The Battle for Hong Kong 1941-1945

by Oliver Lindsay

  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 terroris
ts’ 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.