Powdered Milk Saved our Lives.

There was a barge down in the, down, it was maybe eight feet down below, and full of barrels. And he says, “put the planks down and go in there and start rolling the barrels out from the barge up to the dock.” So Joe and I, we just couldn’t do it, the two of us, we maybe did one, but how many can we do? There was about 30 or 40 of them in there. There was about another 20, 30 guys come and they helped us. But the first thing, we had a big habit and when we were working, the first thing that if we looked at it and if it was liquid we’d go like this. Is it good? Can we eat it? Can we drink it? Or another thing, could we eat it? That was a very bad habit we had. But in this case, the first thing they asked us, “What are you doing, what’s in that?” I said, “It’s alcohol. There’s alcohol in here, but what kind of alcohol, I don’t know.” I had a drink of it and that wasn’t that bad. So the first thing though, these guys, as they were working along, they were filling their water bottle up, they were filling their canteen up, they were drinking it. By the time it was time to go home, we had the barge unloaded, these guys were all half cocked out of their mind. But in the mean time, while these guys were unloading that barge, the same boss, we called him honcho, over there, a foreman. The same honcho came to me right off the bat again, “Ike, come on with me, get Joe.” So Joe and I, he took us to another warehouse and there was an oxcart with, and he was going to unload and we were supposed to load that oxcart with bags of powdered milk, boxes of powdered milk. So we went in this warehouse and they put the oxcart in the warehouse and the two Japanese, they went away, and they. So, in order for us to steal, we had a, we were issued with some, instead of some shorts we just had g-strings. So what we did with the g-strings, we’d sew both sides up and make a bag out of it. And then we were stealing beans or rice, we would take them between our legs, tie the g-string and we would be stealing rice or beans. And so, Joe and I were filling up these bags up with powdered milk and carrying them into the camp. And we were helping these other guys, they were getting all out of shape on the road. We had, some we had to half carry in and half not, and shortly after we got to the camp, all hell broke loose. They all threw up and spewed up and they threw up. Nine guys died that night. We were drinking glycol for de-icing planes. The fluid, glycol, that’s what we were drinking. And what saved Joe and me, is we had this milk and when we found out that it was poison, because as soon as they start throwing up, it was so green, it was, you know, so we knew it was poison. So we went and we mixed all this powdered milk and we drank all we could drink and gave some of our buddies all they could drink of this milk. So that saved our lives. The only thing is when they, those Japanese took us and unloaded that oxcart with boxes of milk, powdered milk. Thieves we were good ones. Like, I always said, I was the number one thief when it came to stealing in the Japanese prison camp. But I worked too. They seen a lot of stuff that I did that day. Closed their eyes too.

Mr. Friesen describes the fact that stevedores routinely stole food and drink, with deadly results on one occasion.

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.