{"id":763,"date":"2011-10-16T23:04:28","date_gmt":"2011-10-17T06:04:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ccmm.sodadesign.com\/?page_id=763"},"modified":"2026-01-29T16:29:21","modified_gmt":"2026-01-30T00:29:21","slug":"henry-albert-hank-wong","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.ccmms.ca\/staging\/9619\/veteran-stories\/army\/henry-albert-hank-wong\/","title":{"rendered":"Hank Wong"},"content":{"rendered":"

Henry Albert (Hank) Wong was born in London, Ontario in 1919. His mother passed away when he was very young, and Wong\u00a0was sent off to a Methodist orphanage for a few years. As a result, he never really learned to speak Chinese.<\/p>\n

\"Hank

Hank Wong<\/p><\/div>\n

Being from Ontario, Wong did not face the same level of discrimination that was evident in other parts of Canada, particularly British Columbia. \u00a0So when war broke out and he decided to enlist with\u00a0the army in 1940, he was accepted.<\/p>\n

Wong learned a number of skills. He was first a transport driver. Then a small arms instructor, and later a demolition instructor.<\/p>\n

It\u00a0was these skills that drew the attention of British Intelligence and the recruiters behind\u00a0Operation Oblivion<\/a>. Although Wong\u00a0could not speak Chinese, in 1944 he found himself undergoing commando training on Okanagan Lake with a\u00a0small team of 13 hand-picked Chinese Canadians.<\/p>\n

\"Operation

Operation Oblivion group. Hank Wong is in the back row, second from the right.<\/p><\/div>\n

Coming under Special Operations Executive in South East Asia (otherwise known as Force 136), their initial mission was to be dropped into Japanese-occupied China. The\u00a0group was\u00a0to seek out resistance fighters and help arm and train these groups in sabotage, espionage, etc.<\/p>\n

\"Hank

Hank Wong (L) with fellow Operation Oblivion member Eddie Chow.<\/p><\/div>\n

Since the Force 136 men were not considered regular army — but in fact spies or agents — they were not protected in the same way as normal soldiers. If caught, they were likely to be executed. All of the recruits realized they were on a suicide mission.<\/p>\n

Once the three-months of intensive training in the Okanagan was completed, the Operation Oblivion team was shipped\u00a0to Fraser Island, Australia for further training. There they learned stalking, silent killing, parachuting, sabotage.<\/p>\n

Their mission to China was eventually cancelled by the US who ended up taking charge of\u00a0much of the war in the Pacific. But Operation Oblivion team continued to train and be ready for a mission. And a number of the\u00a0men were parachuted behind Japanese lines.<\/p>\n

At the end of the\u00a0war, the men in Australia were more or less abandoned. According to Wong\u00a0“When the war stopped\u2026 they just told us \u201cgo home.\u201d They had no way of getting us home. \u2026 We had to work our way home… Anytime a tramp steamer came in and had no cargo to take back\u2026 they\u2019d put on soldiers. But we had to sign on and work our way back by chipping decks.”<\/p>\n

Read more about Hank Wong’s adventures below.<\/p>\n

\"Force

Force 136 men in Australia had to work on cargo ships to earn their passage home to Canada.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Australia-returning-home2\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Oral history story<\/a><\/p>\n

Learn more about Operation Oblivion<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Hank Wong is the last surviving member of an elite group of Chinese-Canadian soldiers who, according to the government, never existed<\/h1>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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By\u00a0PAUL HUNTER<\/a><\/span>Feature Writer<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Sun., Dec. 30, 2018<\/div>\n
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Sandi Wong was driving her father \u2014 a refined gentleman already in his 90s \u2014 through the Ontario countryside near London a few years back when he eyed a line of hydro towers.<\/p>\n

Surveying the metal forest, the retired auditor blurted: \u201cI know how to take those out.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Hank Wong then went into detail about where best to place the dynamite and how it was possible to disable an entire power grid with one strategic detonation.<\/p>\n

\u201cAh,\u201d thought his daughter after recovering her breath. \u201cI guess\u00a0that\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0what you were trained to do during the war.\u201d<\/p>\n

