the-battle-for-hong-kong-1941-1945-hostage-to-2016 — Page 1

The Battle for Hong Kong 1941–1945

Hostage to Fortune

Other books by Oliver Lindsay CBE FRHistS

The Lasting Honour: The Fall of Hong Kong 1941

At the Going Down of the Sun: Hong Kong and South-East Asia 1941–1945

A Guards General: The Memoirs of Major General Sir Allan Adair Bt (Editor)

Once a Grenadier: The Grenadier Guards 1945–1995

Whither Hong Kong: China’s Shadow or Visionary Gleam? (with others)

<p>&nbsp;</p><p><br /></p><span><!--more--></span><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>

THE BATTLE FOR

HONG KONG

1941–1945

HOSTAGE TO FORTUNE

by

Oliver Lindsay

With the memories of John R Harris

This edition first published in 2005 by

Spellmount, an imprint of

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2016

All rights reserved

© Oliver Lindsay 2005, 2007

© Maps Denys Baker 2005, 2007

The right of Oliver Lindsay and JohnR. Harris to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’srights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 8054 8

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Maps

Foreword

Part 1: The Beat of Drums

1 The Beat of Drums

Part 2: When Time Was Young

2 When Time Was Young

3 The Outbreak of War in Europe

4 An Ocean of Change

5 Visions of Delight

Part 3: Remember Them with Pride

6 The Vulnerable Outpost

7 Battle Stations

8 Shingmun Redoubt: The Vital Ground 8th–10th December 1941

9 Nothing but Darkness Ahead 10th–13th December 1941

10 “Clay Pigeons in a Shooting Range” 13th–17th December 1941

11 Triumph or Disaster: The Japanese Landings 18th–19th December 1941

12 Hell’s Destruction: 19th–20th December 1941

13 Slaughter and Manoeuvre: The Japanese Advance West and South 20th–24th December 1941

14 The Surrender of Hong Kong: Christmas Day 1941

15 Truth is the First Casualty in War

Part 4: Hostage to Fortune

16 Shamshuipo POW Camp and the Escapes

17 Argyle Street Officers’ Camp

18 The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru

19 Operations Most Secret

20 The British Army Aid Group and Fresh Disasters

21 Sinister Developments: Stanley Internment Camp, the Japanese Occupation and the Privileged Nightmare

22 The Calm after Thunder: Returning Home

23 New Worlds to Find: An Architect At Last

24 Retribution

25 “Good and Gallant Leadership”

Bibliography

Despatches

War Diaries

Reports and Notes

Selected Articles

Diaries

Files

Websites

The Confusion of Events

Oliver Lindsay CBE FHistS is a military historian, lecturer on the war against Japan and Editor of The Guards Magazine. After a career in the Army, he was a fundraiser for disabled youngsters. In keeping with the family tradition, he is a member of the Queen’s Bodyguard for Scotland.

His previous books include Lasting Hour: The Fall of Hong Kong 1941 and At the Going Down of the Sun: Hong Kong and South East Asia 1941–1945.

John R Harris TD is the only survivor at the time of writing of the small band of prisoners of war of the Japanese who smuggled top secret information to the British spying organisation in China in 1943. After the war he became a successful architect with an international practice.

Front jacket illustration: Colonel Tanaka at Lei Mun Strait, across which his Japanese regiment launched their attacks on 18 December 1941. (Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum)

Back jacket illustration: The view, painted by John Harris, from Argyle Street POW camp beyond the electrified wire, looking north. Below Lion Rock are huts containing survivors of the two Indian Battalions. In the foreground is a vegetable patch where secret messages were hidden. The Japanese aircraft have taken off from Kai Tak nearby. © John Harris 1943

To all those Allies who fought and died in the Far East 1941–1945.

Each of them was a hostage to fortune.

“I submit that although I and my forces may have been a hostage to fortune, we were a detachment that deflected from more important objectives, such as the Philippines, Singapore, or perhaps even Australia, an enemy force that consisted of two first line divisions, one reserve division, corps artillery, about 80 aircraft, and a considerable naval blocking force. Strategically we gambled and lost, but it was a worthwhile gamble.”

The post-war report of Major General Maltby CB MC

General Officer Commanding British Troops in Hong Kong in 1941

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to John Harris for allowing me to edit his memoirs. I have known him for 25 years and have great admiration for him. His wife, Jill, gave me invaluable and astute guidance and support for this exciting project. I alone am responsible for any errors.

I must express my warmest thanks to Field Marshal Lord Bramall for writing the Foreword. I had the privilege of serving under him in Hong Kong in the mid 1970s. He has been a friend of John for many years too.

My scruffy, illegible drafts, covered by Tipp-Ex and confusing changes all stapled together, were turned into an immaculate format fit for the best of publishers. For this and more, I am greatly indebted to Marilyn Thompson, John’s secretary.

Special thanks are due to my wife, Clare, for her love and patience, not only when I was researching and writing this book, but also over the last 40 years of our very happy life together.

I have been extremely fortunate in being able to interview over 100 veterans of the campaign and former civilian internees, largely in the late 1970s onwards. This book is their story. They faced bitter adversity. Nevertheless the story reflects some glorious deeds, great loyalty and proud endeavours. It has been a privilege to have the opportunity to write about them. I hope you enjoy the book.

Oliver Lindsay

Sherborne

August 2005

List of Maps

(Drawn by Denys Baker. For consistency, the spelling of place names has been kept to that of 1941)

1. Hong Kong and the Far East

2. Hong Kong and the New Territories 8th–12th December 1941

3. Hong Kong Island

4. Repulse Bay and Stanley Peninsula

Foreword

by Field Marshal The Lord Bramall KG, GCB, OBE, MC, JP

Volume I of the official history, The War Against Japan published back in 1957, devoted only 44 of its 568 pages to the defence of Hong Kong. This tended to obscure the fact that unlike some other defeats suffered, in those early years, by the Allies at the hands of the Japanese, no shame or disgrace whatsoever could be ascribed to the inexperienced, ill-equipped and often untrained British, Canadians, Indians and local Hong Kong garrison, when they heroically held up the overwhelming Japanese attack for nearly three weeks.

Now, to help put matters in their proper perspective and to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Hong Kong, we have this new book by Oliver Lindsay. This is an authoritative, detailed and exciting account of the whole of the campaign using hitherto unpublished material.

In the 30 years that Oliver Lindsay has been studying the war as it affected Hong Kong and the events surrounding it, he has interviewed many of the survivors in Britain, Canada and in Hong Kong itself; he has been able to meet veterans in the Colony who could explain to him exactly what happened on the precise ground over which they fought. For many years he also ran battlefield tours for Servicemen in Hong Kong. All of this has given him a deep insight into the problems confronting the Canadian Brigade, the Royal Artillery, the Royal Engineers, the British and Indian Infantry Battalions, the Hong Kong Volunteers and some of the small Royal Navy and RNVR units, all of which had to face the ferocity of the Japanese attack as, later, did the nursing sisters who suffered appalling atrocities.

In the central part of the book Lindsay gives a graphic and revealing account of the ‘nightmare’ battle itself, leading to the surrender on Christmas Day 1941 of the first British Colony to fall to the enemy in the Second World War. All of which was indicative, he believes, of the fundamental weakness of democracies hoping above all things to avoid having to go to war, leading to deficiencies in force levels, equipment and training. But this informative book also contains the authentic, vivid and hitherto unpublished reminiscences of John Harris, a young architectural student who served in the Royal Engineers. He is the only survivor today of that small group of prisoners of war who smuggled secret information to and from the British intelligence organisation in China in 1943. They were operating with great gallantry under the very eyes of the inquisitive and brutal Japanese guards. The hardships and indignities of life in both the prisoner of war camps and the civilian internment camp were endured with fortitude and stubborn good humour despite the horrors of cholera, diphtheria and deficiency diseases. This throws new and heartrending light on the sacrifices made by those who defended Hong Kong.

Above all, this very readable book reflects supreme courage. I commanded the British forces in Hong Kong in 1970 and began to take a great interest in the battle that had been fought there 30 years before (pointing Oliver Lindsay in the direction of his subsequent research). I visited the military cemeteries there on a number of occasions and saw the graves of those who made the supreme sacrifice, including five recipients of the George Cross.

Those who read these chapters today can truly, I believe, remember those who fought and suffered in the defence of Hong Kong with considerable pride.

Dwin Bramall

Field Marshal

Part 1

THE BEAT OF DRUMS

by Oliver Lindsay

CHAPTER 1

The Beat of Drums

Hong Kong, Saturday 6th December 1941. The day of bright sunshine started no differently from any other relaxed weekend in the Colony’s long history. Yet it turned out to be a day nobody there would ever forget.

The newly arrived Governor, Sir Mark Young, attended a fête at Christ Church in Waterloo Road. Happy Valley racecourse was crowded, as usual. The Middlesex Regiment played South China Athletic at football. In the evening at the massive Peninsula Hotel in Kowloon both ballrooms were packed for the ‘Tin Hat Ball’ which hoped to raise the last £160,000 to purchase a bomber squadron which the people of Hong Kong planned to present to Britain.

It could have been a typical weekend – but on that same day, following secret instructions from Tokyo, a large number of Japanese civilians left the Colony, most of them by boat to Macao and then on to Canton.

* * * * *

Some 3,700 miles to the east of Tokyo, Japanese midget submarines planned their approach to eight battleships of the American Pacific Fleet at anchor at Pearl Harbor. Beyond them lay another 86 American ships. The American aircraft nearby, and also in the Philippines southwest of Hong Kong, “were all tightly bunched together, wing tip to wing tip, for security against saboteurs,”1 despite orders to disperse them.

Some four weeks earlier, on 5th November 1941, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the C-in-C Combined Fleet, was warned by Imperial Japanese Headquarters that war was feared to be unavoidable.

General Douglas MacArthur in Manila remained convinced that there would be no Japanese attack before the Spring of 1942. As the commander of the American and Filipino troops in the Philippines, and a man of immense prestige, few contradicted him.

The Japanese regarded the Philippines as a “pistol aimed at Japan’s heart”. An intercepted coded message from Emperor Hirohito’s Foreign Office to the Japanese Embassy in Berlin referred to breaking “asunder this ever strengthening chain of encirclement which is being woven under the guidance of and with the participation of England and the United States, acting like a cunning dragon seemingly asleep”. This was a surprising and rather silly claim because the Japanese had already seized every port on the Chinese coast except Hong Kong.

On 27th November the US Navy Department sent out a message which began most ominously. “This despatch is to be considered a war warning… an aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days… the number and equipment of Japanese troops and the organization of naval task forces indicates an amphibious expedition against either the Philippines, Thai or Kra Peninsula, or possibly Borneo.”2

J C Grew, the US Ambassador in Tokyo, believed that the Japanese negotiations with the Americans in Washington were “a blind to conceal war preparations”. He warned his Government that Japanese attacks might come with dramatic and dangerous suddenness. The Ambassador’s estimate of the situation was confirmed by intercepted secret messages from Tokyo to Washington; they stressed the urgency of bringing the negotiations to a favourable conclusion by 29th November since “after that [date] things are automatically going to happen”. Roosevelt gloomily concluded that America was likely to be attacked within a week.

On 29th November British, American and Dutch air reconnaissance was instituted over the China Sea; Malayan defences were brought to a higher state of readiness. The Japanese had earlier received intelligence of the arrival of the Prince of Wales and Repulse in the Far East.

All Japanese forces were notified on 1st December that the decision had been made to declare war on the United States, the British Empire and the Netherlands.

Four days later Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, the Commander in Chief of Britain’s Eastern Fleet, flew back to Singapore from Manila after conferring with MacArthur and Admiral Tom Hart, MacArthur’s naval counterpart. Phillips, who had four days to live, left empty-handed; the Americans could spare neither men nor weapons.

Hong Kong and the Far East

That weekend Churchill was at Chequers with Averell Harriman. He was President Roosevelt’s ‘defence expediter’ in England, who later became the American Ambassador in Moscow and then London. They discussed the progress of the Germans on the Russian front, while awaiting news of the British forces in Libya. But the difficulty of discovering Japanese intentions was to the forefront of their minds.

Meanwhile on 6th December President Roosevelt in Washington started drafting a personal appeal to Hirohito in a final attempt to avoid war. George Marshall, the US Army’s Chief of Staff and senior general, prepared a dispatch to MacArthur with a final warning that war seemed imminent. His vital information subsequently went astray; radio communication with the Pacific broke down the next day.

Marshall’s opposite number in London, General Sir Alan Brooke, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, had been in post six days. Brooke that same day was enjoying his first quiet morning, hoping to slip home to his family later that afternoon. “However, just as I was getting ready to leave, a cablegram from Singapore came in with news of two convoys of Japanese transports, escorted by cruisers and destroyers, southwest of Saigon moving west,” he wrote in his diary. “As a result the First Sea Lord at once called a meeting of Chiefs of Staff.” They examined the situation carefully but, understandably, could not decide whether the armada was sailing towards Siam (Thailand), Malaya or “whether they were just cruising around as a bluff. PM called up from Chequers to have results of our meeting phoned through to him.” A second message came from Singapore shortly afterwards. “It only said that the convoy had been lost and could not be picked up again.”3

At 7.20 p.m. Singapore sent an immediate signal to the Royal Air Force in Hong Kong ordering them to adopt “No. 1 degree of readiness”. Wing Commander H G Sullivan, who had arrived in Hong Kong six days earlier, gazed at the signal with dismay for he had nowhere to conceal his three obsolete Vildebeeste torpedo bombers and two Walrus amphibians. All of them were over ten years old with a maximum speed of 100 mph. “It had been suggested that dispersal bays be carved out of the hills, but like everything else in Hong Kong these did not materialize,” he later reported.4 The RAF aircraft remained at Kai Tak airport.

