In response to the widespread criticism of C Force, McDonnell later stated in the same 2006 interview: "We won the fucking war...The people who are whining don't understand that war is a terrible thing. If you volunteer to fight for your country, it's not going to be a Sunday school party...It was tough, but the Canadians in the prison camps were magnificent...staved to death, but never disobeyed orders.". In the same manner, D'Avignon in his 1948 letter written in broken English defended the record of C Force as he wrote: "If such a battle was given to the Japanese and there casualties prove it sure wasn't given by untrained soldiers. It took the Japanese seventeen days to capture Hong Kong with 6000 untrained soldiers to defend it and it took the same army eight days to defeat 75000 trained soldiers of Singapore...If during the seventeen days we fought it gave a chance to Australia to get reinforcement from England and USA. I think it was an honor for Canadian soldiers to participate in saving Australia." In a summary of the controversy over C Force, the British historian Tony Banham wrote in 2015: "Clearly the Canadian authorities did not send their most battle-ready formations to Hong Kong. They sent two unready battalions with a varied quality of officers, generally good NCOs and a wide spectrum of men. They also—through unfortunate timing – sent them too late. This work does not attempt to explore those limitations , but to point out that to accept them and then conclude that everything that went wrong afterwards was therefore 'the fault of the British' is unrealistic".