The Battle for Hong Kong 1941-1945

by Oliver Lindsay

  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 ar
e 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 co
mpare 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.