Making Kai Tak Airport
Heroes Remember
Making Kai Tak Airport
Interviewer: What happens next?
Well from when we finally got
down to the harbour, they took us to,
our camp was camp Sham Shui Po,
then we did the walk from Kowloon
to Sham Shui Po. That was the eight
mile march we, and we did it so many
times during the, after we were in the,
on the way to work parties. Kai Tak airport.
I'm sure everybody's heard about the,
we built the, we did the groundwork for it.
There was two mountains and they took
1,800 of us out there and an officer got
up on top of the back of the truck and
they shouted out to us in Japanese,
and then the little guy had to interpret it
and he said that we are going to take those
two mountains and dump them in the ocean.
Well that was our laugh for the day,
you know, who the hell is... and 18 months later
it was as flat as that table top.
We had carried it on our backs and
dumped it in the ocean
Interviewer: So your march you were
always carrying heavy...
Yeah, we had a big, long bamboo pole,
one guy in the front and one guy in back
and the bag of rice, rice bag and they
throw three and a half, two and a half
shovels of dirt on this bag and there
were strings from end, like this and
then we'd put a bamboo pole through it,
put them on our, and march,
dump them in the ocean, march back.
And we were alright as long as we kept
moving but if we stopped...
Interviewer: What would happen?
Well, they had bamboo, the guards,
especially the officers or the NCOs would
have a bamboo about 4 feet long,
bamboo stick, and they'd love to crack you
on the back of your ankles or your rear end
but they know.... and it would sting.
Interviewer: So did you get the crack?
I got a few of them yeah,
everybody did, you know.
Interviewer: You had to rest.
It depended when, we knew when we
went out there in the morning how
bad it was going to be,
which ones were the bad ones and
which ones were the... some of them were
good enough that they'd even look away,
if we were doing something that we
shouldn't be doing, but most of them were,
the officers were the worst.
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