SECRET.
5 193
It might help in estimating the value of this report if I added a note about Dr. Ride, the writer, who was a close personal friend of my own.
+
This 44 years old Australian, who fought in France in the last war, holds the post of Dean of the Medical Faculty in Hong Kong University. All his leisure for the past few years has been freely given to public service designed to prepare the Colony against the Japanese attack, which he foresaw as inevitable. Among many other things he organised and ran the Volunteer Field Ambulance and lectured at all hours to V.A.D. nurses in training. He set for himself the highest standard of citizenship and patriotism; apathy, wishful-thinking and inefficiency - all the things he mentions at the close of his report - he regarded with bitter and outspoken contempt. Fair minded and exceedingly popular, he was a greatly respected figure in Hong Kong. This report, and any others he might write,should be taken very seriously.
No comment from me on the contents of the report is necessary. But I would like to add this. If our Colonies were populated with Rides we would run an Empire which would be the marvel of the age. He expected from others the standards he maintained for himself and he looked to the Government for a lead. He took very hard muddles like the working of the Hong Kong evacuation scheme and scandals like the A.R. P. enquiry. He blamed the local Government for many things, often justly but sometimes hastily.
I think the cause of the fall of Hong Kong was on a much more fundamental issue than Dr. Ride raises in his report. It is no use blaming Hong Kong for lack of "fortress" standards of behaviour. A fortress is more likely to have two million soldiers and ten thousand civilians than, as in Hong Kong, two million civilians and ten thousand soldiers. It never was, and it could not be, a fortress in any real sense of the word unless we had adopted the Hitler-Mussolini technique of uprooting and expropriating about 1 million citizens and pushed them by force over the border, probably on to the points of Japanese bayonets.
Dr. Ride is, I think, justified in mentioning the lack of confidence in the Colonial Government; it was serious, but turned out to be superficial; as was proved by the fact that, when the test came, the grousers did their bit (and some died), and the Civil Defence Services worked reasonably as planned. (The clamour of the A. R. P. enquiry had hardly died down when the A. R. P. tunnels were protecting from Japanese bombs in safety and cleanliness about 1 million people a day).
I don't think that preparatory military training, however intense and thorough, could have done anything else than briefly postpone the Colony's fall. The key to the successful defence of Hong Kong was close collaboration and co-operation with China during the preceding year, on a basis of full mutual trust.
Ons mus M.
A
my
29th May, 1942.
useful o pertinent note
Savant
6/6
WrRolleston
8/6
Sn. C. Cater has seen
Sparking