That evening Major G E Grey 2/14 Punjabis, who was commanding the troops on Hong Kong’s mainland frontier, “received a police message stating that three Japanese Divisions (38,000 men) had arrived at To Kat, eight miles from the frontier on the previous evening”, recorded the second entry in Hong Kong’s War Diary.5

Major General C M Maltby, the recently arrived General Officer Commanding British forces in the Colony, wondered whether the report was nonsense or if he should mobilise the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps, order all his 12,000 troops to their battle stations and start activating the demolition plans. Should he ask the Governor, Sir Mark Young, to summon a meeting of the Defence Council for a lengthy discussion at Government House the following day?

The General’s ADC, Captain Iain MacGregor, was about to be confronted by the Chairman of Hong Kong’s largest and most distinguished bank, who was to arrive fuming at Flagstaff House demanding to see the General. “The Chairman paced the room, all the time telling me the whole thing was bloody nonsense, and that only two days before he had received a coded cable from one of his managers who had been dining the previous evening with the C-in-C of the Japanese Kwantung Army,” MacGregor remembers. The C-in-C had assured the manager that under no circumstances would the Japanese ever attack their old ally, Great Britain. “‘Good God, Iain,’ said the Chairman, ‘you’re a civilian really, a Far East merchant. You know how these Army fellows flap. You know our intelligence is far better than theirs…’”6

General Maltby was not flapping. He was confident that the Royal Scots, Punjabis, Rajputs and Volunteers to the north of Kowloon could hold their defensive positions on the frontier and the Gin Drinkers’ Line for seven days. This would allow sufficient time to complete demolitions of installations on the mainland of value to the enemy. The two newly arrived Canadian Battalions were at Shamshuipo Barracks but they had seen their battle positions, while in the musty, heavily camouflaged pill-boxes on Hong Kong Island, the machine-gun Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment was largely standing-to.

One topic of conversation on that last Saturday of peace in the Far East concerned Duff Cooper, who had been sent by Churchill on a special mission to establish whether the Government could do more about the situation. Cooper, accompanied by his wife, Lady Diana, had met MacArthur before visiting Burma, and then Australia where he met wives evacuated from Hong Kong. Most were demanding to rejoin their husbands in the Colony and he promised them that he would listen to their husbands’ complaints. Fortunately it proved too late to reunite the families in Hong Kong.

One man who had no wish whatsoever to see his wife return from Australia was Major Charles Boxer The Lincolnshire Regiment, Maltby’s senior Intelligence Officer. He infinitely preferred his mistress, Emily Hahn, an American writer who had once been the concubine, it was said, of Sinmay Zau, a frequently impecunious philosopher, publisher and father of a large family. Zau had introduced her to opium and for a time she had become a serious addict; she was also addicted to cigars. She had given birth to a daughter by Charles Boxer in October.

Hahn and Boxer hosted a cocktail party at his flat on that Saturday evening, 6th December. There were no Japanese present, naturally. But Boxer, who had served with the Japanese Army in the 1930s, was regarded by some as being too friendly with them. On the previous day he had enjoyed a lunch with a Japanese General beyond the frontier at which the General had casually asked Boxer whether he could obtain permission for him and his staff to attend a forthcoming race meeting at Happy Valley.7

Major Charles Boxer asked his guests where they would like to dine that night – a smart hotel perhaps, an exclusive restaurant or should they link up with friends at the ‘Tin Hat Ball’ in the prestigious Peninsula Hotel? Yet Boxer was visibly preoccupied; he knew that the massive Japanese armada had been spotted by British reconnaissance aircraft steaming along the coast of French Indo-China (now Vietnam) and that its destination was unknown. He planned to visit the frontier the following day to see what the Japanese were up to. Meanwhile, however, he accompanied Emily Hahn and their guests to a local restaurant for a buffet dinner.

It was just as well that they had not attended the Ball. Towards midnight the orchestra there had just started to play the current favourite, The Best Things in Life are Free, when suddenly the music stopped. T B Wilson, the local president of the American Steamships Line, appeared on a balcony above the dance floor. Urgently waving a megaphone for silence, he shouted, “Any men connected with any ships in the harbour – report aboard for duty.” After a second’s pause he added menacingly: “At once.” The dance was forgotten. Men hurriedly said “Goodbye” before jumping into the waiting rickshaws.

Thirty miles to the north, the officers of Colonel Doi Teihichi’s 228 Imperial Japanese Regiment studied markings in crimson ink upon their maps, while their men sharpened their bayonets and prepared for battle. Near Canton, 45 Japanese fighters equipped with machine guns examined air photographs of their targets, which were Kai Tak airport and Shamshuipo Barracks. Their objective was the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong.8

Notes

1. Manchester, William, American Caesar, New York: Dell, 1978, p. 224.

2. Report of the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, US 79th Congress, 2nd Session, Document No. 244.

3. Alanbrooke, FM, War Diaries 1939–1945, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001, p. 208.

4. Letter, Sullivan to Oliver Lindsay (OL).

5. This Hong Kong War Diary is on Army Form C 2118 and is headed Preliminary Summary. It is undated and unsigned, and contains amplification in manuscript.

6. Interview MacGregor/OL.

7. Alden, Dauril, Charles R Boxer: An Uncommon Life, Lisbon: Fundação Oriente, 2001, p. 133.

8. Colonel Doi Teihichi’s statements are in National Defence Headquarters (NDHQ), Ottawa.

Part 2

WHEN TIME WAS YOUNG

With memories by John R Harris

Edited by Oliver Lindsay

CHAPTER 2

When Time Was Young

John R Harris begins his memoirs

Luck has played a formidable part in my life. Looking back over the years – I’m now aged 86 – I count my blessings. How fortunate I was that I didn’t suffer the same fate as my two closest friends in Hong Kong: they were killed in terrible circumstances by the Japanese in December 1941. Then, on 25th September 1942, I was among the prisoners of war who were assembled on the camp parade ground. The Japanese picked men on my immediate left and right to be sent to Japan on the Lisbon Maru. Why didn’t they choose me? Some 1,816 men were incarcerated in the holds. The ship carried only two life rafts for the POWs. Of them, 842 were killed or drowned when the ship was torpedoed. I could so easily have been one of them. And later, dangerously ill with diphtheria, with little chance of survival when our Japanese guards were withholding vital drugs, how was it that, in a month when 41 Canadians died in Shamshuipo’s primitive hospital, serum was given to me in the Argyle Street POW isolation hut, thereby saving my life?

Then I look at the post-war years. I rejoice at my marvellous good fortune in meeting Jill, a fellow architectural student who became my wife. I wouldn’t have succeeded without her. The third big test we faced together in 1953 – an insurmountable challenge it seemed at the time – was an international open competition to be the architects to design and supervise the construction of the State Hospital Doha (Qatar). There were 74 entries from firms around the world. The assessors awarded us first prize. Thus we gained international recognition.

Of course there have also been years of turmoil, of traumatic change, of catastrophic events, particularly in the Far East, the repercussions of which I saw at first hand for five most dreadful years. But I should start at the beginning.

* * * * *

My father was born in Surrey during a snowstorm in 1888. Aged 17, he joined the 2nd Middlesex Royal Garrison Artillery Volunteers as a Territorial nine years before the First World War. Shortly after the beginning of the war, by which time he was a commissioned officer, he was billeted with a Mr and Mrs Alderson at Melrose in Hersham, Surrey; and in April 1916, when he was home from France on leave, he married their youngest daughter, Freda.

By 1915 he was in France fighting with the 36th (Ulster) Division in such fearsome battles as Neuve Chapelle, the Somme and Fleurs. Such was his gallantry that he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and mentioned in Despatches in 1916 for his part in the first tank battle at Combles.

After more bitter fighting at Verdun, Vimy Ridge and the third battle of Ypres, fate caught up with him; he was badly wounded at Passchendaele. Threatened with a soulless hospital in the Midlands, he persuaded the authorities to send him instead to a private hospital near Bond Street in London where Freda could visit him. They had been married for scarcely a year. Back in France, he was dismayed at the lack of fitness of the men joining his battery. But good fortune smiled on him for he survived the war, commanding a brigade for several months before its end.

I was born in 1919 at Melrose near the railway bridge at Hersham, which still exists. The doctor came from Esher in a pony and trap. My first memory was watching, with my sister Rosina from a bedroom window, Father Christmas coming up the drive on Christmas Day. He carried a bulging sack and lantern. In the evening we all danced around the tree with Father Christmas before the excitement of opening our presents. Unfortunately, to our horror, Father Christmas’s mask fell off – revealing our father. There was a scream and roars of laughter while he ran for the door!

My first school, Ovingdean, was behind Rodean girls’ school. Glancing at our school photograph, I see there were 67 of us, wearing blazers and open neck shirts. A clergyman, with a large shaggy dog resting uncomfortably on his knees, sits alongside nine other adults. What happened to them all, I have no idea. The pleasant buildings still exist. My parents had chosen Ovingdean because it had its own farm and should have been especially healthy. Paradoxically, the farm’s cows nearly proved my undoing for I contracted tuberculosis. There was no easy cure in those days: there were no antibiotics. I was sent to a bungalow on the coast near Mundesley-on-Sea, Norfolk for the Summer so that I could attend a tuberculosis sanatorium nearby each day. Aged eight, I stayed there six months, doing little more at first than lying in the sun. My lungs were scarred for life. On the other hand, I won a 440 yards race before leaving Ovingdean, so I was not physically handicapped thereafter.

From the age of 11, I wanted to be an architect. I was admitted in 1933 to the bottom 4th form at Harrow, thanks to a dedicated master, Chris Carlisle, who interviewed me.

Over the years I have taken some pride and comfort in the fact that one of my predecessors had also been admitted into that same bottom form some 40 years earlier. “I found I was unable to answer a single question in the Latin paper. I wrote my name at the top of the page. I wrote down the number of the Question ‘1’. After much reflection I put a bracket round it thus ‘(1)’. But thereafter I could not think of anything connected with it that was either relevant or true,” wrote my predecessor. “Incidentally there arrived from nowhere in particular a blot and several smudges. I gazed for two whole hours at this sad spectacle: and then merciful ushers collected up my piece of foolscap with all the others and carried it to the Headmaster’s table. It was from these slender indications of scholarship that Mr Weldon drew the conclusion that I was worthy to pass into Harrow,” recorded Winston Churchill in My Early Life.1

I suspect that Churchill was inclined to exaggerate his early ignorance so that in later years his brilliant success would be enhanced. We had to fag for older boys. Having entered at the bottom, it took me three years to work my way up to a respectable level when I would no longer have to clean the prefects’ shoes, carry up their coal, deliver messages and so on. A pointer to my future career was the fact that I won the Henry Yates Thompson Art prize for the last two years.

I much enjoyed the art class excursions in the Summer and painting with watercolours. Maurice Clark, our art master, took us by train to Amersham and other pleasant places. True, many of the other boys only came for the opportunity to get away to smoke, which was strictly forbidden. One of the tasks Mr Clark gave me was to measure part of the school’s war memorial, a building designed by Sir Herbert Barker. I was not to know that 12 years later I would become an architectural assistant in that firm.

Maurice Clark, whose paintings are still to be seen in books about Harrow, always exhibited in the Royal Academy. One day in 1935 the weekly art class was in progress. The rule was that all forms had an hour’s art every week. Of course for many boys it was a bore. On this occasion the class had been arranged in a circle facing a bowl of fruit. (There was usually a bowl of fruit or a bust of Nero.) Every boy had a sheet of drawing paper, a pencil and a rubber.

Suddenly, sitting next to me, I O Liddell picked up his rubber and threw it at Maurice Clark. It hit him on the back of the neck. He swung round just in time to see Liddell’s arm going down by his side. Maurice Clark leapt at Liddell, who ran out of the Arts School, down the steps and along the High Street. Maurice Clark pursued him, gown flowing behind; Liddell soon outpaced the master. By this time the art class were assembled on the terrace watching the dramatic chase.

On 3rd April 1945 Liddell, now a Captain in the Coldstream Guards, cut the wires of demolition charges while in full view of the Germans, thereby enabling his Company to capture the vital bridge on the Ems intact. He was subsequently wounded and died before he knew he had won the Victoria Cross.

When we left Harrow we gave our friends leaving photographs; in my case I was given 32. I checked recently and found that, within seven years of leaving the school, 14 out of those 32 friends were dead. They were all under the age of 25. Boys of my age group took the brunt of the Second World War.

