Roy Chan, attached to British Military Intelligence during the Second World War

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Group photograph: Roy Chan is 3rd from left, front row. Canadians who became secret agents during the Second World War served with two British secret organizations: The Special Operations Executive (S.O.E.) and M.I.9 (Military Intelligence). Because they often could speak the local languages and blend in with local populations, Chinese-Canadians played a primary role in S.O.E.s in 1943 and 1944. It was a dramatic switch for the Chinese-Canadians who up until then had been prevented from playing any role in the defence of their new country. Roy Chan and four other Chinese Canadians were flown into Sarawak, in northern Borneo, on August 6, 1945. When the first S.O.E. team landed in this wild, jungle-covered land in 1942, they took great risks to enlist local mountain tribes in their fight against the Japanese. Fortunately, these local people detested the Japanese and became loyal and indispensable allies to the S.O.E. agents. The Ibans, one of the most aggressive of these head-hunting tribes, were a considerable help to S.O.E. in clearing this area of Japanese. The five Canadians, Roger Cheng, Jimmy Shiu, Norman Lowe, Roy Chan and Lewis King, joined a small British team which was gathering information on the movements of the Japanese as well as about conditions in prison camps in Kuching, the capital of Sarawak, where about 25,000 British prisoners of war were being held.

In Collection:
Subject Identifier
  • M00617
Date created Resource type Rights statement Extent
  • 1 black and white photograph
Physical repository Collection
  • Victoria’s Chinatown, a gateway to the past and present of Chinese Canadians
Provider Genre Is referenced by Date digitized
  • May 10, 2012
Technical note
  • 600 dpi tiff. Cataloguing metadata provided by GF. Migration metadata by MT.
Rights
  • This material is made available on this site for research and private study only. These images are provided with the consent of the Victoria Archives, and cannot be reproduced or copied without their permission.
DOI

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