Silent assassination? Wong learned that too. Blowing up trains, jumping out of moving trucks, parachuting, he was proficient in all that. But his specialty, one that earned him the nickname The Trigger was small arms. Beretta, Luger, Japanese Nambu, name the pistol and he could efficiently dispatch an enemy soldier with any of them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Wong, who will turn 100 next year, is the last surviving member of Operation Oblivion, a covert military mission devised by the British secret service for 13 Chinese-Canadian volunteers during the Second World War.<\/p>\n

Essentially, the plan \u2014 one that sounds like a Hollywood action movie \u2014 was for that hand-picked crew of 13 to be trained in guerrilla warfare and then dropped behind enemy lines into Japanese-occupied China.<\/p>\n

Once in place, those soldiers were to connect with the Chinese resistance and subvert the Japanese by any means, including destroying communication towers, bridges and railway lines. It was considered a suicide mission. The men were issued cyanide capsules to be swallowed in the unlikely event they were taken alive.<\/p>\n

Wong didn\u2019t see the need for cyanide.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf they captured you, you were dead anyhow,\u201d says Wong, who moved from London into the Veterans Centre of Toronto\u2019s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre this year.<\/p>\n

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An Omni Television documentary,\u00a0Operation Oblivion<\/em>, outlining the planned espionage and its historical significance, was released five years ago and it introduced many Canadians to the little-known 1944-45 spy story. The men were sworn to secrecy for 25 years but even after that only partial details emerged. Hence, Sandi Wong\u2019s jolt of surprise when her father detailed his efficiency with explosives. And it was only when she and her dad sat down together to speak with the Star recently that she learned her father had done wartime surveillance with a mini camera.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were divorced from the Canadian army; it was all completely secret,\u201d says Wong, who uses a walker, one of his few concessions to age.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWhen I was recruited, even I didn\u2019t know what it was for. They don\u2019t tell you anything. You don\u2019t have a name, you have a number.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before the war, Canada, particularly in British Columbia, was largely inhospitable to those of Chinese heritage. They weren\u2019t recognized as citizens and they weren\u2019t allowed to vote. The Chinese Immigration Act, also known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, along with a punitive head tax stemmed the flow of arrivals from China. Culturally too, those of Chinese heritage were barred from some jobs and public amenities such as swimming pools.<\/p>\n

Some Chinese men in Canada believed serving in the war would earn them respect and eventually lead them to have full rights as citizens. The majority of the men volunteering for Operation Oblivion were from B.C.<\/p>\n

Another of the Oblivion members was Victoria-born Douglas Jung, who went from having no legal status to becoming the first Chinese-Canadian elected as a member of Parliament. He was later Canada\u2019s ambassador to the United Nations.<\/p>\n

In an interview available on the Veterans Affairs Canada website, Jung \u2014 who died in 2002 \u2014 spoke to why Chinese-Canadians signed on to serve despite the lack of respect from their birth country.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome of us realized that unless we volunteered to serve Canada during this hour of need, we would be in a very difficult position after the war ended to demand our rights as Canadian citizens because the Canadian government would say to us, \u2018What did you do during the war when everybody else was out fighting for Canada? What did you do?\u2019 So a few of us volunteered to serve,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Someone like Wong, who was born in London, and spoke none of the Chinese languages, was not considered a Canadian national. When he and four buddies, all white, tried to join the navy in 1940, his friends were accepted but Wong was rejected because of his race. He then went downstairs to volunteer for the army and was offered a job as a steward in the officers mess.<\/p>\n

Persistent, Wong travelled to Chatham and joined the Kent Regiment, only after the commanding officer there learned he\u2019d studied auto mechanics in high school. Initially, he became that man\u2019s personal driver. Relieved of that duty for speeding, he was trained as a weapon\u2019s specialist and deployed with his unit at various locations on the B.C. coast, and in Halifax and Niagara Falls. When his sister\u2019s husband died in 1944, Wong was granted compassionate leave to help her run her restaurant in Palmerston, Ont.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s where a rather straightforward soldier\u2019s life took a dramatic twist. One day at the diner a mysterious stranger with a British accent ordered fish and chips and then lingered at his table waiting for the other customers to leave. Finally, he identified himself as representing British intelligence and he asked Wong if he was interested in returning to active duty. Wong was told to report to Wolseley Barracks (now part of CFB London). From there he was flown to the west coast where, after a week of waiting and still with no idea why he was there, he was ordered to the Vancouver Hotel for an interview.<\/p>\n

