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between the two main batteries, but being mobile the battery could have been at any position within the fort at the time of the surrender. This battery would have had its own mobile searchlights.
A wartime machine gun post is shown on some old maps beside the footpath leading down to the present pumphouse behind the new married quarters on the west side of the peninsula. Nothing is shown on the Ordinance Survey map and it is believed that this post would have been an improvised sandbagged strongpoint. Its purpose would have been to prevent the enemy coming up the path from the sea. It also may have had its own searchlight set up in a sandbagged emplacement.
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The story of the fierce fighting in the Stanley area and the last stand at Stanley Fort, which in the latter stages of the battle had no water supply and no communications link with the Fortress Headquarters in Victoria Barracks, has been told in Oliver Lindsay's book “The Lasting Honour", Tim Carew's "The Fall of Hong Kong", and the Volunteers' Little Red Book. It was in this final action on Christmas Day 1941, that severe damage was done to the Stanley Fort Batteries by intensive shell and mortar-fire bombardment from the Japanese counter-batteries combined with continuous air-raid attacks by Japanese dive-bombers throughout the day until the capitulation was made on written orders from Fortress HQ shortly after midnight.
From 1942 to 1945 Stanley was used as a civilian internment camp by the Japanese. In July, 1943 the batteries at Stanley Fort, then of course in Japanese hands, were again subjected to air-raid attacks this time from American dive-bombers. Fourteen internees were unfortunately killed in one of these bombing raids by a stray bomb. These air-raids continued intermittently until the end of the War. The war damage sustained by the bunkers, magazines, observation posts, and pillboxes which made up the batteries can still be seen today.
After the Liberation, Stanley Fort was again occupied by the British Army. The garrison was reinforced in 1949 and remained strong throughout the 1950s despite deployments to fight insurgency in Ma-