Hong Kong was Pretty Primitive at that Time

Well, my first impression, the first thing I really noticed that was the amount of rickshaws that had come to the wharf, that come to . . . I’d never seen a rickshaw before then. And then there was the odd person that come down to the boat in the rickshaw and the rickshaw let them off, like a cab, delivering to the boat. And some of the higher people in Hong Kong they came to the boat by rickshaw. There was a lot of good cheers, a lot of cheering, a lot wishing us well. And we marched off the boat, and we marched from the boat to Sham Shui Po barracks. Coming from a small depression community in the hungry thirties in Manitoba, and then going to Hong Kong, which was probably just as depressed as Manitoba was. But we seen things in Hong Kong that I never thought that we would see. You know, stories that you heard about the Chinese people. There were Chinese women, they’d get their feet bound and they would have just little feet like this. They got their feet bound and then when they’re grown up, their feet were, the toes were all gone and the stubs were just there, and stuff like that you see, you’d just turn you away, you couldn’t look at it. There was still quite a bit of that around. Hong Kong was pretty primitive at that time. We were going to guard the border between the colony, or the territory of Canton and the territory of southern China, just outside of Kowloon. Kowloon is on the other side of, on the mainland of Hong Kong. Hong Kong was the island and then Kowloon was the mainland of China. And the troops were just across the border at Canton territory, which was only across the hill. You can look up the hill, and we always said, the top of that hill that’s where the Japanese are, or China, the Japanese are, because they still were in control of China at that time. Because they had some war, they had the Chinese war previous to this. So and I was a truck driver, but, we had no trucks. So we pretended we were truck drivers, we would get the Chinese civilians to do the truck driving and we would sit as a co-driver beside them and tell them where to go. They sure made us ready for it because they had a couple of mock emergencies where in the middle of the night they would sound the sirens and everybody had to get out of bed and march up the hill. We had to go across by ferry, they, from Kowloon to Hong Kong and we’d march up the hill and take our positions where they had laid out that they figured the Japs would come over if they ever did come over. And then, now we’re getting very close to December, end of November, close to December, and the closer we got to when they attacked us in Hong Kong. It was getting very close to December. And then when they did attack us it was the same time and the same day when Pearl Harbor got hit

Mr. Friesen gives some impressions of Hong Kong and discusses preparations for the expected Japanese attack.

Isaac ‘Ike’ Friesen

Isaac ‘Ike’ Friesen was born on a farm in the Russian Ukraine on October 19, 1920. His father died while Ike was an infant, leaving his mother to run the farm. At the onset of the Bolshevik Revolution, Mrs. Friesen sold the family farm and emigrated to Winkler, Manitoba, later moving to and buying a house in nearby Pomcooley. Mr. Friesen attended the four room school across the street, completing grade eight before becoming a farm laborer to help support his mother. He eventually tried working on a sugarbeet farm in Carmen, Manitoba, but quickly decided joining the armed forces was a better option. He tried to join the Royal Canadian Navy, but was deferred to the Army. He took basic training as a member of the Eighteenth Manitoba Reconnaissance Regiment at Shilo. He was designated as “D” - unfit for overseas service, until being recruited by the badly depleted Winnipeg Grenadiers where his status suddenly became “A1.” Once the conflict in Hong Kong ended with the Allied surrender, Mr. Friesen worked as a laborer at Kai Tek airport. He was eventually shipped to the camp in Niigata, Japan, where he labored as a stevedore. After being liberated and returning to Canada, Mr. Friesen, as the result of a chance meeting while hitchhiking, was offered and accepted employment with what is now Shell Oil.