In the General Strike my father drove a steam engine, with others, from Walton to Waterloo station – a schoolboy’s dream. He became a very successful surveyor admired by the profession. Such was his success that in 1928, at the height of the slump, he purchased Brook Place at Chobham in Surrey. The house was a Grade II listed building dating back to 1656.

My father had started in practice in 1911 and joined a firm called Widnell and Trollope, whose first appointment had been as surveyor for the building of the Houses of Parliament. In 1928 he became the quantity surveyor for the new London Passenger Transport Board headquarter offices at St James’s Park Station. His big professional breakthrough may have come when Dr Holden of Adams Holden and Pearson Architects and he appeared for an interview before the Senate Committee for the construction of London University’s new buildings in Bloomsbury, including the tower behind the British Museum. The Chairman of the interview panel asked Dr Holden what he and my father would do if they were awarded the commission. “Our best,” was Holden’s reply. They were chosen, despite strong competition. By 1930 they were working for the London Transport Board on many stations as the system expanded, and also on Westminster Hospital’s new buildings in Horseferry Road under Lionel Pearson and Sir Bernard Docker. Further successes followed.

There was little freedom at Harrow. Nevertheless we received a good all-round education and most of us learnt the importance of self-discipline. Above all, I met many people who became great friends later in life – the secret of a good school. Harrovians go out of their way to help each other. I was reminded of this in the desperate days in the prisoner of war camp in Hong Kong in 1942. Three of us Old Harrovians gave invaluable mutual support to aid our survival. (Incidentally Harrow Songs are unique: some of the chapter headings of this book are taken from them. Churchill used to visit Harrow to listen to Harrow Songs, sung by the whole school in Speech Room, during the darkest days of the war.)

Several hundred of us in the school’s Officers Training Corps spent ten days in a training camp at Tidworth. I can’t claim to have particularly enjoyed it. Boys from other schools were there too, but we had little opportunity to meet them.

Throughout my schooldays we were increasingly conscious of the growing threat from Germany. President von Hindenburg had handed over to Hitler in 1933. That same year Germany withdrew from the Disarmament Conference in Geneva and left the ineffective League of Nations. In March 1935 Hitler announced, in breach of the Versailles Treaty, the reintroduction of conscription and the building of an army of 550,000 men. The following year Hitler ordered the remilitarisation of the Rhineland in contravention of the Versailles and Locarno Treaties.

Jumping ahead almost 70 years to the early 21st century, we have seen how NATO troops, led by the Americans, moved into the war-torn former Yugoslavia to put a stop to ethnic cleansing and to arrest murderous war lords. Then, following the terrorists’ attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in September 2001, we witnessed their deployment into Afghanistan to restore democracy and to bring to justice some of al-Qaeda, led by the notorious Osama bin Laden who is held responsible for much international terrorism. The US-led Coalition’s controversial invasion of Iraq in the Spring of 2003 succeeded in removing Saddam Hussein, who had invaded Kuwait in 1990 and undoubtedly gassed tens of thousands of Kurds. Is one valid lesson of history that despicable, evil dictators, such as the potential Hitlers and Mussolinis of this world, should be sought out and brought to account before they wage war and commit crimes against humanity? Forty million people lost their lives in the Second World War.

Reverting back to the mid 1930s, we were simply in no position to act decisively. On the contrary, a very small minority of people in Britain looked at Hitler with admiration. “He was applauded, like Mussolini, for restoring order and national pride, bringing economic revival, and, not least, for suppressing the Left and forming a bulwark against the menace of Bolshevism,” writes Ian Kershaw in the November 2004 BBC History Magazine. “Admiration was not confined to the fanatics who supported the British Union of Fascists. Hitler had also impressed others in high places, those among the social and political elite of the land.”2

Britain’s military weaknesses were due to our priority to put money into education, welfare and so on. We all wanted peace; the horrors of the First World War were fresh in our minds. Making friends with Hitler, or buying him off, seemed to offer the best prospect of avoiding another war – call it appeasement if you wish, but I didn’t give much thought to such matters then.

On leaving Harrow in the Summer of 1937, I was accepted for the five-year course to become a student at the Architectural Association in Bedford Square. Run by architects for architects, it was one of the premier schools in the United Kingdom.

My architectural course consisted of a long sequence of different subjects. I enjoyed it immensely, often working late into the night (as my architect son, Mark, does to this day!). At weekends I used to bicycle a lot, sketching churches and other buildings around Surrey, with pencil and watercolours as at Harrow, but now for my diploma. In 1937 my father and I had watched from Park Lane the Coronation procession, seeing King George VI pass by.

Although I never considered myself cut out to be a soldier – far from it because I always wanted to be an architect – I volunteered to join the Territorial Army, which was growing fast. Many of my fellow students had chosen to do likewise. Naturally we preferred the Royal Engineers for we were familiar with construction and Sapper tasks. We started to take part once a week in exercises in London’s Duke of York’s Headquarters – now largely sold off to the private sector. In August 1939 we went to the TA camp on the cliffs above Dover and were taught how to dig trenches and make redoubts, using an outdated handbook published more than 20 years earlier. We could see naval convoys on the horizon going we knew not where, and wondered if one day we would be amidst them.

Time was marching on. The previous year, on 12th March 1938, German troops had entered Austria. The following day, Germany annexed the country. Western powers looked on with disapproval but did nothing. America’s policy of isolation was scarcely a factor; we did not regard the Americans as ‘sleeping giants’ for they were set on non-intervention; their military capability, like ours, was, we now know, shockingly inadequate.

We feared that war was imminent.

Notes

1. Churchill, Randolph S, Winston S Churchill: Vol I, Youth 1874–1900, London: Heinemann, 1966, p. 106.

2. Kershaw, Ian, ‘Making Friends with Hitler’, BBC History Magazine, November 2004, pp. 13–16.

CHAPTER 3

The Outbreak of War in Europe

Czechoslovakia developed, during the years that followed its founding in 1918, into the most progressive, democratic, enlightened and prosperous state in Central Europe. But it was gripped by one domestic problem – its minorities of different nationalities, including 250,000 Sudeten Germans, although the Sudetens had never belonged to the German Reich. Hitler harangued his military leaders with the need to destroy the Czechoslovakian state and to grab its territory and inhabitants for the Third Reich. Despite what had happened in Austria, the leaders of Great Britain and France did not grasp this.1 Appeasement was still paramount in unexpected quarters.

Rarely in the history of The Times has such abuse descended upon the newspaper as it did on 7th September 1938 when its leader advocated the handing over of the Sudetenland to Germany, with a hint that this policy “has found favour in some quarters” which led everyone to assume that the editor, Geoffrey Dawson, was relaying the British Government view. The Foreign Office disowned the leader in its communication with the Czech Government, but the damage had been done. The period of The Times being almost a great Department of State and its editor almost an honorary member of the Cabinet was over for good. Its influence declined accordingly.2

The Queen, the glossy magazine, was equally off-net. Persecution of the Jews was dismissed as unreal, and was claimed to be Germany’s own domestic problem. There were attempts in the social journal to laugh it off as ridiculous or even humorous. A great joke was made of Hitler’s decree that shops should only be allowed to sell dolls with Aryan features. The Queen estimated that in the matter of Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, his efforts were undoubtedly beneficial and there was nothing self-seeking about him. Mussolini was nominated in 1933 as one of the great personalities likely to become an immortal, along with the Prince of Wales, Charlie Chaplin and the Chief Scout.3

Having occupied Czechoslovakia with impunity in 1938, Hitler believed that the British and French would still not fight were he to further his territorial ambitions by invading Poland.

On the news of the German-Soviet pact signed on 22nd August 1939, the British Government at last took decisive steps: orders were issued for the immediate manning by key parties of the coast and anti-aircraft defences to protect vulnerable points. 30,000 reservists for the RAF, Air Auxiliary Force and overseas garrisons were called up. All leave was stopped throughout the fighting Services.4

On 25th August 1939 the British Government proclaimed a formal treaty with Poland. According to Goering’s evidence at Nuremberg, Hitler immediately stopped the planned invasion of Poland to see if he could “eliminate British intervention”. Accordingly, he postponed the invasion from 25th August to 1st September to enter into direct negotiation with Poland, as Prime Minister Chamberlain desired.

A year earlier, the journalist Leonard Mosley had an unexpected meeting with Hitler at Bayreuth. Hitler was initially in a good mood and told Mosley there would be no war over Poland. “Almost a year has passed since Munich was signed,” Mosley replied. “Then Britain and France were unprepared. We had no troops, nor arms, nor planes. Now we have had almost a year to get ready…” Hitler turned on Mosley sarcastically, his pale face growing ruddy with passion, and his stubby forefinger with its bitten fingernail jabbing towards him. “A year to prepare! What foolishness is that!” growled Hitler. “The position of Britain and France is worse – far worse – than in September 1938. There will be no war, because you are less in a position to go to war than you were a year ago …” Hitler proceeded to boast of the dramatic increases in Germany’s ships, aircraft, tanks, guns and manpower. “I remember wondering who was supplying Hitler’s information about our arms programme, and how near he was to the truth,” concluded Mosley gloomily.5

Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke (as he became) revealed in detail in his 1939–1945 War Diaries, published in 2001, Britain’s lack of preparation for war. Our guarantees to Poland meant little to Hitler, just as the eleventh hour reinforcement of Hong Kong, to take place only weeks before the Japanese invasion of the British colony, had not the slightest deterrent effect on Japan’s plans. Hitler had postponed his invasion of Poland not to reach agreement with that country, but instead to give the British Government every opportunity to escape from their guarantee. We can see how Hitler had miscalculated: any further appeasement from Chamberlain as the crisis intensified was unacceptable to the House of Commons following Germany’s unprovoked attack on Poland on 1st September. “There was no doubt that the temper of the House was for war,” wrote Churchill after the short but fierce debate.

* * * * *

Following my TA camp from the end of July to mid August with my Field Squadron of the Royal Engineers at Dover, I returned home. I had planned an architectural tour in my car around Italy before my TA unit was mobilized on about 27th August at the Duke of York’s Barracks. On Sunday 3rd September I tuned the wireless to hear the Prime Minister’s broadcast that we were at war with Germany.

Immediately the broadcast was over Londoners heard the prolonged, sinister, wailing air raid siren announcing, they assumed, the approach of German bombers. When they emerged from their shelters, they found that about 35 cylindrical silver-coloured balloons had been raised above London’s roofs and spires to interfere with German bombing runs.

To my great disappointment, I had to stop my architectural course for the duration of the war. Now a Corporal, I was billeted at 21 Cadogan Square, which was my father’s house. He had tried to let it, but couldn’t because of the impending war. We had no furniture and were issued with two blankets and slept on the filthy floors. Fortunately, the food was excellent: it was delivered at regular intervals in a dirty demolition lorry from a top class Knightsbridge restaurant. Each morning we went for a run in Hyde Park, frightening the wild rabbits near the Serpentine.

I was foolish enough to believe, like some of my friends, that the war would be over in six months. Ignorant people like me thought that Germany was incapable of fighting another one and could not compete with our Royal Navy.

In October my Field Squadron paraded as usual – to be told that it would deploy imminently to join the British Expeditionary Force in France. About ten names were then read out indicating who were to be sent instead to the Royal Engineer Officer Cadet Training Unit at Malta Barracks, Aldershot. For better, or probably worse, my name was one of them. It never occurred to me for a second that I would end up fighting the Japanese rather than the Germans.

The six-month course was a good one. We were taught the necessary skills to support the combat formations – the infantry, the gunners and armoured units. Briefly, in defence, that meant the construction of field defences, laying anti-tank mines, and the improvement and construction of obstacles. In attack, we covered obstacle crossing, demolition of enemy defences such as bunkers, mine clearance, bridge or ferry construction. Other phases of war included withdrawal, which involved learning about blowing up or cratering roads, bridges, ammunition dumps and so on.

There was no time or inclination to teach us infantry work. I had no instruction therefore in such matters as ambushing enemy patrols, platoon skirmishes to capture an objective, or withdrawing from strategic positions under fire: all skills which I would need in Hong Kong.

The six months were not too intense; we certainly had good instructors. I was able to go home probably every other weekend. My father bought me a 90cc motorbike which was very economical on petrol; this was now rationed. The Colonel commanding us gave several dances in Aldershot. There was still no active fighting in France, virtually no bombing, and the food rationing scarcely affected us. We were certainly enjoying a good life compared to some others.

On 22nd March 1940 a photograph was taken of our course, Number 3 Class of 142nd OCTU. Forty-two of us are looking as confidently as possible at the cameraman. We thought we were a fairly professional lot. How many of us survived the war, I fear to think about.

In April 1940 we learnt our next appointment. Which theatre of war was I destined for? Students at the Staff College Camberley during most of the 20th century, or those at Quetta up to 1945, went to their ‘pigeon holes’ to collect the envelope containing the good news or bad; we newly commissioned Royal Engineer 2nd Lieutenants had ours read out to us. It was a moment of considerable tension.

Would the appointment be in a relatively peaceful location with a pleasant climate, a social life and none too taxing job? Or would one be destined for a challenging job, back to regimental duty in a theatre of war where fighting was imminent? Finally, much worse, would one be despatched at best possible speed, without leave, to replace a key officer who had been killed in action – so no hand-over, no prior knowledge of the local tactics, and no idea of the personalities under whom one had been sent to soldier? Inevitably, particularly in wartime, one might ask oneself if one was up to the job in question? Had the posting staff put a ‘square peg in a round hole’ – someone able, but quite unsuitable for the appointment, in a vital job?

