He Really Enjoyed Slapping us Around

Heroes Remember

He Really Enjoyed Slapping us Around

Transcript

It was beyond our, see our time to think about what we would, what they would make us do. Eventually yeah, of course, once we were so called settled, as settled as you could ever get in a situation like that, well then we kinda figured they would probably make us work at something. Oh yeah we worked at that Kai Tek airport for years. That was quite a fair size mountain right in the centre of where the runway is now. And we levelled that all by pick and shovel. You had to, you had to, there was such thing. If they say you had to work, you had to work. We even, some people just couldn’t. We even carried them out on stretchers. The Japs said that so many people had to go work and that’s it. They were awful mean. They would slap you or slap you or knock you over with the rifle butt for any little excuse. Kamloops, he really enjoyed tormenting us. He would slap us around and he had a stick he was always carrying and he would club us with that. He spoke good English. He was an interpreter. He said he come from Kamloops and they treated him in Kamloops rotten so he was gonna treat us rotten. But I’ve talked to people that lived in Kamloops at that time and they said there was no Japanese got treated bad when they were there. He was just a mean bugger.

Description

Mr. Peters describes having to work at Kai Tek airport no matter how ill you were, and gives his impression of the guards, particularly the “Kamloops Kid.”

Abraham Peters

Abe Peters, one of six children, was born in Lowe Farm, Manitoba, on November 12, 1919. His father was a farmer. Mr. Peters worked on the family farm, and was entrusted with the care of the horses. He left school after completing Grade eight to become a farm labourer. His parents were very upset to learn that he had enlisted in the Royal Winnipeg Rifles in June, 1940. Mr. Peters took basic training at Shiloh, Manitoba and Debert, Nova Scotia. He was ill in hospital when the Rifles shipped overseas to Europe, and once healthy, was sent to reinforce the Winnipeg Grenadiers, with whom he was sent to Hong Kong. As with other survivors of the Hong Kong theatre, Mr. Peters experienced poor training, inferior weaponry, capitulation and a life of misery in the Japanese POW and labour camps. He agrees with many of his comrades that it was a hopeless deployment.

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