CO129-590-25 Accounts of events leading up to surrender and subsequent treatment of prisoners- etc 23-4-1942 - 28-9-1943 — Page 190

9.

have stood out for some months, if the military situation had

not gone to pieces.

218

And this applied, in my view, to Chinese

and Portugese, as well as to Europeans.

So long as there was

hope, they were willing to go on. Old Sir Shou-son Chow, his

eyebrows sprouting as belligerently as ever, gripped my arm in

Pedder St., on Dec. 23rd "Do you think", he roared, pointing at

Kowloon, "that we cannot beat those damned monkeys over there!"

Chinese in general were not quite as aggresive as that, but they

were prepared to stick and they did frantically want us to hold

out. All the central government (Kuomingtang) organisations in

the colony co-operated to the nth. degree.

During the last week we gave a degree of prominence in our

official bulletins to the approach of the relieving Chinese Army

that was hardly warranted by what facts we knew. We did this

of course deliberately with the aim of keeping up people's

spirits: and if by some miracle our reduced and exhausted garrison

could have held off the enemy for another two weeks, our official

optimism might well have been justified a hundred times over.

As I neared Waichow about the 30th of Dec. on my way to ChungKing,

I passed thousands and thousands of Chinese troops moving back

towards KuKong.

These were the armies which had intended to

relieve H.K. They were not very well armed but I am certain from

what I saw of them, and later of their commander General Yu Han

Mow, that they were in earnest.

In another two weeks, had we

been/

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