Of course some of us, including me, would simply be told the theatre of war to which we would be sent. By the time we reached it, casualties, sickness, sackings or postings would create the vacancies into which we would be slotted. Others might go into reinforcement pools, well behind the front line, to be urgently moved forward to join, in all probability, a shattered unit following a particularly bloody battle and replace key men lost in action.

I and my close friends, Micky Holliday and Dickie Arundell, were to receive a considerable surprise when we Royal Engineers youngsters compared notes. “France, France, France,” seemed to be on everyone’s lips, with a trickle for Singapore. But for Micky, Dickie and me it was to be Hong Kong. Hurrah! I had no military ambitions, for I planned to be an architect. What could be better? The pleasant climate and social life for a year or so in the prosperous British colony would spare us from the fighting elsewhere and do us good. By then the formidable British Expeditionary Force (BEF) combined with the massive French forces, not forgetting the Canadians, Australians, Indians and New Zealanders who were rallying to support us, would have seen off Hitler and his henchmen. Japan was already heavily engaged in fighting the Chinese and was worried about her northern border with Russia, so posed no threat to us – or so we three 2nd Lieutenants convinced ourselves.

Naturally, therefore, I was delighted with the posting to Hong Kong. My parents were pleased; my other friends were envious. How lucky I was!

The German onslaught on 10th May 1940 came as a considerable shock even to Field Marshal Lord Gort, VC. “The tension which had been increasing during April,” the commander of the BEF wrote in his official despatch, “had lessened somewhat during the early days of May…. It was not until the night of 9th/10th May that information was received of exceptional activity on the frontiers of Luxembourg, Belgium and Holland.” At 8 a.m. on 10th May, front-line BEF battalion headquarters, listening to the BBC announcing the German invasion of the Low Countries, could see that German aircraft were already streaming above them, dropping a few bombs in their areas.6

I mention the above because it is indicative of the total failure of Allied intelligence to determine what the enemy was up to – both in Europe and, later, in even more traumatic circumstances, in the Far East when the Japanese launched their catastrophic invasion some 18 months later.

My Royal Engineer course had finished in April and I had been sent home to Chobham to await orders to sail to Hong Kong. Then came the German breakthrough, which led to lack of ships to take us to the Far East. It is quite possible, of course, that the posting authorities had simply forgotten about me. So what was I to do?

On 14th May, with families huddled as usual around their wireless sets after the BBC’s nine o’clock news, Anthony Eden, the Secretary of State for War, announced that “the Government has received countless enquiries from all over the kingdom from men of all ages who wish to do something for the defence of their country. Well, now is your opportunity….” He went on to announce the formation of the Local Defence Volunteers, which was soon rechristened the Home Guard.7

My father became fairly senior in this unpaid force. I immediately joined to help him by undertaking night patrols, particularly in the Chobham Ridges area near Woking and south of London. The locality has excellent views over part of Surrey. We had good visibility on moonlit nights to see any enemy parachutists being dropped in our neighbourhood. I carried a shotgun with which I occasionally shot rabbits – it was all a bit ridiculous really. We stopped all traffic including buses to check the driver’s identification card. If we saw lights, we promptly ordered that they be extinguished. Churchill seemed to be under the impression that there were some 25,000 organised Nazis in Britain when war was declared, and so keeping an eye out for saboteurs was important.

Despite being in Surrey, I heard very distinctly the rumble of gunfire during the evacuation of Dunkirk. I then witnessed some of the BEF survivors coming through Woking and Guildford. The Women’s Voluntary Service and other marvellous organisations served them hot drinks and sandwiches as the overloaded trains came through. My mother worked many hours there. The men’s appearances and uniforms were dishevelled. Some were absolutely shattered and a few were never the same boisterous personalities again.

During all this time, I witnessed only one lone German aircraft. I was half a mile away working on an anti-tank ditch at Crondall when it dropped a single bomb, hitting a telephone box in Aldershot and killing the unfortunate man making a call. As the war intensified, nobody, however isolated, was entirely safe because German bomber crews, returning from raids and still carrying bombs, dropped them indiscriminately to lighten their loads and thereby endeavour to escape our fighters. For example, many of the leading schools were hit in 1940. Incendiary bombs caused some fires at Harrow, but the only significant damage was due to the Fire Service deluging the organ in Speech Room with too much water. In September, when the Battle of Britain was at its height, the sirens were constantly sounding throughout London and southeast England. There was a continual dash to the shelters. One German aircraft, annoyed by the anti-aircraft guns defending Windsor Castle, dropped two bombs on Eton out of sheer pique. One of them fell on the house of the master responsible for music, destroying his dining room, where he would have been killed had he not been elsewhere reading an article in Punch! The Headmaster of Wellington College was killed when visiting school houses during an air raid.

Waiting impatiently for a ship to Hong Kong, I tried to learn from Royal Engineer manuals what might be expected of me. But they seemed to relate more to the closing years of the First World War and what a sapper officer was supposed to do in 1918. Perhaps things hadn’t changed much in the intervening years.

At last I received a cable telling me to report to Liverpool to board SS Viceroy of India bound for the Far East. The family gathered at Brook Place before I departed. They reminded me again how lucky I was to get away from Europe – to Hong Kong’s wonderful lifestyle with no food rationing or blackout. My mother, in tears, said goodbye. My father accompanied me by train from Woking station to London, en route to Liverpool and the Far East at last. Little did I know that I was to return to Platform Two at Woking station five years later having circumnavigated the world.

Notes

1. Shirer, William L, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, London: Secker & Warburg, 1960, p. 360.

2. The Times Past Present Future (published to mark the newspaper’s bicentenary), p. 30.

3. Crewe, Quentin, The Frontiers of Privilege, London: Collins, 1961, p. 196.

4. Churchill, Winston S, The Second World War, Vol. I, London: Cassell, 1949, p. 353.

5. Owen, James and Walters, Guy (eds), The Voice of War, London: Viking, 2004, p. 1.

6. Forbes, Patrick, The Grenadier Guards in the War of 1939–1945, Vol. I, Aldershot: Gale & Polden, 1949, p. 14.

7. Carroll, David, The Home Guard, Stroud: Sutton, 1999, p. 5.

CHAPTER 4

An Ocean of Change

Our ship was luxurious! SS Viceroy of India was the flagship of the P & O line. She proved to be the last civilian passenger ship of her type to go to Japan before hostilities. The civilian passengers on board were largely colonials with their families returning to India and Malaya. The Servicemen and women included Queen Alexandra’s Military Imperial Nursing Service (known as QAs), TA Gunner officers and we three Royal Engineer 2nd Lieutenants – Dickie Arundell, Micky Holliday and me.

We sailed from Liverpool on 27th July 1940 bound for Gibraltar, Cape Verde, Cape Town, Mombasa, Bombay, Colombo, Singapore, and, for us, Hong Kong.

Almost precisely 64 years later I had a great friend, ‘Bunny’ Browne, to lunch in London who told me of his adventures when posted to Hong Kong, travelling on the Empress of Australia, which sailed from Southampton in mid September 1939. He is one of my very few Hong Kong contemporaries still alive. Horace Wilfred Browne, subsequently appointed CBE, was a civilian auditor working for the Army. His destination was meant to be secret and he was told to mark his baggage ‘Q4’. At Waterloo station everyone seemed to know what ‘Q4’ indicated. “It’s the Indian boat,” the porters told him. The ship had a swimming pool; the food was excellent and all looked promising.

The Empress of Australia was accompanied by the Franconia, Alcantara, Athlone Castle and a Destroyer. After leaving Gibraltar, three of the ships were zigzagging in line abreast to avoid any enemy torpedoes when two of them inexplicably collided in broad daylight, crushing all the lifeboats hanging on one side of one ship and buckling the bows of another. At Bombay Bunny wisely insured his possessions. Most unexpectedly, the passengers were then told that their ship was returning to England and they would have to proceed across India by train. On reaching Calcutta, he was put on board the Sedana, a small cargo ship carrying some passengers. All went well, apart from a flood in his cabin which soaked all his possessions. He had accidentally left a tap on a little earlier when there was no water in the pipes.

On leaving Singapore on 13th November 1939, Bunny suddenly heard at 6.00 a.m. a big bang on the port side, followed by screaming. The Sedana had strayed into a British minefield, watched by a Gunner Battery on shore which did not have the authority to warn the ship. The minefield had apparently been marked in the wrong place on Sedana’s charts.

Bunny came up on deck, properly dressed, wearing his topee and life jacket, clutching two possessions which first came to hand – his new camera and an alarm clock. The ship was sinking fast and the crew useless. Lifeboats were capsizing as too many Indians, and the Chinese being deported from Singapore, crowded into them, standing on the lifeboats’ oars. The one European woman bound for Hong Kong was thrown into a lifeboat while Bunny descended a ladder which suddenly flipped over leaving him hanging upside down ten feet above a heaving, tightly-packed lifeboat. Attempts to rescue the survivors were handicapped by the unwillingness of anyone to enter the minefield.

Bunny was met in Hong Kong by a violent typhoon, but he was a happy man: his insurance claim amounted to £100 which enabled him to buy his first yacht and a dress suit.

To revert to our own voyage, I was immediately struck by the luxury of SS Viceroy of India. Indian stewards served us cucumber sandwiches and marvellous cream cakes when we boarded her at teatime. There was a Palm Court orchestra to entertain us at tea and in the evening. I had a cabin to myself: all officers travelled first class. A Royal Artillery officer, the highly respected Lord Merthyr, was in charge of us. We were to become great friends in dire circumstances later.

Italy had entered the war on 10th June. Following the formation of the pro-Nazi Vichy Government, most of the French ships at Oran, their crews having refused to come over to the Allies, were sunk by Admiral Somerville after a bitter engagement.

Before the war it had been anticipated that, should Britain and France find themselves at war with both Germany and Japan, much of the British Mediterranean Fleet could be spared for the Far East. But now – with Italy’s belligerence and no French Fleet to fight alongside us – the few Royal Navy ships at Singapore and Hong Kong would be largely on their own. Transferring the Eastern Mediterranean Fleet to the Indian Ocean, or to relieve Singapore, “would entail the complete loss of the Middle East, and all the prospects of beating Italy in the Mediterranean would be gone,” Churchill told the Prime Ministers of Australia and New Zealand on 11th August 1940.1 Naturally, I and my friends were quite unaware of this sinister warning or the repercussions for us in Hong Kong.

We reached Gibraltar and stayed at sea all night. On receiving the news of Oran, the Vichy Pétain Government ordered retaliation by bombing the harbour at Gibraltar from their African bases. Their bombing was spectacular as were the British warships’ anti-aircraft guns, but both were equally ineffective. The following day we went ashore and met the apes, who seemed quite indifferent to having been under fire the previous night.

I must refer to one meeting of greater consequence. An architectural friend had been posted with the Royal Artillery to Gibraltar and was now in uniform. He told me quite categorically that, as everyone apart from me seemed to know, there was a major problem in both Singapore and Hong Kong: all the artillery – the great fortress guns – pointed out to sea to the south to safeguard against a seaborne attack, rather than to the northwest, north or northeast should the Japanese attack overland.

In 1991 the authoritative book, The Guns and Gunners of Hong Kong, was published: it addressed this point. The book shows quite conclusively that the above rumour was quite untrue as far as Hong Kong was concerned. The arcs of fire and range of the coast batteries at Stone Cutters, Mount Davis, Jubilee, Devil’s Peak and Pakshawan between them could and would engage the enemy advancing upon Hong Kong.2

As far as Singapore is concerned, General Wavell told Churchill on 16th January 1942 that “the fortress cannon of heaviest nature have all-round traverse, but their flat trajectory makes them unsuitable for counter-battery work.”3 (It was true that there were no permanent fortifications covering the landward side of the naval base, but that was a different matter.) And so my architectural Royal Artillery friend’s demoralising information was wrong on both counts.

The harbour at Cape Verde, where we stopped to refuel, provided a perfect setting for a dance on deck, with cheerful coloured lights instead of the usual blackout because the country was neutral.4 There were a number of nice girls on board. It has been said and is undoubtedly true that the longer one is at sea, the more alluring and beautiful the girls seem to become, almost by the hour. One girl, educated at St Swithuns, whose father was a senior director of Dunlop, became a particular friend but there was no serious romance for me.

Ten days before reaching Cape Town, I went down with pneumonia. Lord Merthyr had a look at me and said, “You know, you’re not really fit. I don’t think we need you to carry on; we will unload you in Cape Town.” Fortunately the ship had penicillin. After a week I was out of the ship’s hospital and so not abandoned in Cape Town, swept into the 8th Army and possibly killed in the desert. A different fate awaited me.

When we reached Cape Town, we were told that we couldn’t land because the Australian Army on the Queen Mary en route to England had earlier had a happy time creating havoc everywhere. In the end, as the passengers on the Viceroy of India were mainly civilians, the authorities relented and we had two very excellent, enjoyable days due to the overwhelming South African hospitality.

