The Battle for Hong Kong 1941-1945

by Oliver Lindsay

  In the late 1980s the practice had prepared plans and secured the commission for a comprehensive redevelopment of a 2.84-acre site in Kensington above Gloucester Road underground station which incorporated the historic Brunel railway arches of the District Line. The development comprised luxury serviced apartments, an office building, and a retail arcade with landscaped areas. Throughout the contract the District, Circle and Piccadilly tube lines remained in use. Major structural work, including 18.5-metre long beams over the railway, had to be undertaken at night. Access roads were closed to bring in the beams. Gloucester Park was officially opened by HRH the Duke of Gloucester GCVO on 29th November 1991.

  During my career much has changed to produce the ‘global village’ and instant communications of today. In the early years I spent several days travelling to the Gulf on unreliable piston-engined planes with frequent night stops, often unexpected. Nowadays one can fly direct in a matter of hours. When I first travelled to the Arabian Gulf there were few telephones; cables, which had to be sent from cable stations by radio, were the main means of communication. Every word and punctuation mark was chargeable. Over all these years, London remained my base and I travelled laden with rolls of drawings tied up with brown paper and string, and detailed architectural models in wooden boxes which had to be placed in the aircraft hold. The reputation of the practice grew through the nurturing of personal contacts and the building of trust and confidence with clients. Promotion was principally by word of mouth. Cost control and quick responses were essential.

  Jill and teams of architects and technicians undertook most of the design work in London. The hardworking professional teams and key personnel who ran the regional offices were no less essential to the success of the practice.

  The full story of our architectural practice over more than 50 years, and which still continues, must be told elsewhere.1 There were many projects and locations – and inevitably there were disappointments.

  One project in particular held special significance for me. This was the 1,600-bed Tuen Mun Hospital in Hong Kong. We had won against international competition the commission for one of the largest hospitals in the world to be built in one phase in the 1980s. After 36 years I was back in Hong Kong.

  Other hospitals followed in Hong Kong, some in association with Leigh & Orange: United Christian, Caritas and a technical design consultancy for one of the largest hospitals of all – the Pamela Youde with almost 2,000 beds. We were invited to enter the People’s Republic of China to plan the Zhuhai Special Economic Zone near the former Portuguese colony of Macau. This was an urban development plan proposal for a new city of over 200,000 people. It incorporated a large resort complex, a city centre and commercial and industrial areas. The initial survey was carried out with my son Mark from the deck of a Chinese warship.

  We should remember that the Chinese were our brave allies during the war years.

  Mark had returned from the United States in 1981 with a Master’s degree in architecture and urban design from Harvard University, after which he had worked for the well-known architect developer, John Portman, who was based in Atlanta, Georgia. Mark introduced Computer Aided Design, then a new and rapidly developing field, into the practice. The first practical use of the system was for the design and working drawings of Tuen Mun Hospital. The Public Works Department in Hong Kong was impressed and subsequently installed a similar system.

  The Tuen Mun Hospital was the first building services contract to be awarded in Hong Kong to a Japanese contractor since 1945. Before that, the Japanese were prohibited from tendering for Government contracts in Hong Kong.

  * * * * *

  Having endured the grim experience of being a POW in Hong Kong and seen at first hand the cruelty to which some of the Japanese descended, I was once asked by Oliver Lindsay, “What are your feelings today about yesterday’s Japanese?” After some thought I replied in two words: “Very mixed.”

  As far as today’s Japanese are concerned, Oliver has seen another side to them. After 35 years as a regular soldier, he worked for six years at the Treloar Trust which looks after 300 very seriously disabled youngsters. Many have severe cerebral palsy, which prevents them having any speech.

  A Japanese firm, a household name, visited the charity at Oliver’s invitation. After much bowing and inscrutable ‘smiles’, they departed. Oliver hoped they would pay for several appropriately named ‘Liberators’, each of which rests on the front of the child’s wheelchair, providing synthetic ‘speech’. They cost £4,000 each. Without them, the youngsters in question could not communicate.

  Oliver heard from the Japanese the following day: they wanted to fund and equip the entire Communication Centre! There was only one condition: the Japanese wanted no publicity – it was the children they wanted to help, not their firm or its reputation.

