Frank Brown

The regiment

The Winnipeg Grenadiers began on 1 April 1908 as the 100th Regiment, headquartered at Morden, Manitoba. In 1910 it moved to Winnipeg and became the 100th "Winnipeg Grenadiers." Its motto was Adsum ("Present") and its march "British Grenadiers."

First World War. The regiment raised men for the Canadian Expeditionary Force and carries on the history of three of its battalions: the 11th, the 78th and the 100th. The 78th Battalion (Winnipeg Grenadiers) reached France in August 1916 and fought with the 4th Canadian Division until the Armistice. Two of its officers, Lt. James Edward Tait and Lt. Samuel Lewis Honey, received the Victoria Cross.

Between the wars. It was renamed The Winnipeg Grenadiers in 1920, and in 1936 merged with the 10th Machine Gun Battalion to become The Winnipeg Grenadiers (Machine Gun).

Second World War. Mobilized on 1 September 1939, the battalion served on garrison duty in Jamaica and Bermuda from May 1940 to October 1941, with a detachment on Aruba. It then sailed with C Force to Hong Kong, where it was destroyed in the battle of 8–25 December 1941. Company Sergeant-Major John Robert Osborn received a posthumous Victoria Cross for throwing himself on a grenade to save his men. The battalion was rebuilt in Canada in 1942, served at Kiska, Alaska, in 1943, went overseas in 1944, and ended the war as No. 10 Canadian Repatriation Depot, disbanded on 28 January 1946. The reserve battalion carried the regiment's name on.

After the war. On 28 February 1965 the regiment was reduced to nil strength and placed on the Supplementary Order of Battle. That means it still exists on paper, with its colours and battle honours intact, but has no soldiers and would only be revived if the army needed it. Current sources still list it there. Over its life it earned 22 battle honours: 20 in the First World War and 2 for Hong Kong. Its colours are displayed in Winnipeg, and a Winnipeg Grenadiers cadet corps re-formed in 1946.

Before the war

Frank Brown was born on 4 September 1915. His obituary says he grew up with one brother and eleven sisters. He enlisted from Winnipeg; by 1945 his home was 202 Roger Street in Norwood, where his wife and their daughter Sheila were waiting for him.

Not found: parents' names, schooling, pre-war work, wife's name, enlistment date, and whether he served with the battalion's earlier garrison posting in the West Indies.

To Hong Kong

The Grenadiers left Winnipeg by Canadian Pacific train for Vancouver. On 27 October 1941 C Force sailed on the liner Awatea, escorted by HMCS Prince Robert, stopping at Honolulu and Manila. They reached Hong Kong on 16 November and were quartered at Nanking Barracks, Sham Shui Po, in Kowloon. Their vehicles and equipment, sent on a separate ship, never arrived.

The Awatea had little cargo room, so C Force's 212 vehicles went separately on the American freighter Don José, which sailed from Vancouver on 4 November. U.S. naval authorities routed her by Honolulu and Manila, and she reached Manila on 12 December, four days after Japan attacked; the vehicles were handed to American forces defending the Philippines. A carload of spare parts sent later on the Fernplant was held at Los Angeles and returned to Canada. The 1942 Royal Commission under Sir Lyman Duff found that, with more energy from the Quartermaster General's Branch, about 20 vehicles could have sailed with the troops, though it saw no evidence their absence changed the outcome. The Quartermaster General and the Director of Supplies and Transport were retired in early 1942. The Army's official historian later concluded that the full Don José shipment "would have helped the defenders a great deal."

Frank Brown is not identified in either photograph.

The battle

Japan attacked on 8 December. On 11 December the Grenadiers' D Company became the first Canadian Army troops in combat in the Second World War. On 19 December the West Brigade headquarters and Grenadier positions at Wong Nai Chong Gap were overrun. The colony surrendered on Christmas Day. Of 1,975 Canadians, 290 were killed and 493 wounded.

Not found: Frank Brown's own part in the fighting. The HKVCA holds no battle details for him.