British Servicemen travelling to fight in North Africa who stopped at Durban had an equally memorable and marvellous time. This was just as well because so many of them were killed in the relentless battles in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia.5

Three days before we arrived at Cape Town we had come across the large, disabled Ceramic. She had been hit by another ship in the darkness; no ships carried navigation lights because of the threat of German submarines and raiders. The numerous women and children en route from Britain to Australia were transferred from the Ceramic to our ship. My beautiful cabin was surrendered to a woman with a band of children, leaving me to sleep with others on the ballroom’s floor.

Our next stop was Mombassa where there was a swimming party one night at Port Reitz with the by now devastatingly beautiful QA nurses. At Bombay, on the other hand, we were berthed alongside a hospital ship which was unloading dead and wounded from Berbera – yet another timely reminder that we were in the corridors of war.

Colombo was worth a visit and then we reached Singapore with its legendary Raffles Hotel. Sadly, we were there for only one night but the beach club which I and my friends visited was truly splendid.

Six days later, on 11th September 1940, the Viceroy of India entered Hong Kong’s fabulous harbour. My first exciting impressions were of the sheer beauty of the place – the bright green hills descending to the yellow sands of the picturesque bays. Even by the standards of the late 1930s, everything looked serene, beautiful and, yes, extraordinarily peaceful.

Notes

1. Churchill, W S, The Second World War, Vol. II, London: Cassell, 1949, p. 385.

2. Rollo, Denis, The Guns and Gunners of Hong Kong, The Gunners’ Roll of Hong Kong, 1991, p. 123.

3. Churchill, op. cit., Vol. IV, p. 42.

4. Wiseman, E P (‘Bill’), Hong Kong: Recollections of a British POW, Ontario: Veterans Publications, 2001, p. 15.

5. Hawes, Sid, ‘Durban 1942’, in The Guards Magazine, 2004/5 Winter edition, p. 232

CHAPTER 5

Visions of Delight

On arrival in Hong Kong on 11th September 1940, we were met by Major D C E Gross who commanded 22nd Company Royal Engineers. Being so junior, I was expecting to be put up in some dingy barracks, but instead Micky Holliday, Dickie Arundell and I were taken to the Hong Kong Club. It was on the waterfront of Hong Kong harbour and enjoyed the exclusive, dignified atmosphere of a 19th century London club; it had an historic air about it. The imposing premises overlooked the Cenotaph, an exact replica of Lutyens’ Cenotaph in Whitehall. Membership was strictly controlled.

The Royal Engineers in Hong Kong amounted to two Field Companies and Royal Engineer Services, with a total strength of 465. There were also two Auxiliary Force Engineer units. In 1939 an Engineer Field Company in the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps was formed to carry out when necessary certain initial demolitions. Then there were plans for a Hong Kong Engineer Corps to be formed to consist of over 1,500 Chinese.1

My appointment sounded very grand to me – Garrison Engineer West! I worked with half a dozen other Royal Engineer officers in Major W W Parsons’ office in Victoria on building works such as repairs to military roads, constructing some pillboxes and preparing defences. To be more precise, I was in charge of hard working Chinese contractors whose responsibilities included constructing and maintaining the water supplies in the Colony. These reservoirs were of vital importance, as were the pumping stations. Without water, Hong Kong could not hold out for a week. So concrete pumping stations and drains became my business. This does not sound very exciting when it comes to war, but, as a fledgling architect, it suited me well as I knew something about it all. My two great friends, Holliday and Arundell, were sent to R.E. Field Companies.

I became familiar with the western part of Hong Kong Island which included the important Mount Davis gun position completed in 1912 and manned by 24th Coast Battery, 12th Coast Regiment Royal Artillery. It consisted of 115 Gunners and three massive 9.2 inch guns. They were well camouflaged and surrounded by barbed wire. Also there were the Headquarters of Western Fire Command, a Fire Control Position Finder, Fortress and Battery Observation Posts, Plotting Rooms and much else. I looked after the engineering part of the batteries, seeing that the mechanical equipment was working. I rebuilt some gun emplacements which needed attention. I also installed a water supply there, with some difficulty because it needed a special water pump. Three times the pump was ordered from the UK: the first ship bringing it out was sunk, as was the second one. Fortunately the third got through.

All the guns were able to fire at an enemy target at any one time. The targets might include Japanese ships approaching Victoria Harbour from the west where the sealane was 3,600 yards wide, or Japanese soldiers approaching from the northwest area of the Mainland.

After some 13 weeks of greatly enjoying life in the Hong Kong Club, Holliday, Arundell and I were lucky enough to be allocated a flat on May Road, which lay halfway up the exclusive Victoria Peak and about a mile from Mount Davis. We had our first Hong Kong Christmas there. The Peak is the highest point of Hong Kong Island and overlooks the capital, Victoria, which stretched in a narrow strip along the northern shore for about four miles. The Peak also overlooked other mountains, tortuous valleys and precipitous slopes covered by dense vegetation.

Gradually, I got to know the British Crown Colony. It consisted of the Island, and, to the north, across a narrow channel and Victoria Harbour, the Hong Kong Mainland which bordered China. The Japanese were in occupation beyond the border. North of Kowloon were the New Territories of about 360 square miles. They had been leased to Britain in 1898 for a period of 99 years. The only airport was at Kai Tak to the east of Kowloon; it was used for both commercial and military purposes. Since the dockyard in Victoria Harbour was vulnerable to attack from the Mainland, an alternative naval base had been prepared to the southwest of the Island at Aberdeen. This area also came under me for some engineer support.

Hong Kong and the New Territories 8th–12th December 1941

It is difficult to describe the pre-war beauty of Hong Kong, the New Territories and the islands both large and small amidst the sparkling sea. The stunning crimson sunsets and the bobbing lights of the distant fishing fleet sailing into the darkness before delivering their catches to us the following morning, coupled with the cheerful optimism of the friendly Chinese – of such delightful visions are memories made. Our family motto is ‘I strive cheerfully’. I felt that it was not difficult to abide by it when I arrived in Hong Kong.

Some Chinese girls wore Chinese style traditional cheung sarm tight fitting dresses with slits up the sides, exposing their pretty thighs, while on the other side of the street one might see middle-aged Chinese women with walking sticks hobbling along on tiny bound feet.

On the Peak, it was commonplace to hear barking deer at night on the hillside. At Fanling near the border, the only sounds were the whooping calls of coucals and the black-necked starlings. (Compare that to the continuous roar of traffic there now.) Then, for those who enjoyed them, there were the formal Chinese meals of 12 courses; they traditionally started with small bits and pieces before moving on to soup, then to meat (pork, beef, pigeon, poultry and fish), shark’s fin soup, fried rice and a sweet dish. Apparently the menu should contain something that swam, something that flew and something that crawled. Guests, usually all men, were served brandy or whisky and were called upon to drink numerous toasts with cries of “yum shing”, meaning “drink it all”.2

Soon after our arrival in Hong Kong, Arundell, Holliday and I, together with Bill Wiseman, pooled our resources to buy an old yacht, Diana. Wiseman had come out to Hong Kong on the Viceroy of India with us. He was a remarkable character. “As usual the Summer term at King’s School Canterbury ended with the annual Officer Training Corps camp.” So began his memoirs. “I never got there. Instead, thanks to fooling about on the train, I found myself minus a foot in Andover Cottage Hospital. I returned for the Easter term managing quite well on a ‘tin’ leg… Prior to the railway accident, a Service career had seemed probable – and I had never thought of anything else. Choice of work was no problem as no one wanted me.” Nevertheless, four years later, Wiseman was commissioned into the Royal Army Service Corps (TA) and posted to Hong Kong.3

Diana cost only 20 pounds plus the boat boy’s wages. We used to sail regularly together, but, for some reason, Wiseman had to celebrate his 23rd birthday alone. “However, with the aid of Ah Su and a bottle of Gordon’s Gin, I managed to circumnavigate the Island in record time, or so I always claimed,” he wrote. “By October 1941 mounting debts forced us to sell Diana. Her massive lead keel brought in a small fortune, settling our debts just in time.”

Meanwhile I, with my father’s financial help, had bought a 25-foot Sparkman Stephens yacht with a cabin for two. At weekends I visited most of the bays on or around the Island. My friends and I slept on the boat.

I also had a small Morris car and so enjoyed travelling across the ferry to the New Territories or driving gently on the few roads on the Island. I often walked around the water catchments and reservoirs and so came to know the Island pretty well. I still kept up my painting which I had started at Harrow.

There was ample time to do what we liked because we seldom worked in the afternoon. As Bill Wiseman put it: “Off duty life was great. Although my pay and allowances totalled less than 300 pounds a year, I lived like a lord! I lodged in a comfortable and respectable Kowloon hotel, belonged to three or four clubs and went ‘on the town’ most weekends.”

Anthony Hewitt, the Adjutant of the Middlesex Regiment, fondly remembered that Hong Kong was still “a festive place, a refuge for enjoyment. The top hotels and restaurants were the best anywhere, the night life exciting. ‘The Grips’ was a social centre where dinner jackets were mandatory. Overlooking an exquisite coastline, the Repulse Bay Hotel with its old fashioned style was the epitome of colonial living. In Kowloon, the Peninsula Hotel was our nearest haven, only two miles from our barracks at Shamshuipo.”4 The Peninsula was built at the end of the Trans-Siberian railway which would link Dover with Hong Kong.

For those who liked team sports, there was cricket, rugby and drag hunting. However, I was more than happy with my sailing and playing golf at Fanling in the New Territories. It was a golden time in Hong Kong; everything was very inexpensive. Commander Rex Young, a Royal Navy wireless expert, was amazed to discover on arriving in the Colony that “Hong Kong did not seem to know there was a war on… business seemed to be flourishing.” The General Officer Commanding Hong Kong, A E Grasett, had a reputation for being easy-going. It would seem from the war diaries of Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke that this attitude even prevailed in some quarters of England in June 1940, despite the collapse of France and the invasion of England appearing imminent. “Motored over to Salisbury where I spent rest of the day with Bertie Fisher, taking over Southern Command,” he noted in his diary on 26th June. “The main impression I had was that the Command had a long way to be put on a war footing and that a peacetime atmosphere was still prevailing.”5

In that same month, June 1940, Hong Kong did have a nasty warning of what might happen to us. The Japanese were then fighting the Chinese just beyond the border; several schools in Kowloon were converted to become hospitals for wounded Chinese brought over in Red Cross trucks. The smell of dead Chinese beyond the border was unmistakeable and unbearable: they had not been buried properly, if at all.

A Japanese attack was expected any day, so the Hong Kong Colonial Government demanded that all women and children leave the Colony immediately. Within days the giant Canadian Empress of Asia, her funnels spouting black smoke, sailed for Australia crammed with evacuees. Rickshaws overloaded with suitcases and anxious, tearful women had hastened towards the Kowloon docks to board her and the President Coolidge.

Later, the husbands held mass meetings to demand their wives’ return. The daily press was filled with letters criticising the Government and complaining about so-called discrimination in allowing so many women to remain in Hong Kong – women who had enlisted almost overnight as auxiliary nurses, air raid wardens, stenographers and cipher clerks in order to stay there. “Too many wangled exemption and some deliberately flouted the orders,” recalls one nurse who stayed. “They were the ones who loudly bemoaned their fate later in Japanese captivity. Children were kept in the Colony and suffered the horrors of war and the privations of subsequent internment, solely through their parents’ selfishness.”6

I am not convinced that the above criticism is fair; some of my married Service friends in Hong Kong kept their children there for good reasons.

Those who did not take soldiering too seriously in Hong Kong took comfort from the views expressed by Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham who was appointed to the new post of Commander-in-Chief, Far East, stationed at Singapore. He was a retired officer who had been Governor of Kenya.

After he had inspected defensive installations in Hong Kong, we were all assembled in the main theatre in the rather disreputable Wanchai District to hear the great man speak. He addressed us all, painting a picture that the Japanese fighting qualities were greatly inferior to ours. Having seen the “dirty uniforms” worn by the Japanese troops, he confidently announced that they were “sub-human specimens” and that he could not “believe they would form an intelligent fighting force”.7 According to one military authority on the war in the Far East, Brooke-Popham, though aged only 62, “had developed a habit of falling asleep at any time… often in the middle of a conference at which he presided, therefore often missing much of the subject under discussion. Although a man of great charm, he had clearly passed his prime.”8

Brooke-Popham was certainly awake when one of our officers had the nerve to ask him how we could defend Hong Kong when the RAF had only five planes: two Walrus amphibians and three Vickers Vildebeeste torpedo bombers, all over ten years old with a maximum speed of 100 miles an hour. (The RAF had given orders that they were not to be flown operationally unless an opportunity occurred either at first light or at dusk.)

I heard the Air Chief Marshal reply briskly: “You must carry out the defence of Hong Kong with what you have got.” We did not find this encouraging, but were reassured by his remarks that the “slit-eyed” Japanese could not fly at night and that their soldiers were of very poor calibre.