Even though recruiters were surprised Wong spoke only English \u2014 he\u2019d been raised mostly in a London orphanage \u2014 he was taken on to the special force because of his expertise as a weapons instructor.<\/p>\n

Wong and the 12 other Asian men recruited by British Special Operations Executive were all anointed as sergeants \u2014 a rank, Wong says, \u201cdidn\u2019t mean a damn thing\u201d and wouldn\u2019t draw attention \u2014 and began an odyssey that would first see them train clandestinely for five months on the shores of Okanagan Lake near Penticton, B.C. There, they lived in tents, practised rolling out of moving vehicles, learned hand-to-hand combat and did gun manoeuvres with live ammo.<\/p>\n

In Wong\u2019s case, he was also taught to speak Cantonese; some of the men learned how to swim. They were all then shipped to Melbourne, Australia, on a circuitous route that included a lengthy stop in New Guinea. Once down under, there was more intense commando instruction. Wong earned his paratrooper\u2019s wings in Australia.<\/p>\n

It was there, in 1945, where the operation was suddenly scrapped. American general Albert C. Wedemeyer had been given control of the Allied efforts in China. In the documentary,\u00a0<\/em>it is speculated that he had no interest in sharing glory for liberating the area.<\/p>\n

While Wong and his small detachment awaited other deployment \u2014 five of the men did see action in Borneo \u2014 the Americans bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki leading to the surrender of the Japanese. That left Wong\u2019s crew in limbo. Because they were not officially Canadian soldiers \u2014 and weren\u2019t expected to return alive \u2014 no plan was in place to get them home. They were abandoned in Australia.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe just sat there,\u201d Wong says. \u201cNobody owned us and we couldn\u2019t get home. We had to work our way home on a freighter.\u201d<\/p>\n

When those men did get home, they faced another battle as Chinese-Canadians were still fighting for citizenship. The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1947 and they were given full rights.<\/p>\n

Jung, in that online interview, said he believes that wartime sacrifice helped pave the way for this to happen. Several hundred Chinese-Canadians ultimately served.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re very proud of that record and all this was done, bearing in mind, at a time when we did not have to serve Canada, but we thought in our guts that unless we did something like that, we could (not) show to the Canadian people, and to the Canadian government, that we were willing to work for everything that we wanted, which was no more than the rights of Canadian privileges, the rights that every other Canadian enjoys,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

In 2006, then prime minister Stephen Harper apologized for the \u201cthe racist actions of our past\u201d in regards to the head tax on Chinese-Canadian immigrants.<\/p>\n

Because Operation Oblivion was a clandestine British initiative, it isn\u2019t in the Canadian military records that Wong or the others participated in it. Sandi Wong says her dad didn\u2019t receive some of the medals or recognition other Chinese-Canadians who served were awarded. She said she is going to try to rectify that through Veterans Affairs Canada this year.<\/p>\n

After the war, Wong worked for General Steel Wares in London, as a heating and cooling lab technician. He then became an auditor for the steelworkers union.<\/p>\n

Wong, in his understated way, now says doing all that training for a mission and then not seeing action is just how it goes in the service.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the army, you do what you\u2019re told. You take what you get,\u201d he says matter-of-factly. \u201cWe were all ready to go. Then it was no go. As soon as they dropped the atomic bomb, they didn\u2019t want anything to do with us.\u201d<\/p>\n

— END–<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Henry Albert (Hank) Wong was born in London, Ontario in 1919. His mother passed away when he was very young, and Wong\u00a0was sent off to a Methodist orphanage for a few years. As a result, he never really learned to speak Chinese. Being from Ontario, Wong did not face the same level of discrimination that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":874,"parent":594,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-nosidebar.php","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-763","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","post-preview"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ccmms.ca\/staging\/9619\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ccmms.ca\/staging\/9619\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ccmms.ca\/staging\/9619\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ccmms.ca\/staging\/9619\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ccmms.ca\/staging\/9619\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=763"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.ccmms.ca\/staging\/9619\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/763\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3424,"href":"https:\/\/www.ccmms.ca\/staging\/9619\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/763\/revisions\/3424"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ccmms.ca\/staging\/9619\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/594"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ccmms.ca\/staging\/9619\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ccmms.ca\/staging\/9619\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}