The controversy

Anger over Hong Kong came in two waves: a political fight in 1942 that critics called a whitewash, and a long campaign by the surviving veterans after the war.

The government asked Chief Justice Sir Lyman Duff to investigate how C Force had been sent. His Royal Commission reported on 4 June 1942 and cleared Prime Minister Mackenzie King's government. It called the decision to send the force "the only course open to them in the circumstances," blamed the Quartermaster General's Branch for the transport failure, and blamed Britain for the faulty intelligence. The next day, Ontario Conservative leader George Drew publicly accused Duff of ignoring evidence and said the closed-door hearings had been arranged to give King the answer he wanted. Censors stopped his letters to King from being published. On 3 July the government charged Drew under the Defence of Canada Regulations with making statements likely to harm recruiting. It dropped the charges a week later, and King wrote that he was "greatly relieved." By then press opinion had turned. The Winnipeg Tribune called for an open inquiry on 20 July, Saturday Night magazine withdrew its earlier support for the government, and critics called the inquiry a whitewash.

The survivors came home to limited support. They were paid $1 for each day of imprisonment, about $1,360 each, with another 50 cents a day added in 1958, but they were never paid for their years of forced labour, and that remained their main grievance. In 1971 Canada recognized their suffering and made disability pensions easier to obtain. In 1987 the War Amps took their case to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights without the Canadian government's support. On 11 December 1998, Canada paid $24,000 to each surviving veteran or widow. On 8 December 2011, seventy years after the attack, Japan formally apologized to Canada's Hong Kong veterans. No record of a formal apology from the Canadian government has been found.

Prisoner of war

His HKVCA record traces every move he made as a prisoner. In January 1943 he was among 663 Canadians shipped to Japan on the Tatuta Maru, landing at Nagasaki and going on by train to Tokyo and the shipyard camp at Tsurumi.

Fellow Grenadier William Bell, held at the same Tsurumi camp, described beriberi, malaria, the painful swollen feet the men called "electric feet," constant hunger, and beatings by guards.

Ready for home

Back on the street

The uniform

• Beret instead of side cap. His 1941 enlistment portrait shows the wedge-shaped side cap. The Canadian Army began replacing it from 1943, while he was a prisoner, so he could not have worn the newer headgear before Hong Kong.
• Open collar with shirt and tie. Other ranks were allowed to wear battledress open at the neck with a shirt and tie for walking out only late in the war. This also points to after his return.
• Ribbon bar. A strip of ribbons appears above his left breast pocket. Hong Kong veterans were entitled to the Canadian Volunteer Service Medal, the 1939–45 Star and the Pacific Star, so ribbons fit a returned soldier. The colours cannot be read in this copy, so which medals they are is not confirmed.
• Shoulder title. A curved title sits at the top of his sleeve, but it is too small to read.

His physical condition

He looks healthy, upright and filled out, with no sign of the wasting seen in photographs of prisoners at liberation. That does not fix the date on its own: many returning Hong Kong prisoners regained weight quickly on the voyage home and during hospital care in Canada. It does fit a photo taken weeks or months after he came home rather than at the moment of release.

The setting

Walking snapshots like this were sold by street photographers on busy shopping streets from the 1930s to the 1950s. The skirt lengths and hairstyles of people behind them fit the mid-1940s. The signs read "Clothes" and "…Shops Ltd," which is not enough to name the city. He wears no greatcoat and a woman in the background wears no coat, which hints at mild weather. That is only a hint: he reached San Francisco on 16 October 1945, when Winnipeg can already be cold, so spring or summer 1946 is also possible.

Not found: the date, the city, and who the woman is.

Mentioned in Despatches

His Mention-in-Despatches was published in the Canada Gazette (6 April 1946), Canadian Army Routine Orders 6522 (18 April 1946) and the London Gazette (11 April 1946, No. 37528, p. 1837).

Not found: the citation. What he was recognised for is unknown.

Later life