to Canada in 1927, settling in Manitoba where his father worked as a farm labourer. Mr. Agerbak started working on a farm at the age of 13. He then loaded freight for the railroad, and finally worked in a pulp mill. His sense of patriotism led him to enlist the day that war was declared in 1939. He tried to enlist in the PPCLI, but not having reached the age of 21 didn’t have naturalized Canadian status and was turned down. The Winnipeg Grenadiers did , however, accept him. He performed garrison duty in both Bermuda and Jamaica before his deployment to Hong Kong. Hong Kong quickly surrendered, and Mr. Agerbak spent time on labour gangs at KaiTak airport in Hong Kong, and the Yokohama shipyards and northern iron mines in Japan.