George Chow

I joined up in August 1940 at Victoria, Bay Street armouries. I walked in there and, and I said, I want to join the army. How I got interested was my school buddies, they were already enlisted and I saw them one day and they says, Why don’t you join up? So I says, Oh, why not. I was just 18, not quite 19. So I walked in the armouries and they said, Oh, you want to join the army, I said, yes. You want a lot of action? I said, yes. You know, a young guy, don’t know nothing from nothing. So he says, okay, we’ll make you a DR [Dispatch Rider]. Of course, I didn’t know what a DR was. I says, sure. So another week, same day, got my medical, went to the quartermaster, got my uniform, that’s one of those uniforms that they size you up, more or less one size fits all deal. So I was in the Bay Street Armouries there and my parents didn’t even know that I’d joined up. So then I went home, told them about it and they were very surprised. They didn’t want me to go overseas and get killed and all that naturally. So they got the landlord, an ex-[First] World War vet, a Scottish fellow, asked if he could keep me in Victoria rather than overseas. But no, I was determined, I wanted to go, I didn’t want nothing like that.

So we stayed at Victoria for a few days and shipped over Vancouver. We were billeted at the Seaforth armouries and we started training there… Next thing, we headed over to Windsor, Ontario, and we stayed the Christmas there and then we boarded a ship that cut over to Halifax and then we were up onboard the ship there but they found someone had the measles, so they quarantined the whole ship. So we stayed at Debert for that winter. So we went overseas, early spring of 1942.