Sandi Wong was driving her father — a refined gentleman already in his 90s — through the Ontario countryside near London a few years back when he eyed a line of hydro towers.Surveying the metal forest, the retired auditor blurted: “I know how to take those out.”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.“Ah,” thought his daughter after recovering her breath. “I guess that’s what you were trained to do during the war.”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.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.Essentially, the plan — one that sounds like a Hollywood action movie — was for that hand-picked crew of 13 to be trained in guerrilla warfare and then dropped behind enemy lines into Japanese-occupied China.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. Wong didn’t see the need for cyanide. “If they captured you, you were dead anyhow,” says Wong, who moved from London into the Veterans Centre of Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre this year.An Omni Television documentary, Operation Oblivion, outlining the planned espionage and its histor ...
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