LCdr William Lore the first Chinese-Canadian to join RCN

Navy News / May 31, 2021

Warning: The imagery associated with this story of Canadian prisoners of war may be disturbing to some.

Born 1909 in Victoria, B.C., Lieutenant-Commander (LCdr) William Lore came from humble upbringings as a second-generation Chinese-Canadian and was the first Allied officer to step ashore to liberate Hong Kong at the end of the Second World War. LCdr Lore was persistent in his desire to serve Canada, a nation which did not originally accept his wish to serve.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, LCdr William Lore tried to join the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN), but was denied three times due to his ethnicity.

Finally in 1943, LCdr Lore was asked to join the RCN at the personal request of the Chief of the Naval Staff, Vice-Admiral Percy Nelles, who intervened on his behalf. Thus, LCdr Lore became the first Chinese-Canadian to join the RCN, and the first naval officer of Chinese descent in British Commonwealth navies.

After graduating from the Officer Training Course in June 1943, LCdr Lore served in Ottawa at the Operational Intelligence Centre at Naval Service Headquarters. He went on to serve in London, England in a similar capacity, before being sent to the South East Asia Command under Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten where he served in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and planned operations for the attack on Rangoon, Burma (now Myanmar).

In August 1945, LCdr Lore (who held the rank of Lieutenant (Navy) at the time) became the first Allied officer to enter Hong Kong since its capture by Japanese forces in 1941. In recognition of the sacrifices Canadian soldiers had made during the defence of Hong Kong, the commander of the British Pacific Fleet, with which LCdr Lore was assigned, chose him to lead a party of Royal Marines ashore.

LCdr Lore and his party liberated Canadian, British and Hong Kongese prisoners at the infamous Sham Shui Po Prisoner of War (POW) camp from Japanese guards who were still at their posts. While the Japanese guards first laughed at LCdr Lore, his persuasive attitude and the accompanying Marines convinced the guards of Japan’s surrender and the war was over.

LCdr Lore’s account of discovering the Canadian POWs is harrowing, and shows the dire conditions many suffered at the camp.

“I went into the first building I came to and it was very dark,” he said. “There were about 40 men in there, Canadians, sitting at tables and so forth. I said, ‘Hi you guys, don’t you want to see a Canadian?’ Then they ran forward and saw my cap badge. Those men were really skeletons. You could see their bones through the skin.”

It was a moving experience for LCdr Lore who had a duty to care for his subordinates.

“Then they were crying and weren’t ashamed of crying. And finally I cried, too, because they were telling me what they had suffered,” remembered LCdr Lore.

LCdr Lore was present at the official surrender of Japanese forces in Hong Kong, September 16, 1945.

After the war, LCdr Lore continued to serve as an officer on loan with the British Royal Navy (RN) until November 1946 when he returned to the RCN. It was during his post-war RCN service that he was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant-Commander.

Becoming the first Chinese-Canadian to serve in the RCN was not the only racial barrier LCdr Lore overcame in his lifetime. In 1929, he was accepted into McGill University in Montreal to study mining engineering. With the financial stress of the Great Depression, LCdr Lore had to cut his studies short and returned to British Columbia where he worked for a Chinese-language newspaper in Vancouver. In 1939, he became the first Chinese-Canadian to join the federal Public Service as a wireless operator for the Department of Transport.

After retiring from the RCN in 1948, LCdr Lore graduated from Oxford University with a law degree. He owned a law firm in Hong Kong, where he lived for the rest of his life, and passed away in 2012 at the age of 103.