This morning I was watching the Remembrance Day ceremonies on TV. One of the war veterans made an interesting remark. He said that our generation would be one of the last generations that will be able to talk to people who lived through the World Wars. They drove the point home by commenting that there were no World War I veterans at any of the ceremonies today, and this is the first year that this has happened. Apparently there are only five WW1 Canadian veterans left, and they are all not well enough to attend a public function. The time is also ticking for those who lived through WW2 unfortunately. Anyway, the man ended by encouraging our generation, who does not know war, to talk to relatives who lived through the war, and to remember their stories. So, I asked my parents about what my extended family's experience in the war was like.
I encourage you, if you have any war stories from your grandparents, please post a comment about it. I would find it most fascinating.
This article will retell the stories from both my grandmothers who lived in the Pacific theater of the war. One was in China, and the other was in Hong Kong.
We will start with my mother's side of the family who was living in Hong Kong during WW2. For some background about how Hong Kong fell to the Japanese, read my article about
the Battle of Hong Kong.
When the war started, my grandmother was in her mid-twenties. The most vivid memory she had about the war were the Japanese bomber planes. The Japanese strategy for taking Hong Kong was to take air superiority since the British forces didn't have many air defences. The Japanese did not begin the battle with a naval landing because the British had surrounded Hong Kong with their navy, and the British navy is a formidable force. However, the Japanese knew that once they controlled the skies, they could take on the British navy with air power.
So, the Japanese launched bombers and fighters from the Japanese home islands, and from the Chinese mainland which they had already occupied. My grandmother distinctly remembered the terrifying air raid sirens that would go off right before an air raid began. All civilians had to rush to underground bomb shelters during these raids. She mentioned that she was always very clumbsy when she rushed to bomb shelters as she would often slip and fall from the broken glass that littered the streets from previous bombings.
The other distinct memory she had was the brutal Japanese occupation of Hong Kong. She said that Japanese soldiers would march down streets, and sometimes if they saw a mother with a baby, they would take the baby and play with it. Once they got bored, they dismembered the baby with their knives for fun. These atrocities made the local civilians burn with anger. As an act of protest, my grandmother remembers a lot of Chinese taking all of their possessions which were made in Japan, and they threw it out onto the street. They would gather all this stuff and burn it as a symbol of protest.
A lot of Asians that lived through the war still boycott Japanese products as their act of protest. One of my friends from South Korea mentioned that Koreans still have a lot of bitterness towards the Japanese (as Korea was brutally occupied as well). She said that up until the late 80s, Japanese music and anime was illegal in South Korea.
The only other thing that my grandmother brought up was the resistence. After the British and Canadian forces in Hong Kong were forced to surrender, local Chinese university students took up arms to fight the Japanese occupiers. They engaged in guerrila warfare against the Japanese.
Let's now move to my grandmother from my dad's side. Her side of the family lived in the southern provinces of China, in a rural village. The village was not close to the shore, and possessed little strategic importance, so they were largely left alone from the war. The Japanese were going for mainly costal cities in China. Every now and again, my grandmother would see Japanese soldiers march through their towns as they were just passing through.
One of my grandmother's relatives was a military man in the Imperial Chinese army, or sometimes known as the White Army. His allegiance belonged to the dynasty King who was overthrown by the Chinese Red Army, or the communists. Unfortunatley for him, he was fighting both the Red Army, and the Japanese Army. China was still very much divided as it was in the middle of a revolution (ie developing a communist system), and fighting a superior foe, the Japanese.
Anyway, the story was very different in Northern China. One of my former pastors lived through WW2 as a young boy. He lived in constant terror during the Japanese occupation. Their family was often hungry as Japanese soldiers would randomly appear at people's houses and demand that they feed them first before the family. A lot of times, they would steal rice supplies from civilians.
So, those are the stories I was able to glean from my family. What's your family's war story?
After the war ended Holland started many programs to make sure that no child would grow up hungry. This was because during the occupation, resourses were scarce and many people died for that reason. When my mom was little and in school, she almost got sent away to a "health camp" because her teachers thought that she was too skinny. But my oma refused to let them take her because my mom definitely got enough to eat on a daily basis. Kindof interesting!
I remember another WW2 story that one of my elementary teachers told us in school. During the war he was a young kid.
One day his dad told him to bring this black box to the other side of town, and this involved crossing through a German checkpoint on the road. His dad insisted that the box was not to be opened at all, and they concealed the box somehow. His dad also wouldn't tell him what was inside the box.
So my teacher road his bike cross town, and got stopped at the checkpoint. The Germans searched his bike, and a few of his bags, but they didn't seem to notice the black box. He got across town and delivered the box.
A while later, my teacher asked his dad what was inside the box. It turns out that they contained a few guns. The dad was traffiking weapons to Dutch resistance fighters. He got his son to deliver the guns because the Germans let kids through checkpoints fairly easily. One could only imagine what would happen if my teacher was caught traffiking those guns eh?
The other story he told us was that his family helped rescue a downed allied pilot. The pilot's plane was shot down over Holland, and the pilot managed to bail. The family took him in, and hid him from the Nazis, and later was able to help get him out of the country.
There's a lot of unsung heroes from the civilians of WW2 eh? They did their part and risked just as much as their comrade-in-arms.