Benny Proulx, MBE
If Benny Proulx hadn’t lived, Damon
Runyon would have invented him. The kid from Osgoode Street in Ottawa’s Sandy Hill district parlayed street smarts and a Lisgar Collegiate education into a storybook career in Asia. Few of his Ottawa friends knew that King George VI awarded him the MBE — Member of the Order of the British Empire — for gallantry in the fall of Hong Kong.
Benny learned to type at Lisgar. When Canadian Pacific advertised for a male stenographer for Japan, he applied. He got the job, moved to Yokohama, and lived in Asia for the next 21 years.
He represented MGM and Paramount Studios in Shanghai, distributing their films in South China, and he had an apartment in Kowloon and a country house several kilometres outside the city. A popular member of the Hong Kong Jockey Club, he had a seat on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and, in 1939, he joined Hong Kong’s Royal Naval Volunteers. His wife and two sons enjoyed an amah (Asian nanny), cook, maid, gardener, and houseboy. The Proulx family enjoyed the good life — hotel dining and dancing most evenings, and weekends of golf, tennis, and dips in warm Pacific bays. At age 40, Benny had it all. War seemed far away — until the Imperial Japanese forces attacked.
Monday morning, December 8, in Hong Kong was Sunday afternoon, December 7, in Pearl Harbor. Benny, an amateur jockey, was out for a 6 a.m. gallop at Happy Valley racetrack. At 7:30, as a club steward served Benny a breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast, and coffee, he heard air raid sirens, looked up, and saw a V-formation of 15 Japanese bombers. “I could see red balls of the Rising Sun clearly on their wings.”
Benny’s Royal Navy Volunteers duty post was the Fort Stanley mine-watching station, whose only defence was one 23-centimetre gun. “From my post, I watched helplessly as the Japanese dive-bombed our installations, dropping their eggs with neat precision. Bombs burst among the congested buildings of Hong Kong, vomiting flame and tile, soil and human flesh in brown cones. Then came the order: ‘Enemy has landed. Destroy your station. Move to the hills and join the military.’
“In a few minutes we were a roaming band of hillbilly guerrilla fighters, driving around in search of the enemy. Now that the Japs were in our midst, we could only form small, besieged units, defending each fort, building or hotel in helpless isolation.”
Within five days, the Japanese army occupied Hong Kong. Benny joined one of the pockets of resistance in close-quarter fighting. He fought alongside the British Middlesex Regiment before joining the soldiers of Canada’s Royal Rifles. He threw hand grenades at attackers. He manned Lewis and Bren guns. When his own .303 rifle went missing, he grabbed a dead Japanese soldier’s weapon.
On Christmas Day, Benny sat down to a glum Christmas dinner of “soup, roast chicken, vegetables, tinned peaches with tinned cream and one drink. The dining room rocked as shells whistled through the building and exploded along the upper corridors. For a few moments there, we were gay — not just in our speech — but in our hearts. Briefly, it was Christmas.”
At 4:30 p.m., the commanding officer (CO) announced: “The colony has surrendered.”
Benny’s first thoughts were for his wife and children. “I had a mental image of precisely what would happen when those drug-filled, battle-thirsty Jap soldiers reached our house. Something in me seemed to whisper. Somehow, I reached them by phone and ordered them to drive at once to the Repulse Bay Hotel without stopping for anything. They obeyed to the letter. Shortly afterwards, our front lawn was the scene of a bloody battle, but my family had been saved.” Benny’s family carried Irish passports and, because Ireland was neutral, they were allowed safe passage home.
At 6 a.m., Boxing Day, orders came for all British personnel to proceed to the Royal Naval Dockyard. The Japanese Rising Sun flag replaced the Royal Navy Ensign over the dockyard. The entire Hong Kong garrison was interned. Benny’s reception was the butt-end of a rifle in his back and, when he fell, another painful blow to his kidneys. His nimble brain stored up all his conquerors’ atrocities — bayoneting, beatings, beheadings, and arbitrary executions. He reconstructed the savagery in his best-selling 1943 book, Underground in Hong Kong.
In it, he wrote: “We knew well enough that the enemy was not taking prisoners during battle and that anyone surrounded and captured could expect no mercy. They could not even hope for a clean death.” Japanese soldiers “were taught to kill ruthlessly and to save ammunition. That is why so many of our soldiers were tied with their hands behind their backs and executed with bayonets instead of bullets.” Enemy soldiers “quickly learned to hold life cheaply. Their ‘practice’ killings are authentically pictured on postcards that can be bought in many parts of the world. The last ones I saw were propped up in a shop window in Capetown. They showed the Japs receiving bayonet practice on live Chinese coolies.” On the stone floor of his prison cell, Benny wondered if “my friends made good dummies for Japanese bayonets and I prayed that some of them might still be alive.”
During a month of internment, Benny thought only of escape. He discussed the possibility with his “messmates,” but found no takers. Two officers of the Royal Netherlands Navy overheard him. They were survivors of a Dutch submarine that had been sunk by Japanese shellfire. The sub sat on the bottom for 30 hours while Japanese destroyers prowled overhead. When the oxygen ran out, the submariners were issued breathing apparatuses and ordered to abandon ship. They followed a rope attached to a surface buoy, stopping several times to decompress. Though in shark-infested waters for 10 hours, oil seeping from the sub kept the predators away. At dawn, Japanese destroyers sighted them and rushed at them, full speed, killing the commander and three crew members.
