The first in a three part series about the WWII campaigns fought by Canadians, using archive footage and dramatised readings from soldier's letters and diaries. It questions whether the sacrifices were necessary or the result of bad leadership and misguided policies. In each film, two Canadian veterans return to the battlefields, retell their experiences and meet with the men they fought against. Canadian soldiers re-enact actual battles. The films caused a sensation when they were screened in Canada and were the subject of a Senate Inquiry and a $6000 million lawsuit. The first programme looks at the `sacrificial battle' to save Hong Kong against the advancing Japanese when 1,973 young Canadians, deemed `unfit for combat' died facing overwhelming odds or began a long ordeal as prisoners of war. In particular 2 survivors revisit Hong Kong and reveal a horrifying saga of massacres of the wounded, and their experiences of starvation, ill-treatment and forced labour as Japanese prisoners.