Veteran Hormidas Fredette, pictured in 2018, holds a picture of himself in his uniform when he was younger.Eric Brunt
On a warm spring day this year in the Nova Scotia village of New Minas, Hormidas Fredette sat at the kitchen table and signed a letter to the Minister of Veterans Affairs, officially dissolving the Hong Kong Veterans Association. With the death of George MacDonell in April, Mr. Fredette was the last Canadian survivor of the brief but horrific Battle of Hong Kong and the resulting hell of 44 months as Japanese prisoners of war. The constitution of the HKVA, formed by returning veterans not long after the end of the Second World War, dictated that the last of them would bring the association to a formal end. The sad duty fell to Mr. Fredette, who died Nov. 29 at the age of 106.
“He was the last living link to the Battle of Hong Kong,” said Mike Babin, president of the Hong Kong Veterans Commemorative Association, tasked with keeping alive the memory of the battle and the nearly 2,000 Canadian soldiers who took part. “It was an important part of our military history. But now they’re gone. All gone.”
Mr. Fredette was a rifleman with the Quebec-based Royal Rifles of Canada. Along with members of the Winnipeg Grenadiers, the Royal Rifles had been sent to shore up defence of the then British colony of Hong Kong in November of 1941. The decision has been criticized by some military analysts for sending Canadian soldiers, underequipped, with little experience, on a mission that was doomed to failure.
On Dec. 8, the day after Japan’s deadly strike against Pearl Harbour, Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong, just three weeks after the Canadians arrived. The first troops from Canada to see action in the Second World War, they became fully engaged when the Japanese, having quickly overrun the mainland, moved to capture the island of Hong Kong. Outnumbered, with no air or naval support, the Canadians fought as bravely as they could to hold them off.
Like many veterans, Mr. Fredette first opened up about his experiences much later in life. He told of terrifying nights in the pitch darkness, of dangerous scouting missions, of seeing officers killed and bayonetted before his eyes, and most memorably, of coming across an abandoned Vickers machine gun, with considerable ammunition. His commanding officer asked if anyone knew how to operate it. Rifleman Fredette volunteered, having learned how during his time in the Canadian militia. “I put the range at 1,950 yards,” he recalled, and quickly began peppering Japanese positions in the Hong Kong hills. “You’re hitting the mark every time,” said the impressed officer, who promised him a promotion. Mr. Fredette said he wasn’t interested.
Finally, on Christmas Day, with ammunition running short and no hope of further stemming the Japanese, the British officers in charge of the defence called a halt. Troops were ordered to lay down their arms. Mr. Fredette complied, but not without a last act of resistance. Before tossing his rifle into the pile of arms, he removed and threw away its firing pin, so “at least my gun could not be used to kill anybody.”
But he knew he was lucky to be alive. The short, intense battle had claimed 290 Canadian lives, including a number of wounded soldiers who were bayonetted and mutilated in their hospitals beds by rampaging Japanese troops.
The battle for survival was to continue as the Canadian soldiers became prisoners of war, forced to work as slave labour in brutal and inhumane conditions, receiving barely enough food to keep them alive, their meagre rations of rice often infested with maggots. “What you had to do was eat them, without looking at them,” Mr. Fredette told an interviewer. He remembered coming across a discarded fish head in the dirt. He picked it up and ate it. “All they thought about was food, food, food,” said Mr. Babin, whose father, Alfred, was also a prisoner. Beatings were common, rarely with reason.
Prisoners were first set to work repairing Hong Kong’s damaged Kai Tak Airport, toiling from dawn to dusk, with rarely a day off. After a year, they were transferred to Japan. Mr. Fredette was assigned to work in the shipyards. One day, he and another prisoner protested the lack of food by refusing to work, standing on a steam valve to keep warm. Guards beat him unconscious. When he came to, he was beaten again.
Another time he was used as a guinea pig for the injection of an experimental concoction his Japanese captors hoped would relieve the symptoms of beriberi. Instead, his arm turned black, becoming so infected it narrowly escaped amputation and took several years to heal properly. His only respite was being selected for burial ceremonies whenever a prisoner died, because he had kept his uniform in good shape.
On Aug. 9, 1945, Mr. Fredette was in a camp south of Nagasaki, when the second atomic bomb dropped by the United States exploded over the city. He didn’t see the blast, but he heard it. “He told us of seeing lines of badly burned Japanese walking by,” his son Brian said. Six days later, Japan surrendered and the war was over.