Benny and the two Dutch submariners made their break for freedom at low tide, midnight, January 27, 1942, making a six-metre drop over a sea wall into soft mud flats covered by 31 centimetres of water. Then, they entered one of Hong Kong’s main sewer tunnels and waded through a foul smelling soup of thick sludge and rotting sewage. The first exit they tried was smack dab in the middle of the compound of Japanese army headquarters. The second exit was more successful. Once out, they now had to face climbing Mount Parker, Hong Kong’s highest peak.
On the way, they passed a deserted pillbox. Outside the entrance, three Indian soldiers lay dead. Further on, they smelled the sickly odor of six rotting corpses. Two were Indian army soldiers, one a British soldier from the Middlesex regiment, and the three others, Canadians.
All six had been bayoneted.
Benny and his companions scoured the area in search of trenching tools “but we could find no tool or spade with which to dig their graves.” There was water everywhere, but none was safe to drink. “Every creek and brook and reservoir was contaminated. You could see dead bodies lying about in the water.”
Benny’s route to freedom took him to his country home. There, he thought he might find food, water, and money. His house was in darkness. It was empty. Every room had been stripped of furniture. Floors were littered with rubbish, paper, empty tins, decaying food scraps, bloody bandages, and excrement. Japanese soldiers had used every room as a toilet. Even the walls, ceilings, and woodwork were smeared with human waste. There was no food in the house, and the water taps were bone dry. Outside, on the front lawn, were the swollen bodies of several bayoneted Chinese civilians.
Without so much as a backward glance, Benny left his house to rejoin his two Dutch submariner friends. He cast a look along his beach “in the wild hope that there would be a craft anchored off shore. There was none.” After two hair-raising days scrambling across the island and several close calls, they managed to negotiate the purchase (with an IOU) of a small boat and oars from a fisherman. Benny’s Chinese benefactor was a trusting soul. He accepted a cheque for 300 Hong Kong dollars for a boat and oars.
“A thousand years passed during the next 24 hours. Suspense joined the forces of thirst and hunger and there was no sleep for us … We were able to squeeze a few mouthfuls of drinking water from our wet clothes.” All they had to do was row across water patrolled by Japanese gunboats. Their destination was China — “still Jap territory. We’d still have to dodge Japs and walk about 200 miles [322 km] until we’d be among friends. I reached into my breast pocket and took out my crucifix and, holding it in my hand, sat praying like a fool.”
The Chinese mainland was five kilometres away. Miraculously, no Japanese patrol boat came near the small craft. No one challenged them. Nine metres from China, their dory hit a submerged rock, splintered, and capsized. They dog-paddled the last few metres to shore. Benny’s war wasn’t over yet; 59 days after his escape, he reached the headquarters of General Claire Chennault, commanding officer of a group of volunteer U.S. fighter pilots, The Flying Tigers. He served in General Chennault’s operations room for two months, until the Tigers were disbanded in July 1942. When the Flying Tigers “stood down,” he returned to Canada with hopes of joining Canadian forces. But, at age 40, Benny was “over the hill” — too old for active service. After the war, Benny came home to live in Ottawa.
Retired Ontario Supreme Court Justice Ken Binks remembers him fondly as a likeable character: “When I first met him in the early 1950s, he reminded me of James Cagney, the diminutive movie actor. Benny had the right build for a jockey. At the time, he was selling imported British cars. Shortly after that, at a time when society insisted that you get caught committing (or appear to be committing) adultery in order to obtain a divorce, Benny became a private detective.
“Some thought he took on the airs of Sam Spade, the famous 1930s gumshoe. From time to time, questions were raised about his success rate (some unkind critic said he couldn’t have caught anyone in flagrante delicto even if he tripped over their bodies at the corner of Bank and Sparks Streets), but he persevered in this calling for a number of years. You could find him any morning at 8:30 in our law office or the parking lot back of the Albion Hotel.”
Benny ended his years as a process server, runner, tout, confidential messenger, and confidante to many courthouse journalists and prominent members of the criminal bar and judiciary. Ken Binks recalls: “You could always tell when Benny received a new retainer from a suspicious spouse. Immaculately dressed in a blazer, ascot, and beautifully pressed grey flannels, (shades of the Hong Kong Jockey Club), he escorted the two senior secretaries from the law offices of Binks and Chilcott out for Friday lunch at Madame Burger’s elegant Hull restaurant — to sample the famous hors d’oeuvres tray, as he ordered what he described as a dry, very dry ‘maw tini.’”
Benny was living on the top floor of an apartment in the Alta Vista neighbourhood (which he irreverently called “God’s Waiting Room”) when he died in 1984 at age 83. He spent hours on his balcony observing takeoffs and landings at Uplands Airport with his high-powered field glasses. True to his Hong Kong Jockey Club background, after his death, thousands of discarded lottery tickets were found under his bed. He never did quit trying to pick a winner.