From Chapter IV: Heroes and Honours

Prisoners of War in Hong Kong

In 1940, Lieutenant Kathryn (Kay) Christie, a Toronto nurse with seven years’ experience, enrolled as a lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps. Late in 1941, she was sent to Hong Kong with the two Canadian infantry battalions (a deployment of 1,975 people) requested by the British to help bolster defences in the island colony. Lieutenant Christie was accompanied by another nurse, Lieutenant Ann May Waters of Winnipeg, whom she met on the train on their way to the ship that took them to Hong Kong. Also with the contingent were four medical officers (Major John Crawford, Captain S.M. Banfill, Captain J.A.G. Reid and Captain G.C. Gray), and two dental officers (Captain W.R. Cunningham and Captain J.C.M. Spence). On Christmas Day 1941, only weeks after their arrival, Hong Kong fell to the Japanese.

The British military hospital, where the two Canadian nurses worked, came under fierce shelling during the Japanese attack. On Christmas Day, when the British surrendered the colony, a period of horror began: 287 Canadians died during the fall of Hong Kong, and 266 more succumbed to hunger, disease and abuse during the next three and a half years, which the survivors of the invasion spent in brutal captivity. Four Canadians were executed for attempting to escape from Japanese prison camps.

Captain Banfill, who was serving with a Royal Army Medical Corps unit, had an especially terrible experience. He was captured early in the battle, and saw his RAMC orderlies killed before his eyes before he was taken to the Argyle Street Camp in Kowloon, where he was imprisoned with 900 Indian soldiers. Lieutenant Christie and Lieutenant Waters were incarcerated first at the Bowen Road Hospital, transformed into a prison by the addition of barbed wire, where they worked without proper food or supplies and in the face of spreading disease. After eight months at Bowen Road, they were shifted to the Stanley Civilian Internment Camp in the south-eastern sector of the island, where they remained for 13 months with 2,400 other men, women and children. At Stanley, they lived in rooms that measured nine by twelve feet and, in the beginning at least, were completely bare of furniture. “Our constant but unwelcome companions were large flying cockroaches,” Lieutenant Christie recalled, “which sailed in through the windows, where there was very little glass; bedbugs that came out of the walls where the plaster had been damaged during the fighting; and large centipedes that seemed to fall from nowhere.” The prisoners’ other companions were boredom and hunger.

On New Year’s Eve 1942, the prisoners decided to defy their captors. Ignoring the 10:30 p.m. curfew, they crept out of their rooms at midnight and assembled in the dark, all along the staircase. Linking arms along the railing from one floor to another, they sang a brave and tearful “Auld Land Syne.”

In September 1943, Lieutenant Christie, Lieutenant Waters and the other Canadians at Stanley were repatriated through the efforts of the International Red Cross. They were taken by ship to the small Portuguese colony of Goa, where they were officially exchanged. Six weeks later, they were back at home.

Left behind in the prison camps of Hong Kong, the remaining Canadian military medical personnel continued to work heroically under the direction of Major John Crawford. When the bulk of the Canadians were assembled at North Point Camp, Major Crawford and the other three doctors found themselves responsible for the health of more than 1,200 Canadian prisoners.

Captain Reid was later transferred to Japan with the 500 Canadian prisoners who were shipped there to be used as forced labour. Thanks to this doctor’s success in wringing concessions from their captors and making the best possible use of limited medical resources, only 25 prisoners died during their captivity in Japan, many fewer than in other, similar, contingents of prisoners.

An historian later wrote that the skill and resourcefulness that the Canadian military doctors brought to the care of prisoners in such appalling conditions “must surely be without parallel in the story of the RCAMC in the Second World War.” Resourceful and dedicated though they were, they could not stem the rising tide of death over the 44 months of their captivity, and sometimes they came near to despair. Nevertheless, the fact that 1,400 Canadians ultimately returned home is largely due to the care they received from these military doctors.

Lieutenant Kay Christie’s war did not end with her return to Canada; she served at a military hospital in Toronto until October 1945. After the war, she worked as a medical secretary until her retirement in 1980. Lieutenant May Waters died on 18 December 1987, exactly 46 years to the day after the Japanese attack on Hong Kong.

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Regards, Michelle

Oliver Goldsmith, "I love everything that's old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines."

The story of the Canadians at Hong Kong is indeed a sad one. Churchill was furious and this becomes obvious in his own writings at the deployment of the Canadians to Hong Kong. The Canadians and their British and commonwealth allies went thru hell that Chrismas. The medics and patients more than most if that is possible.

Another great waste in that theatres history.

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Prepare to repel borders.
William L. McGonagle, MOH, U. S. Navy, Commanding Officer, USS LIBERTY 1967.