Desperate Measures for Survival

This mountain, knocking this mountain down, it was getting a little boring anyway, and it was getting a little heavier working. Guys were starting to use all kinds of excuses to get off work. I even know a guy, he’s dead now, he put his arm underneath the railroad. They had a little cheese side railroad, what do you call it, these little carts, manning carts that they would haul the ore out of the mines. Well, they, these were little kind of tracks that we would lay up the hill. And we would haul the ore, the mountain down from the hills down this track. And I know guys who put there arm underneath the rail, underneath the wheels, cut their arm off so they wouldn’t have to work. The depression was bad. The best what the doctor could do was what he learned in Canada, but he, the Japanese wouldn’t, but the Japanese would if it was real serious and most of those cases they would take them to a Japanese hospital. Because we in Hong Kong we still had a hospital there run by the Hong Kong people that lived there before the war broke out. They hadn’t come, taken them out of there yet. A lot of nurses were run, were still in the hospitals. Well, I always had it this way. My spirits were high. And when we came home from work, and you throw yourself on the bunk that you had, the little place you called your bunk, I said, those little bastards will never let me down. And a lot of boys remember that to this very day.

Mr. Friesen describes the desperation of some of the Kai Tek labourers, minimal medical facilities in Hong Kong, and his personal vow to survive.

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.