Japanese Ambushes

Heroes Remember

Japanese Ambushes

Transcript

The company commander, he was, marched us down there, in the valley. All of a sudden, we asked him if we shouldn’t send out scouts to see where the Japanese were and he said, “Oh no, they’re not within miles of us.” We didn’t get very far and we found out where they were. By that time it was too late. He was killed, our commanding officer was killed, and our second in command was killed and . . . well, it was pretty well every man for himself right then. We got out of there. I got back to, some of us got back to our company headquarters, and then we were told, like there wasn’t that many left of us, “A” Company, and we were told that we, I was attached to “B” Company, and we were ambushed after that. And after that, we were just pretty well here and there, all over the place. The Japanese, they knew every inch of that Hong Kong. They had their men in there, people in there, long before. Even the Chinese were backing some of the Japanese. Heck, we were, one time we stopped this Chinaman, he had a bag, it looked like a bag of rice on his back. We stopped him, searched him, and here in the rice he had a gall darn machine gun and everything else, carrying it for the Japanese. After that, we were just little bunches of people, of men, troops here and there. There was no organization at all after that. But up till the 25th we were still active.

Description

Mr. Agerbak describes the impact of Japanese ambushes on the Canadians’ ability to remain a cohesive fighting unit.

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.

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