Japanese Canadians Serving in The War
Some of the interned citizens had been combat veterans of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, including several men who had been decorated for bravery during the fighting on the Western Front in the First World War. Small numbers of military age Japanese-Canadians were permitted to serve in the Canadian Army in the Second World War, as interpreters and in signal/intelligence units.
Canadians of “Oriental racial origin” were not called upon to perform compulsory military service. Japanese Canadian men such as Harold Hirose, however, chose to serve the Canadian army during the war, to prove their allegiance to Canada. However, various Japanese Canadian men would be discharged from the war only to discover that they were unable to return to the coast of British Columbia or have their rights of Canadian citizenship reinstated.
Read more about this topic: Japanese Canadian Internment
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“The Japanese do not fear God. They only fear bombs.”
—Jerome Cady, U.S. screenwriter. Lewis Milestone. Yin Chu Ling, The Purple Heart (1944)
“The Canadians of those days, at least, possessed a roving spirit of adventure which carried them further, in exposure to hardship and danger, than ever the New England colonist went, and led them, though not to clear and colonize the wilderness, yet to range over it as coureurs de bois, or runners of the woods, or, as Hontan prefers to call them, coureurs de risques, runners of risks; to say nothing of their enterprising priesthood.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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I wasn’t going to tell you and I mustn’t.
The best way is to come uphill with me
And have our fire and laugh and be afraid.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)