  * * * * *

  Our London office has remained in Marylebone. We moved from George Street to Queen Anne Street and then to Devonshire Place in 1963.

  In 2000 Jill and I celebrated our golden wedding anniversary with our family and friends; the reception was held on the River Thames on HMS Belfast. My life therefore came full circle. HMS Belfast was the sister ship of HMS Euryalus, the ship on which, within days of my liberation from the prison camp in Hong Kong, I had so enjoyed my first pink gin and the glimpse of Country Life once more.

  Note

  1. The 120-page account of John R Harris Architects was published by the Hurtwood Press in 1984.

  CHAPTER 24

  Retribution

  Following Japan’s surrender in August 1945, all former members of the Hong Kong Japanese military police (the Kempeitai) were arrested. Colonel Noma who had commanded them was traced to Japan and flown back to Hong Kong. Added to them were some officers of the Japanese 38th Division. They were placed in the cells at Stanley prison, vacated a few weeks earlier by some of our men!

  The trials started in Hong Kong in March 1946. All the cases were meticulously investigated. British Army officers represented the accused; four months later a team of Japanese lawyers arrived to defend them, too.

  The three most senior officers were tried by the Nationalists in China. Lieutenant General Takashi Sakai, who had been captured in China, had invaded Hong Kong in December 1941 when shocking atrocities were committed against Servicemen and civilians alike. He was found guilty and shot in Nanking.

  The two former Hong Kong Governors, Rensuke Isogai and Hisokazu Tanaka, both Lieutenant Generals, had fled to China and Tokyo respectively. Tanaka was shot by a firing squad in Canton. He was heard to grunt defiantly on the eve of his execution, “Let’s see who is calling the shots in East Asia in ten years’ time.” Isogai, who preferred beautiful handwriting to military matters, was given a life sentence for the forced evacuation of the Chinese which led to so many of them dying. He ended up serving only five years.

  Colonels Noma and Kanazawa, the two successive chiefs of the military police, had been responsible for many callous murders during interrogations. Much of the testimony against them was provided by Chinese, Eurasians and Indians who had suffered in their cells. Both were hanged along with 19 other high-ranking military police officers.

  Two other Japanese who faced the death penalty were Colonel Tokunaga Isao, the overall commander of all Hong Kong’s camps, and Saito Shunkichi, the camps’ medical officer. Lieutenant Colonel J N Crawford, the senior Canadian medical officer, told the Court during their two months’ trial that of 128 Canadian deaths from diphtheria, 101 would have survived if the Japanese had provided the serum.1 Warrant Officer F W J Lewis said that £30,000 worth of British medicines and surgical instruments were in the Colony when it was captured, but were deliberately withheld. “The death of every man who died of diphtheria because of failure to ensure segregation, or the lack of serum, was directly Saito’s responsibility, no less than if he had grasped the man by the throat and choked him to death,” declared Major Puddicombe KC for the prosecution.

  Major C R Boxer cal
led Lewis’s evidence about a beating of Saito “a tissue of lies”, while Major S Smith of the Volunteers wrote to the Court about Tokunaga’s kindness to him. There is no doubt that Tokunaga stole Red Cross parcels. G White, formerly employed by the Municipal Electricity Company, saw stacks of them when shown over the house by Tokunaga’s mistress. “They were given to me by POWs through Major Cecil Boon as an act of affectionate gesture,” claimed Tokunaga.

  Saito told the Court that there were only three cases of cholera among the POWs due to his efforts, whereas 1,700 Chinese died of it. He blamed the high proportion of Canadian diphtheria deaths on inevitable overcrowding, poor sanitary discipline, Canadians sharing lit cigarettes and the ignorant POW doctors.

  In short, they blamed everyone but themselves.

  The evidence against them was overwhelming, but their death sentences were commuted to life and 20 years’ imprisonment. It is not known if Boxer’s evidence enabled them to escape the hangman’s noose. “Unlike many former POWs, he did not approach post-war Japan with hostility or with the spirit of revenge,” writes his biographer. “He considered that, given the nature of war, he warranted the punishment for disseminating war news in his camp.”2 Laurens van der Post, an ex-POW from Java and since discredited by his biographer, strongly opposed the war crimes trials and refused to testify against his former captors.

