[
    {
        "id": 207515,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1975",
        "page_number": 283,
        "title": "RAS-1975",
        "content_text": "CAPTIVE SURGEON IN HONG KONG\n\n275\n\nA direct assault on the Japanese homeland using conventional weapons was being prepared at the time the bombs were dropped. In spite of their reduced nutrition and lack of supplies of all kinds, there seems little doubt that an Allied invasion of Japan would have been bitterly resisted and would have proved very costly. The cost of the invasion of the sacred territory will now never be known. It seems quite possible that in the prevailing mood at that time, reprisals of all kinds might have been ordered to be taken upon any Allied personnel in Japanese hands. The execution of the airmen captured in the Doolittle air raid on Japan in 1942 comes to mind.\n\nI do not intend to examine the morality or the political implications of the use of the atomic bomb at all, nor the fact that two were dropped. Opinions on these matters will always differ. I confine myself here to what I see as the facts as they affected us. A Japanese-Chinese war in the neighbourhood of Hong Kong would have been prolonged; situations would certainly have arisen in which our safety would have been jeopardised, and at best, many of us might not have survived at all. The decision by President Truman to use the atomic bombs resulted in our release almost overnight. Seen in contrast with the other possibilities which might have been envisaged, this was a wonderful outcome.\n\nA VIEW IN PERSPECTIVE\n\nThirty years after the events and after making allowances for the discreet phrasing of my diaries and for the effects of the passage of time in scaling down the few peaks of elation and levelling up the much more numerous troughs of depression, I conclude that we, the staff and patients in the British Military Hospital, Hong Kong, fared better than many other prisoners in Japanese hands. The published accounts of others, most of them written nearer to the events than my present story and so perhaps more influenced by passion, are far too numerous and ring true. I am allowing myself now to speculate on the somewhat privileged position we enjoyed, privileged that is by the standards of those who were Japanese prisoners.\n\nFirstly, our unit fell into Japanese hands as a fully equipped and staffed hospital with a full complement of patients seriously wounded in action, and hence, perhaps, in the eyes of our captors, more worthy of consideration than men who had surrendered, even though",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 215817,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-2002",
        "page_number": 116,
        "title": "RAS-2002",
        "content_text": "49\n\nSo whether Allied LoC were disrupted by the Japanese or a typhoon, the end result would be the same: troops and supplies prevented from achieving their objectives, and Allied strategy would be hampered. The Allies could do something about the Japanese, but not much about a typhoon.\n\nAs nasty as it is, a typhoon does have a redeeming factor. The rain that accompanies it can help alleviate the water supply problem in a place as dependent on rainfall for its fresh water as Hong Kong (which itself has no rivers). During wartime, an adequate water supply was a most invaluable resource for both sides.33\n\nThe B-29\n\nThere was another important reason for recapturing Hong Kong: to use it as a base from which to bomb Japan. Before the war, China was thought to be the best place from which to do this.34 During her conquests of 1941-1942, Japan had wisely expanded her perimeter far enough so that she would be impervious to retaliatory bombing raids by Allied land-based aircraft, or so she thought. The Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in April 1942 was as unorthodox as it was daring, having been accomplished by land-based bombers operating from aircraft carriers, but it was not practical to replicate on a large scale. If the Allies wanted to devastate Japan, they needed a real land base and a bomber with enough range and bomb capacity to reach Japan.\n\nThat bomber was the Boeing B-29 Superfortress. It was classified as a Very Heavy Bomber (VHB), and it was, with a maximum bomb load of 10 tons, a range of 3,600 miles (5,800 km), and a top speed of 358 mph (577 kph). But it could not display all of these qualities at the same time, for speed and range decreased as the bomb load increased. The B-29 had been originally designed to operate from across the Atlantic to hit Germany, but once the older Allied bombers were performing adequately against Germany by 1943, the decision was made to operate the B-29 in the war against Japan. Initially, China was believed to be the best place from which to operate the B-29s.\n\nSoutheastern China, of which Hong Kong was a part, was deemed the best part of China to begin B-29 operations against Japan.35 The prerequisite, of course, was a strong enough LoC being established",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278",
        "rank": 0
    }
]