Tommy C.G. Wong, a World War II veteran from British Columbia, attends the opening ceremony for the exhibition on Chinese-Canadian contributions to the war at the Chinese Canadian Military Museum on May 9. hatty liu / for China Daily

When Canada entered the Second World War in Europe, another conflict already had been brewing at home about the status of its Chinese population.

In the days when even Chinese born in Canada did not have full citizenship rights, and Chinese immigration to Canada was still banned under the Exclusion Act of 1923, there were debates in the federal government, the provinces and each branch of the military on whether Chinese Canadians should be allowed to serve. Like many young Chinese Canadians in the early days of the war, British Columbia veteran Tommy C.G.

Wong was eager to volunteer, “but when some of us went to enlist, they wouldn’t accept us”, he recalled. “They said they weren’t accepting any Chinese.” Wong and more than 100 Chinese Canadians would eventually end up serving in Force 136, a branch of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) whose creation was responsible in many ways for turning the tides of discrimination.

Although Chinese Canadians could usually volunteer in the army in all of the provinces, there were veterans in BC like Wong who recalled Chinese being turned away. BC had the largest Chinese population in Canada at the time, but along with Saskatchewan, it was one of two provinces that did not grant Chinese Canadians the right to vote.

Because provincial voting rights automatically granted the federal franchise, this meant that the Chinese in BC, who were the majority of Chinese in Canada, had no voting rights on the federal level.

BC also was instrumental in getting the federal government to place a nationwide ban on Chinese and Japanese Canadians being called up to active service under the National Resources Mobilization Act of 1940 (NRMA).

Due to the strong associations between military service, patriotic duty and the concept of full citizenship, there was a dreaded possibility that these ethnic groups would demand the right to vote if they were called up to service.

Faced with discrimination

In a letter addressed to Prime Minister Mackenzie King, BC Premier T.D. Pattullo stated that this possibility was something “which we in this province can never tolerate”.

Neill Chan, another BC veteran who belonged to the same unit as Wong, remembered that when the war started in 1939, he took part in military training for air cadets with the rest of the student body at Vancouver Technical Secondary School.

“As the war went on, the white students all went off to war,” Chan said “But they didn’t want [the Chinese] since we were ‘immigrants,’ so we stayed in school.”

Chan also got a registration to serve in the Chinese Nationalist Army, but lacked the funds to travel to China. In Vancouver Chinatown at the time, both he and Wong recalled, there were many campaigns to support China in the war against Japanese aggression, and the prospect of helping out in the Chinese war eff ort was a major motivation behind Chinese Canadians’ attempts to enlist.

Wong recalled that it was only “when the war progressed in the South Pacifi c and the Japanese were sweeping all of Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia and Burma, then all of a sudden the Allied forces thought they could use more Chinese help over there”.

Marjorie Wong (no relation to Tommy), a historian of Chinese Canadians in World War II, has claimed that the “necessary political change in Ottawa” to reduce discrimination against Chinese Canadians during the war resulted directly from the British War Office’s request for the Canadian government to send Chinese to serve in the SOE.

In her book, The Dragon and the Maple Leaf, Wong noted that the SOE asked to recruit a greater number of Chinese Canadians than were voluntarily enlisted in the Canadian Army. The National Defence Department pessimistically believed it could not call up even 150 men for the SOE to recruit.

Nevertheless, in the summer of 1944, the Cabinet War Committee fi nally permitted Chinese Canadians to be called up for active service. After 1942, draftees called under the NRMA had the choice of serving in the home defence or to go overseas. The majority of Chinese draftees who chose to go overseas were loaned to the SOE in Southeast Asia and the Pacifi c, which operated under the code name Force 136.

Their bilingualism made them suited to interpretation and communication tasks. If necessary, their appearance and their Chinese-language skills also made them ideal candidates for training local resistance fi ghters in Malaysia and Burma and operating behind enemy lines.

“We were supposed to be on a secret mission,” Tommy Wong said. “We would have to parachute into Burma during the night and meet up with the local Chinese, since we could communicate with them, and train and organize the local people in how to resist the Japanese advancement.” The SOE was a secret organization formed by the British Ministry of Economic Warfare in July of 1940. Its initial purpose was to assist in the training and arming of resistance movements in occupied parts of Europe after the British Expeditionary Force was driven out of the European Continent. Some intelligence was also gathered in the course of these operations.

The SOE in Southeast Asia went under the code name Force 136. Its purpose was to help the resistance in occupied parts of Malaysia, Burma and China itself. Basic training for the Canadian recruits took place in Canada, Britain, Australia and India.

According to Marjorie Wong, few people knew during or after the war what the SOE’s purpose was. Most of its members were only aware of their own part in it. The tasks that its members performed were eclectic and varied across regions and situations.

The Canadian media were told not to give publicity to the SOE’s recruits, and there would be no disclosure made as to what these Chinese Canadians were being trained or employed in, though they could publish stories about Chinese-Canadian soldiers employed in other areas of the military.

When the war ended in August 1945, Chan and Wong were based in the bushes north of Calcutta waiting for their missions to start.