One Soldier's Story: 1939-1945 by George S. MacDonell

Author:George S. MacDonell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2002-03-29T21:00:00+00:00

Captain John Reid, Canadian medical officer.

We were dismissed and, slowly and quietly, we went back to sit on our bed shelves in our huts. Within minutes, one of our French-Canadian riflemen, who was a born mimic and comedian, rose on a bed in the centre of the hut to command our attention. He soon had us roaring with laughter, as in the arrogant gestures of the general and in the comical broken English of the Japanese interpreter, he did his impressions of them. In a perfect imitation of the general, he gave us his speech in what he pretended was Japanese, scowling all the while and pausing for effect. And then he interpreted his own speech in the broken English of the interpreter: Japan was losing the war; he was sorry for all the mistakes they had made; he had come to apologize for the bad food and accommodations; he was sorry we had sabotaged so many of his ships, but he could understand our annoyance; and so on! The hut rocked with laughter as we saw in that flash of humour the general for what he was — a blustering, brutal bully. He knew Japan was losing the war and to bolster his sagging ego, he was intimidating a group of men systematically being starved to death. His samurai sword, dragging at his side, was symbolic of his backward warrior class, wreaking misery on us and the poor people of Japan. Later that day, our medical officer, Captain John Reid, was summoned by the camp commandant to explain why, in the face of these awful threats and this intimidating message, we had reacted with such mirth. What kind of people were we anyway? How could there be anything to laugh at? Were we insane? No, we were Canadians, and we were going to resist to the very end, whatever that end might be!

At Camp 3D, there were some events that stand out in my memory. On October 4, 1944, the air-raid sirens sounded their warning for the first time, on a beautiful, clear fall day. All of the workers in the shipyard, including the prisoners, ran outside to stare up at the cloudless sky. There, at 35,000 feet, the sunlight glinting and sparkling from its reflective aluminum skin like a silver ghost, was a giant American bomber leisurely photographing Japan at an altitude that Japanese fighters, try as they might, could not reach. This was the B29, the biggest bomber ever built, and based eight hours flight away in newly acquired American bases in the Mariana Islands. We saw this day the very first evidence that we were not alone. The Allied forces had not been defeated, as we were repeatedly told by the Japanese, and before our very eyes, high above Japan, was the visible evidence of American military reach and power. The presence of this bomber, however, produced another problem in that no doubt the shipyard where we worked every day would be a primary target when the bombing began.

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