Person

Sam, Douglas Kam Len

• Sam, K.L. Douglas
• Sam, Kam Len

1918-1989

Kam Len "Douglas" Sam was born in Victoria, BC on April 6, 1918. He was the eldest of nine children born to Mr. and Mrs. SAM Wing Wo, who immigrated to Victoria from [恩平 Yinping / Enping] county, [廣東 Guangdong] province, China.

While a teenager at Victoria High School, a classmate inscribed in his yearbook, “Doug has aspirations to become the Chinese Lindbergh.” Not just interested in aviation, Sam possessed great linguistic abilities, developing working fluency in Cantonese, Mandarin, French, and Japanese over the course of his career.

After the outbreak of WWII, Sam attempted to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1941, but was barred for being Chinese. He was successful a year later when the government removed racial clauses in entry rules, and his Chinese ancestry later proved to be an asset.

While in the RCAF, Sam flew 28 terrifying raids over “Fortress Europe” in 1943 and 1944, including a mission over Nuremberg that saw 94 Allied bombers go down and another sortie over Berlin that resulted in 73 planes lost.

In early July 1944, Sam was presumed dead after his Halifax bomber was shot down in an air raid over Northern France. According to his son, Trevor Sam, Douglas’ grandmother remained certain he was alive after consulting a joss stick oracle in Victoria’s Chinatown temples, despite being a devout Anglican. She was correct.

Sam was alive, having parachuted narrowly to safety, and was now embedded in the French Resistance actively fighting the Nazi occupation through espionage and intelligence gathering. His orders from London were to stay in France to coordinate the escapes of other Allied airmen.

Resistance members provided him with clothing and forged papers to identify him as an Asian student trapped in France by the German occupation. Dodging the Gestapo and German army in numerous close calls, he witnessed the Holocaust in France while rising to leadership in the Resistance. When the American 3rd Army entered Reims, not far from Paris, their street maps were provided by Sam’s Resistance cell, already engaged in street fighting with air-dropped weapons. This was to be Douglas’ last fight in WWII and, for his efforts, he was awarded the high honour of the French Croix de Guerre with a Silver Star.

After reuniting with his joyous family, Douglas remained committed to the Canadian Armed Forces. He later served as a counter-insurgency specialist during the Malayan Emergency in the 1950s. He made use of his language skills to break up Chinese Communist efforts under the oversight of British Intelligence.

In November 1967, after 25 years of continuous service, including stints in London and Washington, Douglas retired from the RCAF with the rank of squadron leader, the most decorated Chinese Canadian ever. However, after retirement, the National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa was asked to reassign him with the Primary Reserve, Canadian Armed Forces as a lieutenant colonel until his honourable release in March 1978. He was the first, high-ranking Lieutenant Colonel in Chinese Canadian history.

Douglas also joined the Department of Employment and Immigration in 1967 as an intelligence analyst, rising to become the department’s chief of immigration intelligence for the British Columbia-Yukon region. After an historic and groundbreaking career, Douglas died in 1989 at age 71.

His son Trevor sums up his father’s dreams this way: “I think that from the time he was old enough to see the blue sky, he wanted to grasp it; he wanted to fly. And so, he did.”

Description supplied by collector/curator