8.
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and some stragglers had been seen on the streets, exhausted battle.
stained men from regiments which for years had asked only for
the chance to chase the Japanese clear back from Kowloon to Tokyo.
The public knew that these regiments, rehearsed and drilled, had
manned prepared defences of great strength beyond the Kowloon
hills; and they knew too that the authorities expected the se
defences, built with millions of dollars, to hold for weeks. And
yet within a few hours of the Japanese coming up against them,
our defenders were back in H.K. and the strong line was in enemy
hands. No wonder the Colony was jumpy. No wonder heads turned
when doors opened.
Yet within twenty-four hours things had settled down again.
Feople went stolidly but not too grimly about their jobs. Then
a few days later the East Point defences had been smashed complet-
ely, and from several vantage points on the island little boats
could be seen plying without opposition back and forth from Kowloon
Bay ferrying more and more enemy troops into our very backyard,
Europeans eyebrows were no more than slightly raised. When the
Japanese, confidently in possession of Kowloon, twice sought to
scare the island into surrender by ninety hellish minutes of
concentrated assault with planes, artillery and mortars, followed
by a demand for capitulation made under cover of a white flag,
there was genuine indignation. "Do they think this in Indo-China?
To hell with them!".
have/
My own impression of the civil population is that they could