We were aware, of course, of the shocking atrocities committed by the Japanese. In July 1937, after their numerous clashes with Chinese Nationalist troops in north China, Japan had invaded the interior. On capturing the Nationalist capital, Nanking, they had massacred about 300,000 Chinese civilians and raped some 50,000 women. They had earlier slaughtered approximately 6,000 Chinese troops and civilians at Jinan.

But not everything was ‘doom and gloom’. On 16th November, those of us at the bottom of the military ladder, not ‘in the know’, had a most marvellous surprise: two full-strength battalions of Canadian troops with a Canadian Brigade Headquarters suddenly arrived. I saw them parading after disembarking from the Awatea troopship. I felt that nothing but good could arise from these most unexpected reinforcements.

“It was a grand day,” recalled Rifleman Ken Cambon of the Royal Rifles of Canada. “The sun shone but not oppressively, in a cloudless sky. The magnificent Peak and surrounding hills confirmed that it must be… a solid citadel indeed. Our two battalions marched down Nathan Road steel-helmeted and obviously invincible. The main street of Kowloon was lined by cheering crowds waving small Union Jacks. My platoon was halfway between two bands, which were unsynchronised to the same beat. The two-mile march to Shamshuipo Military Barracks was a continuous ballet of changing step.”9

Another Canadian soldier takes up the story: “Sham Shui Po Barracks, white and shimmering in the heat. A Kiplingesque film set with its broad avenues stretching out towards the distant mountains,” wrote William Allister. “Brigade HQ was privileged to be quartered in the Jubilee Building at the harbor’s edge, with rooms and balconies overlooking large parade grounds. Where the good life began. Where we tasted the fruits of Empire. Where servants, at the lordly salary of 25 cents a week, did your laundry, shaved you as you slept and brought you tea in bed.”10

A few Canadians, on arrival, concluded that they were in a form of paradise, with visions of delight everywhere. They were not the only ones. The Times correspondent felt that the islands and coastline to the west resembled “in appearance rather like a piece of the Western Isles of Scotland, but with a climate not unlike that of Florida”.

“After the arrival of a few thousand Canadians, everybody felt that the Crown Colony could and would be defended successfully,” wrote a Dutch-born construction engineer, Jan Henrik Marsman, who had the misfortune to arrive in Hong Kong six days before the Japanese onslaught. “It was a psychological miracle.”11

I felt the same.

Notes

1. History of the Corps of Royal Engineers, Vol. 9, R.E. Institution, 1958, p. 124.

2. Wilson, Brian, Hong Kong Then, Durham: The Pentland Press, 2000, p. 54.

3. Wiseman, E P (‘Bill’), Hong Kong: Recollections of a British POW, Ontario, Veterans Publications, 2001, p. 14.

4. Hewitt, Tony, Corridors of Time: Distant Footsteps through the Empire 1914–1948, Durham: The Pentland Press, 1993, p. 74.

5. Alanbrooke, FM, War Diaries 1939–1945, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001, p. 89.

6. Diary of M Redwood, Imperial War Museum, London.

7. Kirby, S Woodburn, Singapore: the Chain of Disaster, London: Cassell, 1971, pp. 55–6.

8. Ibid.

9. Cambon, K, Guest of Hirohito, Vancouver, 1990, p. 5.

10. Allister, William, When Life and Death Held Hands, Toronto, 1989, pp. 6–8.

11. Marsman, J H, I Escaped from Hong Kong, New York, 1942, p. 9.

Part 3

REMEMBER THEM WITH PRIDE

by Oliver Lindsay

We drink the memory of the brave,

The faithful, and the few;

Some lie far off beyond the wave;

Some sleep in Ireland, too.

All, all are gone; but still lives on

The fame of those who died;

And true men, like you men,

Remember them with pride.

CHAPTER 6

The Vulnerable Outpost

In December 1939 the Japanese Army was told to prepare plans to invade Hong Kong should the decision be made to go to war. Seven months later Captain Sejima Ryuzo began spying in the Colony. He saw that work on the forward defensive Gin Drinkers’ Line had ceased several years earlier. Construction of this line had started in 1937 when consideration was given to a division from Singapore reinforcing the garrison. About six miles north of Kowloon a chain of pill-boxes on the Mainland were to be built, zig-zagging 11 miles across the rocky and precipitous hillside. The line was so named because its left sector began at the scene of alcoholic picnics in happier days. Some trenches, particularly those on the west at the Shingmun Redoubt, were laboriously dug, cement overhead protection added and fields of fire studied. However, since the garrison could expect no reinforcements, the British concept of fighting well forward was stillborn, as the Japanese discovered.

Sejima recommended that the Army should capture the Mainland, consisting of the New Territories and Kowloon. But he was not confident that a Japanese assault from Kowloon on the Island’s northern shore would be successful. A frontal assault in the face of British artillery and machine-gun fire would be a risky operation, he felt. However, Chinese Triad spies, well paid by the Japanese, had watched a British military exercise, in which a direct attack had been successfully staged on the north shore. Sejima’s suggestions that the Army should invade on the south shore were therefore overruled.

Two months later, on 23rd September 1940, Japan invaded northern French Indo-China, marked on Map 1. (The US Army’s Signal Intelligence service had broken the Japanese codes and accurately predicted an invasion. Unfortunately a cipher clerk had muddled the code names; Churchill was told by President Roosevelt that England was to be invaded by Germany at 3.00 p.m. on 23rd September.)

Four days later Japan signed the Tripartite pact with Germany and Italy, thereby recognising the ‘new order’ in Europe and gaining encouragement in turn for her aggressive policy in the Far East.

In July 1941 the Japanese Government sought agreement from the French Vichy regime to enable her forces to occupy all Indo-China including the bases at Camrahn and Saigon which were potential invasion springboards to attack Siam, Singapore, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. France meekly agreed. Meanwhile Hitler had invaded Russia, thereby ensuring that the Japanese had nothing to fear from their northern flank.

Just when Japan felt that everything was falling neatly into place, on 26th July the United States froze all Japanese assets in its territories in order to persuade Tokyo to leave China and Indo-China. Britain and the Dutch did likewise, thereby cutting off all tin, rubber, oil and steel to Japan.

At an Imperial Conference in Tokyo on 6th September 1941, the decision was taken to complete preparation for war against Britain, America and the Netherlands. The alternative, of withdrawing Japanese troops from China and Indo-China, was quite unacceptable. Japan recognised that America would never surrender; their hope was that Japan’s initial successes, coupled with Hitler’s victories in Europe, would force the Americans to accept a compromise peace, leaving Japan supreme in East Asia.

Hong Kong was a valuable prize because the harbour would provide an important anchorage for Japanese shipping. Moreover war materials could no longer be delivered to China to support Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Government. After the fall of Canton, when the railway route was cut, innumerable junks in Hong Kong endeavoured to smuggle what they could to those fighting in China. Tokyo estimated that the junks were channelling 6,000 tons of munitions to the interior each month. If Hong Kong could be captured, the Japanese optimistically believed that China might despair of getting help from the West and come to terms.

Japan’s spies in Hong Kong were fairly unsuccessful. Sakata Seisho, sent by Major Okada Yoshimasa to gather intelligence, was imprisoned by the Hong Kong police, but escaped to the Portuguese territory of Macao thanks to Triad connections. Maizuno, who ran a sports shop in Wanchai, turned out to be a Japanese Lieutenant. There were others like him. In 1949 Colonel Tosaka expressed dissatisfaction with the information provided by his agents. True, Colonel Suzuki, based in the Japanese Consulate, had picked up details of where the signal cables were laid and the location of some of the pill-boxes and guns, but his activities had been exposed. Tosaka had to fall back upon the Wanchai brothel girls, the Japanese jeweller in the Queen’s Arcade, the Italian waiter at the Peninsula Hotel and the Japanese barber at the Hong Kong Hotel, who reappeared after the fighting in the uniform of a Lieutenant Commander as the Commandant of the Stanley internment camp.

So much for the Japanese preliminary plans and their intelligence, or rather the lack of it. Let us now turn to the British and Hong Kong Governments’ priorities, relate them to later years, and consider the success or otherwise of their intelligence gathering.

* * * * *

The Chiefs of Staff in London had long recognised that Hong Kong could not be held without considerable reinforcements. They considered evacuating or reducing the garrison, but decided instead to make no change to its strength and simply ordered that the outpost should be defended for as long as possible.

In 1938 Major General A W Bartholomew, the General Officer Commanding (GOC) in Hong Kong, told the War Office: “I still regard the building of defences as unnecessary. I have also made it clear that troops must resist with arms any sudden attack on themselves or their charge, but this is not to apply to any properly-organized and authoritative request by a military command to enter the concessions… ”1

To ensure that the virtual hopelessness of the position was understood in London, General Bartholomew signalled the War Office on 13th April 1938: “In event of wanton attack on Hong Kong, the garrison would have no option but to fight… the chances of effecting a prolonged resistance even in the best circumstances seem slight.” The War Office needed no convincing. The vulnerability of the outpost was well understood. It was again confirmed that the Hong Kong garrison would have to do the best it could with what it had. By the Summer of 1940 it was even suggested in some quarters that the option be considered of reducing the garrison to cut down on the casualties they would suffer in a hopeless attempt to fight the Japanese off.

It could be argued that Britain was considering almost an ‘open city’ scenario. A precedent for such a policy was set later when Japanese forces were allowed to enter the British and French concessions at Tianjin (Tientsin). In mid-August 1940 the British Chiefs of Staff withdrew the two infantry battalions that were contributing to the security of Shanghai’s International Settlement. That same month they recognised that: “We should resist the strong pressure to reinforce Hong Kong and we should certainly be unable to relieve it. Militarily our position in the Far East would be stronger without this unsatisfactory commitment.”2

On 15th August the Chiefs of Staff in London summed it all up in a dispatch which stated that “Hong Kong is not a vital interest and the garrison could not long withstand a Japanese attack. Even if we had a strong fleet in the Far East, it is doubtful whether Hong Kong could be held now that the Japanese are firmly established on the Mainland of China; and it could not be used as an advance base. In the event of war, Hong Kong must be regarded as an outpost and held as long as possible.”3

This dispatch was sent to the Commander in Chief Far East with other documents on Automendon, a British cargo liner en route from Liverpool to Singapore and Hong Kong. The crew of a German sea raider attacked and boarded the liner 300 miles from Sumatra and captured all the documents despite frantic British efforts to sink the dispatches. German officials handed the most secret documents to the Japanese in Tokyo.4 The Japanese therefore had precise knowledge in late 1940 of Britain’s inability to hold Hong Kong.

* * * * *

It is relevant to compare the position then to the 1970s and 80s when, again, there would be no opportunity of sending significant reinforcements to Hong Kong quickly. Let us examine the two periods in question.

In January 1975 I was Second in Command of 2nd Battalion Grenadier Guards. We were taking over from 1st Battalion The King’s Regiment on arrival in Hong Kong. I asked what secret tactical plans existed in the safe to cover any aggression from China. I was told there was no plan held at Battalion level. This did not worry me unduly because there was no apparent threat whatsoever from the People’s Liberation Army. Moreover there would presumably be time to issue the necessary orders, deploy the battalion, undertake reconnaissance of our areas and prepare for battle. All our more senior Officers and Warrant Officers had some experience of all phases of war after innumerable peacetime training in the British Army of the Rhine. I recently asked the then Battalion Commander, Colonel David Fanshawe, if he felt the Grenadiers would have given a good account of themselves in a limited war scenario in Hong Kong. He gave an emphatic “Yes,” and added one point which is particularly relevant to the fate which awaited the Canadians in December 1941.

David Fanshawe emphasised the vital necessity of building up Infantry soldiers’ mental robustness and physical stamina. In extremis soldiers are likely to be required to march long distances, often in atrocious conditions, carrying heavy loads and then fighting for their lives. Armchair critics are all too ready to condemn when things go wrong – as inevitably they may do. Such people must appreciate that the soldiers involved ‘at the coal face’ are usually young, often exhausted, cold and hungry and probably exceedingly scared. They are held together by effective training, discipline and by their junior leaders.

The British Army’s experience for 30 years in Northern Ireland – and more recently in Iraq – sometimes tested men to their limits and beyond. Political people and their lawyers in cosy offices suffer no lack of enthusiasm in finding fault. They and indeed historians in the longer term, having no experience whatever of the horrors of war, must appreciate the condition of those who put their life on the line for King, or Queen, and Country. The Canadians did their best in the most adverse circumstances. The same can be said for those today fighting in Iraq.

The British, Canadian, Indian and Chinese soldiers would be called upon in Hong Kong to face the pandemonium of battle – the explosions of shells and mortars, machine-gun fire, hearing the screams of the wounded and the loss of close friends to their left and right – such was the full horror of war in December 1941.

Luckily for us in the mid 1970s no Chinese threat developed and we concentrated on internal security scenarios, jungle warfare, counter-revolutionary war and civil assistance. Nevertheless some of us recognised that any limited war involving the withdrawal from the border through built up areas towards Victoria Harbour, regardless of civilian casualties, chased by the Chinese Communist Army, was a concept which was scarcely credible.

I recently asked Lieutenant General Sir Peter Duffell, the Commander of the British Forces in Hong Kong in 1990, what the concept of operations amounted to in his day. Had he favoured an ‘open city scenario’ as Major General Bartholomew had proposed in 1938, or to even reduce the garrison, as suggested by some in the War Office, in 1940? General Duffell replied as follows.

