HONG KONG, DECEMBER 1941 — JULY 1942
A. D. BLACKBURN*
77
The following is an account of the personal experiences of my wife and myself at Hongkong during the Japanese attack and afterwards.
I was still in Queen Mary Hospital when hostilities began. My leg had so far recovered that I was able to hobble about on crutches and the doctor had decided that he could now safely proceed to operate on my ear which had become completely obstructed with scar tissue. The operation was fixed for 8 a.m. on December 8th. I was waiting to be taken to the theatre when, almost exactly at 8 a.m., the wailing of the sirens and the noise of planes announced the beginning of the blitz and the operation had to be abandoned.
Meanwhile my wife was at the War Memorial Nursing Home recovering from an operation for appendicitis. All patients whom it was possible to remove were evicted from the hospitals to make room for war casualties. My wife was turned out on December 10th and I on December 12th and Witham (Tea Adviser to the Chinese Government and a friend of ours) arranged for us to be billeted with him and his wife in their flat on the Peak, which the Hongkong Government had declared an evacuation area. There we stayed throughout the hostilities.
There was fairly heavy artillery fire and air bombing but the Japanese seemed to be concentrating on military objectives (particularly Mt. Austin barracks and two field gun batteries in our neighbourhood), and civilian property around us was not
* Editor's Note. Sir Arthur Blackburn was Counsellor of the British Embassy in Chungking in 1941. On June 29th, 1941, his house there was totally destroyed by a Japanese bomb. Two people were killed, and fifteen injured, including Sir Arthur, who received injuries to his knee and ear. The injury to the ear required operation, as did the injury to the knee, which had become infected. Sir Arthur and his wife were evacuated to Hong Kong to enable these operations to take place, arriving at the end of November, 1941. Sir Arthur was a witness to the Japanese attack on Hong Kong in December, 1941, and he and his wife were interned from January 22nd to the end of July 1942 in Stanley Camp. He and his wife with other captured diplomatic staff were then repatriated, leaving Shanghai on August 17th, 1942. Sir Arthur was asked by both the Foreign Office and the Red Cross to report on conditions in Hong Kong and in Stanley Camp. These reports were completed by the end of September, 1942, even before the Blackburns docked in England. Because of the general interest of these reports, and particularly because of their contemporary character and absence of post-war hindsight, it is felt useful to print them here. The Journal owes copies of these interesting documents to the kindness of Mr. C. Blackburn.