When their former guards came by with papers for them to sign, saying they had been well treated, the prisoners refused. All told, 267 Canadian prisoners perished in the camps, from overwork, disease, malnourishment and simply giving up. Survivors emerged from their prolonged captivity like wraiths, shadows of their former selves.
Yet there was more to come. Many continued to suffer physically and mentally long after they returned home. Mr. Fredette didn’t talk to his sons about his ordeal until he was into his 90s, but they both remembered as kids hearing his screams during the night. “We thought it was normal,” Ron Fredette said.
A modest, unassuming individual, who worked hard for everything he achieved in life, Hormidas Joseph Fredette was born on his parents’ farm near Richmond, Que., in the Eastern Townships on April 11, 1917, the same year as the Russian Revolution and 18 months before the end of the First World War. Life was tough. The second youngest of 10 children, he dropped out of grade school to go to work to help the family make a new life after they were kicked off the land by his grandparents over an outstanding loan. Young Hormidas worked as a labourer on neighbouring farms, where he learned English. Winters were spent in the woods of northern Quebec as a lumberjack. He joined the militia before enlisting in the Royal Rifles, as much for the pay and three meals a day as anything else.
Shortly after the war broke out, the battalion was assigned to Newfoundland for further training and garrison duty. One day, Mr. Fredette was sitting with a buddy in the Blue Puttees, a popular St. John’s café, named after Newfoundland’s famed regiment from the First World War. Lillian Mitcham, a girl at a nearby table, asked him for a light, and they got to talking. They decided to go to a movie that night. Long after the movie ended, they were still in their seats, talking. Ms. Mitcham, 19, was from the small community of Heart’s Content, her father a train conductor. In August of 1941, the Royal Rifles were chosen for duty in Hong Kong, and Mr. Fredette asked his sweetheart to marry him when he returned. She said yes.
Mr. Fredette was as good as his word. After a short visit with his family, brushing aside medical concerns over his lingering ill-health, he hopped on a train en route to Newfoundland. Ms. Mitcham was waiting for him. The couple exchanged two sets of vows, first in an Anglican Church and the next day in St. John’s Roman Catholic Church.
They began their life together back in the Eastern Townships.
When Mr. Fredette applied for a job with Canadian National Railway, he was told by the local agent that they didn’t hire veterans. “So he contacted Veterans’ Affairs, and they told CN, you’ve got to hire him, and they did. An early example of affirmative action,” Brian said. But after eight years, Hormidas Fredette left what he considered a dream job with the railway, when his job was transferred to Montreal. Preferring the Townships to the big city, he went to work for the Domtar pulp and paper mill in nearby Windsor, where he built a house and helped raise his boys. He retired in 1979 at the age of 62, and he and Lillian moved to New Minas in the Annapolis Valley.
In the meantime, Hong Kong veterans, awarded a mere dollar for each day they spent as a prisoner of war, had launched a campaign protesting their shabby treatment by the government. When they asked for more compensation, bureaucrats demanded documentation to prove their ongoing disabilities resulted from their time in the military. Tim Cook, chief historian at the Canadian War Museum, noted in a recent article he wrote for The Globe and Mail: “It could have been a Monty Python skit, if it hadn’t been so cruel.”
Not until 1971 did the government accept their disability claims and provide each prisoner with a modest pension. And only in 1998 did they receive redress for their slave labour: $24,000 each for the remaining 350 survivors and 400 widows.
“When you send young men into places of danger to serve the national interest, you have an obligation to them when they return home with physical ailments,” Mr. Cook added, in an interview. “The government of the day was only too happy to leave this very small group to languish and to suffer.”
On the 70th anniversary of its attack on Hong Kong, with few veterans still alive, Japan apologized for its harsh treatment of the Canadian POWs. It cut no ice with Mr. Fredette. “I do not accept their apology,” he said, bitterly.
Mr. Babin of the HKVCA paid tribute to Mr. Fredette for making it to the age of 106, considering “all the brutal treatment that those fellows got. To have come through all that and lived so long is truly amazing.”
In one of his last interviews, Mr. Fredette, holding rosary beads he fashioned from date pits as a PoW, said he was used to hard times, and that helped him survive. He could see other prisoners crying about their fate. “But it never made me cry.” The old veteran paused, remembering. “But I would say that one time, I did cry. I wanted to come home.”
Mr. Fredette was predeceased by his wife, Lillian. He leaves his sons, Brian and Ron, two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.