“In the mid 1980s when I became Brigade Commander in Hong Kong under Major General Derek Boorman who was Commander British Forces, the negotiations on the 1997 agreement were in hand. I had inherited a defence plan that saw the brigade fighting a classic withdrawal battle down to Kowloon (and through the Gin Drinkers’ Line) and the Island in the face of an all out invasion by the People’s Liberation Army. This seemed to me to be both an unlikely and impracticable scenario and one that was out of touch with military and political reality. We did not have the military strength to take on the PLA even if such a scenario was likely and anyway for the Chinese there were other ways to skin a cat or exert their will. It seemed to me that the British were not going to go to war to attempt to save Hong Kong. I saw in defence terms that the threat lay in the potential for the Chinese government to exert pressure on the British and Hong Kong governments in a variety of ways and that the border and its security and integrity was the key to any plans that we had. This ignored the possibility of air and maritime incursions which were also a possibility. On the former, unless we had a good deal of warning, we had no means to counter such an incursion. On the maritime front the best we could do was to shadow and confront any such maritime adventure with our patrol craft.

“On land my assessment was that the Chinese might exert some form of threatening pressure on the border to extract diplomatic advantage during negotiations with the British. I sketched an escalatory series of possible scenarios that started with verbal exchanges and stone throwing/banners, etc. from across the border and moved through mass illegal immigrant and civilian incursions, militia and PLA troop movements to the north of the border, closing up to the border; possible attempted incitement of military exchanges and eventually some form of military incursion. For each scenario I outlined a series of non-escalatory responses designed to hold the line – in a non-confrontational manner – that would allow us to maintain the sovereignty of the territory within the closed area while diplomatic measures to defuse the situation were put in hand. Our response was to be controlled and disciplined, limited, until military life was threatened, and in the style of our response to the border problems that occurred during the cultural revolution. I could not see any advantage in taking on the PLA full frontal and escalating matters to a situation where the whole territory could possibly be laid bare and diplomatic opportunity thrown away. We needed to buy time with our response. I put this plan to Derek Boorman who told me it was music to his ears.

“Later when I returned as CBF in 1990 I found that the brigade had reverted to the old defence plans. I reintroduced my original 1985 plans in the tense post-Tiananmen situation. We had one such confrontation where the Chinese after some difficulties with the Hong Kong Government in one aspect of our negotiations suddenly decided that they would not take back captured illegal immigrants. The result was a mass influx. We responded by upping our presence on the border, opening holding camps and holding the line while diplomatic exchanges continued. A few days afterwards the Chinese reverted to the old procedure and announced that they had ‘taught us a lesson’. The realities were plain enough. As Kissinger used to say, ‘There is a China card and China holds it.’”

* * * * *

To revert back to the situation 40 years earlier, why didn’t the British declare an ‘open city’ in 1940 in the face of the overwhelming threat posed by the highly experienced Japanese forces just beyond the border, saving many thousands of British, Canadian, Indian and Chinese lives thereby? Why take on the Japanese Army “full frontal – and escalating matters to a situation where the whole territory could possibly be laid bare…” – an option General Duffell sought to avoid, in quite different circumstances, in the 1980s?

The Chiefs of Staff wanted the garrison to fight in 1940 because it was all a matter of Britain’s prestige. For political and moral reasons Hong Kong had to be defended. Moreover many Chinese would have been seriously discouraged from continuing their weary and interminable struggle against Japan, if Britain had lacked the courage and determination to resist and had abandoned the Colony to the mercy of the Japanese before they had even declared war. Such a sordid act of appeasement would also have shaken the neutral Americans who were then strengthening their forces in the Pacific while critically assessing Britain’s determination to fight on. The Chiefs of Staff had no wish to blatantly broadcast the extent of Britain’s military weakness not only in the Far East, but throughout the world.

But other considerations were at play – those in Hong Kong and Singapore gradually came to believe that the Japanese Army was a second rate, contemptible force. Major General A E Grasett, Bartholomew’s successor, urged that his garrison be strengthened by one more battalion. It would enable him to defend the Mainland, he said, against Japanese incursions from the north. Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, as indicated earlier, also believed that greater robustness would defeat the Japanese.

Grasett was a Canadian who had graduated from the Royal Military College in 1909, having won the Sword of Honour before being granted a British commission in the Royal Engineers (John Harris’s Corps). He had won the DSO and MC during the First World War after which he had attended the Staff College at Camberley and the tri-service Imperial Defence College when he and his colleagues studied the Hong Kong situation in 1934. It was remarkable how closely the exercise mirrored the actual development of events through to 1941. Their prophetic conclusion had been that the risks involved in holding Hong Kong were unjustifiable.

Yet, strangely, Grasett throughout 1940 became convinced that the Colony was defensible, believing that the Japanese troops were vastly inferior to Westerners in training, equipment and leadership. Japan’s inability to defeat Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists in battle was put down to incompetence.

In August 1941 Grasett was posted back to Britain, travelling via Ottawa where he held long discussions with his Royal Military College classmate, Major General H D G Crerar, Chief of the Canadian General Staff. Crerar subsequently told the Royal Commission convened in March 1942 that “Major General Grasett informed me… that the addition of two or more battalions to the forces then at Hong Kong would render the garrison strong enough to withstand for an extensive period of siege an attack by such forces as the Japanese could bring to bear against it.”5

Grasett briefed the Chiefs of Staff on 5th September 1941 to persuade them to reverse their policy and recommend to the Prime Minister that significant reinforcements be provided.

The existing force in Hong Kong, he argued, was quite insufficient to deter an attack, or even delay the enemy sufficiently to destroy the port and installations, while the addition of two battalions would enable a full brigade of three battalions to deploy on the Mainland, with a second brigade defending the Island from a seaward assault. In addition, the Chinese would be encouraged by confirmation that Britain and her Empire were determined to fight for their possessions in the Far East.

“The Chiefs of Staff heard an interesting account on the present situation in Hong Kong from General Grasett,” read the memorandum to Winston Churchill. “He pointed out the great advantages to be derived from the addition of one or two battalions, and suggested that these might be supplied by Canada. The Chiefs of Staff have previously advised against despatch of more reinforcements to Hong Kong because they considered that it would only have been to throw good money after bad, but the position in the Far East has now changed. Our defences in Malaya have been improved and Japan has latterly shown a certain weakness in her attitude towards Great Britain and the United States …. The Chiefs of Staff are in favour of the suggestion that Canada should be asked to send one or two battalions… ”6 Some five months earlier Churchill had advocated that the isolated Hong Kong garrison be reduced to a symbolic scale: “We must avoid frittering away our resources on untenable positions,” he had argued.7 But now he was not sure whether to agree or not to the new suggestion that Hong Kong, if reinforced, could be held after all. “It is a question of timing,” he replied a week later. “There is no objection to the approach being made [to the Canadians for two battalions] as proposed; but further decisions should be taken before the battalions actually sail.”

On 19th September the Dominion Office cabled Ottawa stating that “Approved policy has been that Hong Kong should be regarded as an outpost… a small re-enforcement of the garrison of Hong Kong, e.g. by one or two battalions, would be very fully justified. It would increase the strength of the garrison out of all proportion to the actual numbers involved and it would provide a very strong stimulus to the garrison and to the Colony, it would further have a very great moral effect in the whole of the Far East and would reassure Chiang Kai-shek as to the reality of our intent to hold the Island.”

* * * * *

With the benefit of hindsight, we must ask ourselves how was it that Britain’s, and in particular Hong Kong’s and Singapore’s, intelligence gathering was so bad in the months leading up to the Japanese onslaught throughout the Far East?

Major General C M Maltby, Grasett’s successor as GOC Hong Kong, reassured by further reports from his staff of the inferior quality and material of the Japanese, and by the prospect of reinforcements from Canada, decided to deploy almost half his force forward on the Mainland. He referred in a signal to the War Office to holding the Gin Drinkers’ Line “permanently” in order to protect Kai Tak airfield, simplify civil defence problems and make possible eventual offensive operations. Maltby posed the question a month before the catastrophic defeat by the Japanese: “Is not the value of Hong Kong as a bridgehead increasing every day? Looking at the future, a complete mobile brigade group could undertake offensive operations to assist Chinese forces operating in Japanese-occupied territories.”8

Maltby saw Hong Kong as the potential springboard for Britain, Canada and her allies to liberate South China from the Japanese. A month later in Shamshuipo prisoner of war camp, the terrible anguish and despair he felt at his defeat was so much greater because, through no fault of his own perhaps, the Japanese threat had been so misrepresented to him.

A heavy responsibility for the misreading of the intelligence, it appears, must fall on Maltby’s senior officer, Major Charles R Boxer, arguably the most experienced Intelligence Officer in the Far East.

Educated at Wellington College, Boxer had been commissioned in 1923 into The Lincolnshire Regiment after 18 months at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. Over the next seven years he successfully developed two careers – his military one, and secondly as an historian and author, learning Dutch, Portuguese and Japanese.

Boxer learnt Japanese at the School of Oriental Studies at the University of London. In 1930 he undertook an additional year of intense instruction in Tokyo before being assigned to a Japanese regiment as a Military Language Officer where, it was confidently believed by the British Ambassador in Japan, Sir Robert Craigie, that the British Language Officers were in a much better position to understand the minds and ambitions of their Japanese hosts than were the ordinary British Military Attachés on his staff. In the months to come, Boxer formed lasting friendships with fellow Japanese army officers, and scholars who shared his academic interests.

By 1931 he was serving with the 38th Nara infantry regiment at Kyoto, living with his Japanese hosts in their barracks. They ‘leased’ him a cook-concubine who saw to his needs and improved his colloquial Japanese. In mid 1933 he returned to his regiment in Yorkshire before a posting to the Intelligence division of the War Office in London.

This then was the man who became a key member of the intelligence-gathering Far East Combined Bureau (FECB), and the GOC’s principal Intelligence Officer and Interpreter. He travelled extensively in China and became highly thought of, despite his remarkable private life. After his wife had been despatched to Australia with others, he took an American journalist and one time opium addict, Emily Hahn, as his lover, having an illegitimate child with her. As we will see, he was probably responsible for one of the most erroneous signals ever sent on the eve of battle to the War Office.

The other important Intelligence Officer in Hong Kong was Flight Lieutenant H T ‘Alf’ Bennett, also a Japanese linguist.

In September 1990 I was running a major two-day battlefield tour for British Servicemen in Hong Kong. While waiting to be taken by helicopter for a reconnaissance of the Shingmun Redoubt with veterans of the campaign, Bennett approached me unexpectedly. “You should be aware why the intelligence was so bad before the war,” he told me. “It was the fault of the British Ambassador’s staff in Tokyo. They had been there much too long, and had become complacent, some marrying Japanese. Confined to restricted areas of Japan, they were fed false intelligence by Japanese agents. And so it was that we were misled.”

Sir Sydney Giffard, who served four tours with the Foreign Office in Japan between 1952 and 1980 ending up as the Ambassador, disagrees with Bennett’s assessment “because it had been clear to experienced observers for many years (since the Manchurian Incident and the murder of Prime Minister Inukai) that the Japanese Government was coming under increasing pressure from extreme nationalist elements, especially in the army, bent on expansion in China and against Western interests in Asia”.

There is no evidence that the British staff had been in Tokyo too long before the war.

Major General Maltby found it easy to blame the Embassy in Tokyo. He stated in his post war report that the civil defence plan was not fully implemented before Japan’s invasion because of “the belief that Japan was bluffing… the true gravity of the state of affairs was not reflected in the Embassy despatches from Tokyo.”9 Yet the British and American Ambassadors were giving London and Washington grim warnings of impending Japanese operations, and at least one British Military Attaché in Tokyo from 1938, Colonel G T Wards, had accurate views. He was another Japanese linguist who, like Boxer, had been attached to a Japanese regiment. Lecturing to the officers in Singapore in April 1941, he had emphasised the excellent morale and thorough training of the Japanese, condemning the common belief that they would be no match for British soldiers. However, the senior officer present vehemently disagreed, announcing that Wards’ views were “far from the truth” and “in no way a correct appreciation of the situation”.10

Whether Alf Bennett was right to blame the Military Attachés in Tokyo is therefore highly questionable. Both he and Boxer were frequently across the border in China with their Japanese friends. Surely they were in a good position to discover what was going on?

Just as Prime Minister Blair and President Bush were seemingly misled, it would appear, by their Intelligence and Secret Service Officers before the 2003 Iraqi war on the question of Weapons of Mass Destruction, so General Maltby must, it appears, have been ill informed by his senior staff responsible for advising him on Japanese intentions and capabilities. Nobody in Hong Kong knew what the Japanese were up to. They were soon to find out.

Notes

1. File 106/2375, Public Record Office (now the National Archives), London.

2. PRO CAB 80/15, COS (40) 592 (revise), dated 15th August 1940.

3. Ibid.

4. Elphick, Peter, Far Eastern File: The Intelligence War in the Far East, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1997, p. 256.