  Major General Tanaka Kyozaburo received only 20 years’ imprisonment although the Court was satisfied that “the whole route of this man’s battalion was littered with the corpses of murdered men who had been bayoneted and shot”. Lieutenant General Ito received 12 years and Major General Shoji was acquitted. Captain Kyoda Shigeru, who had commanded the Lisbon Maru, received seven years. The sentences seem extraordinarily light. The British are not great ‘haters’.

  By March 1948, when the trials against the Japanese were completed, those facing imprisonment were dispatched to the Sagamo war crimes prison in Tokyo.

  By December 1945 over 50 suspected collaborators were charged with specific offences under English law (while the Japanese had been charged with crimes against humanity and the accepted usage of war). Six of them were accused of treason: one was hanged in Stanley Gaol. After the restoration of civil rule on 1st May 1946, 28 Indians, Europeans and Eurasians were found guilty. Five were executed; the remainder received imprisonment with hard labour. Inouye Kanao, the Japanese interpreter at Shamshuipo, a Canadian, was found guilty of treason and hanged.

  According to Captain J L Flynn, “after the Japanese surrender it was quite common to see naked, head-shaven women being chased, stoned and beaten by Chinese crowds. Such women were said to have been prostitutes for the Japanese.”

  About 400 Indian soldiers captured in Hong Kong are believed to have joined the pro-Japanese Indian National Army. Up to 40,000 Indians from all theatres may have done so, many of them in order to obtain better food and conditions than that which the miserable POW camps had to offer. There is strong evidence that their fighting amounted to no more than a token gesture. The Japanese must have found transporting, arming, provisioning and relying on the 40,000 Indians a considerable burden and let-down; their own Japanese forces were increasingly starving when Slim was advancing south of the Irrawaddy upon Rangoon in 1945. “On the way the 1st Division of the Indian National Army was encountered,” wrote Field Marshal Viscount Slim. “It surrendered en masse with its commander, 150 officers and more than 3,000 men. They were just in time to begin work on the captured airfields.”3 It can be seen that they were ineffective, as opposed to those French, Dutch, Belgians and others who did fight for the Nazis, largely on the Eastern front.

  * * * * *

  It came as no surprise to the POWs from Shamshuipo that Major C Boon Royal Army Service Corps faced a general court martial on 11 charges, one of which was assisting the enemy. He had been a staff officer in Fortress Headquarters. Aged 45, he had served in the First World War and had once been a professional ballroom dancing champion. Boon had been in close arrest for 11 months before his trial in London in August 1946. “Boon had never commanded troops in the whole of his career, having always held administrative jobs. The Japs probably spotted him as pliable material because of his subservient attitude and general obsequiousness,” noted Major A R Colquhoun.4 Boon had occasionally attended parties with the Japanese, as he recorded, in Russian, in his diary. “After roll-call had bananas, fruit and roll with Japanese officers… we went to dine with Japanese Commander, plenty of beer.”

  The Japanese had given him the unenviable job of being in charge of the Other Ranks in Shamshuipo. In 1942 BAAG had addressed a message to him about escapes; fortunately it was intercepted before he received it.

  Evidence was given by former POWs that he informed on them and helped the enemy find wireless sets and tunnels for escape. Boon was alleged to have said to other POWs. “We must do as the Japanese tell us. We are officers of the Japanese Army now. I don’t regard myself as a British officer, but as part of the Japanese staff. I owe no allegiance to the King.” The prosecution called 40 witnesses; there was no ex-POW to give evidence for the defence.

  Major Boon was not at his best during the trial and his conviction seemed probable. However it soon became evident that the desperate years of imprisonment had made the witnesses’ memories unreliable. Some of their testimony was contradictory; a few broke under formidable cross-examination. “I think,” wrote one of the defending counsel, “that it does great credit to the court martial system that after appalling initial prejudice against him, the Major was acquitted.” Boon appeared half-stunned by the proceedings and was scarcely able to enjoy the celebrations at the Savoy Grill afterwards. In the absence of legal aid, he had to pay his entire defence costs, a considerable sum.

