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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“your dear face with its fifth hand,
doesn’t it know it’s the end of the war?”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“No human being can tell what the Russians are going to do next, and I think the Japanese actions will depend much on what Russia decides to do both in Europe and the Far East—especially in Europe.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“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)
“A chaplain is the minister of the Prince of Peace serving the host of the God of War—Mars. As such, he is as incongruous as a musket would be on the altar at Christmas. Why, then, is he there? Because he indirectly subserves the purpose attested by the cannon; because too he lends the sanction of the religion of the meek to that which practically is the abrogation of everything but brute Force.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)