5. Duff, Sir Lyman P, Report on the Canadian Expeditionary Force to the Crown Colony of Hong Kong, Ottawa, 1942, p. 14.

6. Memo Mr Hollis to the PM, dated 10.9.41 (PRO).

7. Churchill, W S, The Grand Alliance, London: Cassell, 1950, p. 157.

8. File 106/2400 signal 1488, dated 27.11.41 (PRO).

9. Operations in Hong Kong from 8th to 25th December 1941, supplement to the London Gazette, 27.1.48.

10. Kirby, S Woodburn, Singapore: the Chain of Disaster, London: Cassell, 1971, pp. 74–5.

CHAPTER 7

Battle Stations

Major General C M Maltby arrived in Hong Kong in July 1941. The GOC had gained useful experience fighting the Pathans on India’s northwest frontier. “He was fit, wiry and lightly-built, rather bowlegged with a slightly rolling gait. His blue eyes could be very kindly or very frosty, always betraying the mood he was in,” remembers his ADC, Captain Iain MacGregor Royal Scots. “His hair, cut very short, was sandy tinged with grey. He had a trim moustache and a complexion like the mellowed red brick of an Elizabethan English country house. He was not amused by caustic or esoteric wit; never by smut. He was almost a British caricature in some ways.”1

General Maltby’s idea of a peaceful Sunday afternoon in the hot weather was “a stroll round the Island”. Taking up to half a dozen staff officers, most of whom would rather be playing golf or sleeping, he would clamber along the most inaccessible hillsides and the roughest paths, nullahs and catch-waters for three hours, studying the possible battlefields. General Maltby hated all forms of protocol and detested snobbery, pretentiousness, boasters and pomposity. He had instructed at the Indian Staff College at Quetta (but, contrary to some accounts, he had not been the Commandant there). His subsequent appointment was as a District Commander in India. He had been led to expect further promotion after his tour in Hong Kong.

Before the arrival of the Canadians in November 1941, Maltby had only four Regular Army battalions – 2nd Battalion Royal Scots, 1st Battalion the Middlesex Regiment, 5/7th Rajputs and 2/14th Punjabis.

His new plan, when the Canadians arrived, was that three battalions would fight on the Gin Drinkers’ Line on the Mainland, leaving the Middlesex Regiment, a machine-gun battalion, to man the pill-boxes round the Island, and the two Canadian battalions on the Island to oppose any landings from the sea. The Island Brigade would be under command of the Canadian Brigadier J K Lawson. When necessary, after holding the Japanese for as long as possible, certainly not less than a week, the Mainland battalions would withdraw to the Island, leaving only an Indian battalion to hold the Devil’s Peak in the southeast. See Map on page 37.

The Mainland Brigade was commanded by the newly promoted Brigadier Cedric Wallis. He became the most controversial soldier in the battle for Hong Kong. Wallis had enlisted in the Royal Horse Guards in the First World War, been commissioned into the Sherwood Foresters and served in the Lancashire Regiment before joining the Indian Army in 1917. He had fought in Iraq; at the end of the First World War he was appointed the Chief Political Officer in Mosul before a posting to southwest Persia. He next served in south India and Burma. At the beginning of the Second World War, he commanded an internal security force in Bombay before moving to Hong Kong in 1940. He was promoted to Brigadier from Lieutenant Colonel in command of 5/7 Rajputs, shortly before the Canadians arrived. (Some books state erroneously that he had the Military Cross.)

Wallis was a slim, tough, very determined and ambitious soldier who wore a black patch or a dark monocle over his left eye, which he had lost in the First World War. He felt there were too many cocktail parties in Hong Kong and too little time was spent in hard training. Like John Harris, he had listened to Brooke-Popham’s optimistic views. “I felt the Air Marshal must be very badly informed and making a great mistake in belittling the Japs,” he wrote afterwards. “This sort of nonsense fitted in very nicely with what many liked to hear and believe in, as they could not bear to think that their carefree, elegant life-styles could be interfered with.”2

Early in November 1941, Wallis committed his three battalions to occupy and work on the Gin Drinkers’ Line, instead of going to camps on the frontier. He felt that defence preparations should take priority over all else. “With many young and inexperienced officers and newly arrived recruits in Indian units, all units were badly in need of training also,” he wrote. “Camps were consequently postponed until after Christmas 1941, so that units could live and work in their battle positions, in itself one of the best forms of training.”

The 2nd Battalion the Royal Scots, the oldest and senior British Infantry Regiment of the Line, was responsible for the west, including the Shingmun Redoubt, and for covering the southern slopes of Tai Mo Shan mountain. The 2/14 Punjabis covered the centre of the Mainland and the 5/7 Rajputs were on the right (east). See Map on page 37.

The Royal Scots “worked hard wiring, digging and on camouflage and were in good form except that their strength was sadly reduced by sickness,” wrote Wallis. “Malarial cases were the heaviest and their defensive area was badly infested with mosquitoes. At one time 110 cases were being treated.3

“Both Indian battalions had been weakened by repeated ‘milkings’ for new units and had just received 150–180 partially trained recruits as reinforcements. The Rajputs received new 3 inch mortars only after deployment.”

All units registered possible artillery targets by bringing down live fire and then adjusting it for range. The targets included for example likely enemy approaches or forming up points before an attack. The artillery batteries were either mobile ones or in static gun emplacements.

With a frontage of ten miles along the Gin Drinkers’ Line, no reserve unit could be found to stop the enemy should they break through.

Previously the Royal Scots’ war role had been on the Island and so the officers and soldiers were unfamiliar with the ground in their new position. They were responsible for a frontage of over 5,000 yards although the textbook norm was 1,000 yards. The abandoned 1937 plan envisaged that at least two divisions would be required to hold the line properly. Wallis had less than one sixth of this strength. The Royal Scots Battalion was issued with only 90 anti-personnel mines – far too few. It had been ‘milked’ like the Indian Battalions, losing ten experienced officers and receiving territorial or emergency commissioned replacements, many of whom had only just taken up their new appointments before the war started; the Battalion was left with just four officers possessing regular commissions.

On 25th October, two days before the Canadians sailed from Vancouver, a brief reached Ottawa from the War Office which read: “The task of the Hong Kong garrison is to defend the Colony against internal attack and to deny the use of the harbour and dry dock to the enemy.

“The threat: the Japanese are established on the Mainland, are carrying out operations in the vicinity of the frontier, and are in possession of a number of air bases within easy reach of the Colony. They also hold command of the sea and are therefore in a position to occupy the surrounding islands at will… ”

This frank, rather pessimistic report ensured that the Canadians were aware of the true situation. Crerar, the Canadian CGS, had earlier announced that there was “no military risk” in sending two battalions to Hong Kong. Nevertheless he “had many high-level British contacts, who, at the strategic level, had a thorough understanding of the risks involved,” wrote Brereton Greenhous, who worked for 25 years in Ottawa’s Department of National Defence’s Directorate of History. “They could have told him at any time during the past two or three years that the garrison was no more than a hostage to fortune.”4

On 16th November 1941 the Canadians reached Hong Kong, ten days before Cordell Hull, the American Secretary of State, rejected the Japanese attempt to prolong diplomatic negotiations. Hull was still insisting that all Japanese troops be withdrawn from China and Indo-China before Washington would release any assets or permit the importation of oil.

Four days after the Canadians arrived, they occupied their battle positions during a night exercise. Starting in early December, one of the three platoons in each company spent a few days in turn manning these positions after a further reconnaissance. The British had no knowledge of the level of training of the Canadians on their arrival. The account which follows may seem harsh and critical of them.

It is often forgotten that there was a Canadian Army to fight in northwest Europe from the D-Day beaches onwards. Moreover 623 high grade young Canadian officers commanded British platoons in 140 battalions in Italy, France, Belgium, Holland and Germany.5 Canadian officers had also served earlier in North Africa to gain experience. Well trained, well led and uncommitted Canadian battalions, impatient for action, were not chosen for Hong Kong because the imminence of hostilities there was not understood; the fact that the international situation had become so precarious was not recognised. Canada deserves infinite gratitude for sending reinforcements – all volunteers – to Hong Kong.

Many Canadian soldiers, if properly trained, were outstanding. Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, who had a critical eye and no respect for the second rate, wrote in his diary on 5th September 1941: “Motored down to Tilshead to visit the Canadian Army Tank Brigade. They have not been in the country long and are consequently in the early stages, but promise very well …”6

On 3rd December Maltby and Lawson toured the frontier and, watching the Japanese through binoculars, thought them to be scruffy, lazy and uninterested. Nevertheless two independent reports from China stated that between 10,000 and 20,000 Japanese were expected to arrive at Sham Chun, five miles north of Fanling close to the border, on 4th December for an attack on the Colony.7 Maltby did not believe these reports, preferring, presumably, the reassuring views from Major Charles Boxer and “people of all kinds and nationalities from all over China, MI6, consular agents, Secret Intelligence Service, cloak-and-dagger types from Shanghai, Canton and elsewhere” whom Maltby’s ADC was admitting at night direct into the General’s study.8

Maltby was responsible for the defence of Hong Kong but was answerable to the Governor, who was also the King’s Representative and Commander in Chief. It was the previous Governor, Sir Geoffrey Northcote, who had proposed to the British War Cabinet that Hong Kong should be declared an open city and the Japanese forces allowed to march in. The closing months of his tour had been clouded by two scandals involving mishandled immigration and air raid shelters which failed to match up to specifications. Some expatriates believed that the entire Government apparatus was riddled with graft. In September 1941 Northcote left Hong Kong with “a nasty taste in my mouth”.

His successor was Sir Mark Young. After initial training in Ceylon, he had served in the West Indies and the Middle East for 13 years, ending up as Governor of Tanganyika before coming to Hong Kong. He was a very able, tough, courageous, unflappable, austere and awe-inspiring figure who did not suffer fools gladly. Sir Mark was of medium height, slim and always immaculately dressed, befitting perhaps his background of Eton and the Rifle Brigade.

During the months before the Japanese invasion, the Hong Kong Government, in keeping with the War Office’s policy, did not take rigorous action in the face of blatant Japanese hostile provocation. For example the Governor, then Northcote, reported that Formosans were entering the Colony as fifth columnists. He wanted to deport them, but the Foreign Office cautioned against such action, fearing reprisals. He also complained about low-level bomber flights over Hong Kong’s fortifications, but the Foreign Office again advised against taking decisive action. The Japanese proceeded to sink junks carrying food for the Colony, to occupy two islands immediately south of Hong Kong, to send a naval party to seize temporarily a British lighthouse and to insert a virtual naval encirclement around the Colony. Northcote told London that these unfriendly actions warranted a vigorous response, though he did not request permission to undertake retaliatory action for he had no modern aircraft and, should hostilities break out, the outcome would be a bloody one.

Could the British and Hong Kong Governments be accused of a degree of appeasement in not taking vigorous action against extreme Japanese provocation? Field Marshal Alanbrooke took over from Field Marshal Dill as CIGS on 1st December 1941 and noted in his diary that he had discussed the possibility of Japan entering the war with Dill. “He had told me frankly that he had done practically nothing to meet this threat,” wrote Alanbrooke. “He said we were already so weak on all fronts that it was impossible to denude them any further to meet a possible threat.” Alanbrooke thought Dill was right in his dispositions and that he could not have done more to meet the probable Japanese entry into the war.

Stalin, on the other hand, could have mobilised his vast forces before the German onslaught – Operation Barbarossa. He could have moved his aircraft from vulnerable airfields where they remained wing-tip to wing-tip; he could have committed his divisions to battle stations instead of leaving them to face giant German encirclements; he could have listened to Stafford Cripps, the British Ambassador in Moscow, who had earlier delivered a letter from Churchill warning of the invasion. But Stalin believed that Britain was trying to entrap Russia and concluded that “they’re playing us off against each other”.9

Sir Mark Young appreciated that vigorous protests in Hong Kong could not be backed up by force. Had definitive information been available weeks before Japan went to war, there was little he or Maltby could have done about it, unlike Stalin.

As mentioned in Chapter 1, on Saturday 6th December a cablegram from Singapore reached Alanbrooke and Maltby with news that two convoys of Japanese transports, escorted by cruisers and destroyers, were southwest of Saigon in Indo-China (now Vietnam). That evening a British officer on Hong Kong’s frontier received a police message that three Japanese divisions of 38,000 men had arrived at To Kat, only eight miles from the frontier. That same evening at 7.20 p.m. Singapore ordered the RAF in Hong Kong to assume “No. 1 degree of readiness”. That night all the Anti Aircraft guns in the Colony were manned.

The Church Parade at St John’s Cathedral in Victoria on Sunday 7th December started no differently from any other. General Maltby was there with many of his officers. Hurried twitterings of conversation among the ladies confirmed that the Chinese Charity Ball at the Peninsula Hotel the night before had been a great success. The latest rumours about the Japanese caused anxious, worried frowns. An officer suddenly entered the Cathedral and whispered to Maltby in the front pew. He got up and strode from the Church followed by others. The Service had not even reached the prayers for peace.

The Defence Council was hurriedly summoned to a lengthy meeting at Government House. Sir Mark Young and Major General Maltby agreed that war was imminent, and the entire garrison was ordered to war stations. Deployment began.