  * * * * *

  In conclusion it might be said that the returning British authorities in 1945 “did not launch a policy of vengeance or recrimination… With the passing of the years into the new, more prosperous Hong Kong, the public memory of any shame or humiliation suffered at the hands of the Japanese has faded.”5

  Notes

  1. Interview Crawford with OL.

  2. Alden, D, Charles R Boxer: An Uncommon Life, Lisbon: Fundação Oriente, 2001, p. 29.

  3. Slim, FM Viscount, Defeat into Victory, London: Cassell, 1961, p. 412.

  4. Interview Colquhoun with OL.

  5. Endacott, G B, Hong Kong Eclipse, Hong Kong: OUP, 1978, p. 250.

  CHAPTER 25

  “Good and Gallant

  Leadership”

  In the months after the defeat in Hong Kong, Major General C M Maltby was so despondent that he was indifferent to honours and awards being conferred on his Servicemen. Fortunately he changed his mind.

  In April 1946 the appropriate recognition was given to the outstanding gallantry of Company Sergeant Major John Robert Osborn of the Winnipeg Grenadiers. On 19th December 1941, having enabled part of his Company to capture Mount Butler at the point of the bayonet and held it for three hours against a much larger number of enemy, he covered his men’s withdrawal. Later that afternoon, several grenades were thrown at his Company; he picked them up and threw them back. Suddenly a grenade dropped between him and his men. He rolled on it to protect them and was killed. The citation for the Victoria Cross which was awarded to this most courageous Warrant Officer is best endorsed in the language of a private soldier: “This man sacrificed his life for the boys that might have been crippled or maimed for life. I say he was a real soldier and one of the best I’ve known.” The British named a large barracks in Hong Kong after him. (Although all recent books on the Victoria Cross and Canadian accounts agree that Osborn’s action took place on Mount Butler, the precise location is not known.)

  Until relatively recently, only the Victoria Cross, the George Cross and a Mention in Despatches have been awarded posthumously. Yet an exception was made in the case of Lieutenant Colonel H W M Stewart whose 1st Battalion The Middlesex Regiment fought so gallantly on the approaches to Victoria and on
the peninsula at Stanley. He may best be remembered for his fine leadership on the sinking of the Lisbon Maru. Stewart was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, as was Captain (later Major General) C M M Man whose prolonged and heartening defence of Leighton Hill by the ‘odds and sods’ was so successful. A DSO also went to Major C R Templer who had rolled grenades down the corridors of the Repulse Bay Hotel at approaching Japanese. Two Canadians also won the DSO. They were Majors W A Bishop and E Hodkinson. The former prevented the Japanese breaking through to the Tytam Gap on 18th December 1941, while Hodkinson undertook a daring attack on the 19th; it led to him being seriously wounded.

  Padre Uriah Laite, the Regimental Chaplain to the Winnipeg Grenadiers, won the Military Cross when D Company held out for three days until 22nd December. He tended the wounded day and night with no medical backup, as well as giving spiritual and moral comfort. Due to his efforts in interceding with the Japanese, the wounded were not murdered on the spot as elsewhere. Another thoroughly deserved Military Cross went to Captain C Otway Royal Engineers whose gallantry at Lei Mun was remarkable.

  Subedar Major Haider R Khan of the 2/14 Punjabis was another proud wearer of the Military Cross. He spent much time in solitary confinement for his adamant loyalty to the Crown.

  Three Royal Scots deserve special mention. Captain D Pinkerton, although wounded earlier, stormed through the Wong Nei Chong Gap reaching the objective, the Police Station there, in a frontal assault before being wounded again. 2nd Lieutenant J A Ford, who had earlier held up the Japanese on Golden Hill on the Mainland, carried him back to safety. Both won Military Crosses. There were innumerable Other Ranks who received recognition. Among them was Private J Gallacher who received his Distinguished Conduct Medal from Princess Mary, the Royal Scots Colonel in Chief, in 1944, following his escape from Shamshuipo. Tragically, having survived so much, Pinkerton was killed in action at Port Said in 1956 and Gallacher in Korea in 1951.