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The 5th/7th Rajputs and 2/14th Punjab Regiments suffered
a relatively smaller proportion of casualties during the actual. fighting but very heavily later. For while prisoners of war, several hundred of them died of starvation, neglect and ill treatment when they persistently refused to obey the order of the Japanese to take up arms against their King-Emperor.
Eight hundred of the garrison were wounded in action. Half of these were admitted to the queen Mary Casualty Clearing Station, a portion of which I had allocated for service personnel.
The figures for those killed quoted above do not repre- sent anything like the sum total of losses among our troops, For example, several hundred died of sickness in the Hong Kong internment camps; hundreds went to a watery grave when being transferred to Japan in 1942; and not a few died of malnutrition and disease, resulting from heavy manual labour in Japanese coal mines on an entirely inadequate diet.
A few (17), including a high-ranking officer, were executed in Hong Kong in 1943 for alleged espionage.
Deaths in action included a former President of the British Medical Association (Hong Kong and South China Branch). This officer (temporary it. Colonel, R. A.M.C.) was struck down while bravely attempting to protect the wounded in the military hospital of which he was in charge. Several of the wounded were bayonetted in their beds, four British women nurses were assaulted and three were killed, and a second R.A.%.C. officer and several Chinese orderlies were murdered in the same building. Similar incidents occurred on the civil side.
Accurate figures for battle casualties in the civilians in the Colony and Leased Territories are, unfortunately, not available This is partly due to Japanese action in destroying records of the Medical Department, and partly because it was difficult to differ- entiate between those killed during the December fighting and those killed by the Japanese after the surrender.
For three months following the fall of Hong Kong my burial and cemetery staff were still engaged in collecting bodies from the hillsides and streams.
Apart from a considerable num er of persons whose wounds were dressed at first aid posts, approximately 2,000 of the severely wounded had to be admitted to casualty clearing hospitals, of which the queen Mary treated 800.
It would be reasonable to assume that actual deaths among civilians from weapons of war during hostilities numbered 2,000. It was, however, in the first and subsequent years of the Japanese occupation that the civilian population suffered most severely.
Just over 61,000 burials in a population of 1 millions were notified in 1:41.
Over 20,000 burials were effected in 1942, although the population had been reduced to little over a million as the result of voluntary exile, forced repatriation, starvation and wholesale shooting.
It became a common sight during the occupation to see bodies of persons who had died of hunger littering the streets, and there was ample evidence of cannibalism.
At the time of the Japanese collapse in August, 1945, nearly a million civilians had been killed, had died of starvation or had disappeared from Hong Kong, leaving behind about 500,000 to 600,000, mostly gaunt individuals, many going downhill rapidly with tuberculosis, beri-beri and the like.