Fooled in Buying a Carton of Milk

What was next? We heard so many rumours that Japanese weren’t going to take prisoners and the next sign that we seen that they weren’t going to do anything like that they were going to take prisoners. But they never told us, but the signs were there. So next, next day they did bring a little food into the grounds and the ones that got into the line, lasted, got some food and there were others that didn’t. Then they took us back to Sham Shui Po barracks, on the Kowloon side, on the mainland side, and they took us back to the camp that we came from. But by this time, a week had lapsed or maybe a little more, all the Chinese refugees they had pilfered that camp. There wasn’t a door in the building, there wasn’t a window in the building, even the wood frames out of the building were all out. They had stripped her clean. I guess they use the wood for firewood and you name it. Around, when we went into the camp, around the fence, there was still the old fence there, page wire fence, the Chinese were around that fence and they were selling, if you had money, you could go and buy a can of pork and beans or a can of milk or anything, but then it didn’t take us very long to find out that we were getting rooked so we wouldn’t, couldn’t, it made no sense buying it. You’d buy a can of milk and when you got it to have milk in your tea, whatever, you were going to brew, or somebody was brewing it and you would help share the tea, and you would share your milk, I said, “ I got a can of milk in my pack here, you need milk for your tea?” You open them up, there was water in it. They had punched a hole in the can and they had soldered it shut and they had made a real good job in camouflaging it so you couldn’t see it. So, we got took that way.

Mr. Friesen describes his first POW experience at Sham Shui Po and being conned by the local Chinese.

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.