My Service in Asia 1951/53

The Adventure Begins

One day in February 1951 while serving as a Communication Sgt. at the Signal Office in Halifax, N.S. I was summoned to Ottawa for a briefing. The briefing consisted of me being given the task of establishing communication to and from 25 Canadian Infantry Brigade, Korea, to Hiro in Japan and from there on to Canadian Army Headquarters located in Tokyo Japan. I was then shown the equipment, telephone switchboards, field telephones and other assorted equipment that would be shipped to Japan and would be my responsibility.

My marching orders arrived and early in March I was off to the Far East.

The ride across Canada was uneventful until about 03:00 hrs our train came to an abrupt stop somewhere in the Canadian Rockies. Voices caused me to get dressed and I clambered down off the train to see what was happening.

To my astonishment we had encountered a rock slide and the alert engineer had managed to react in time to avoid a collision. A collision would have caused us to slide off the narrow ledge the tracks had been built on, and we would have ended up some eighty feet below in the Fraser River.

These pictures were taken later on but it was still dark and misty. I tried to show the extent and seriousness of the slide. It only took a few hours for the "Powder Monkeys" from Yale to clear our way and we continued on to Vancouver.

When we arrived in Vancouver we were met by a fleet of buses. Please excuse the quality of the picture as it was copied from a 35 mm photo.  These busses carried us to Seattle Washington where we boarded the USS President Jackson.

Our berthing was, as we soon discovered, was located below the anchor chain locker. In the high seas that we encountered on our journey of 14 days, and seeing it was March, caused the chains to rattle and pound making it quite a noisy location!

Brigadier Rockingham is shown here bidding us bon voyage from Seattle.