by Jan Morris
Fifty odd years ago, when Smuggler’s Ridge really was a more solitary place, the Shing-mun redoubt was the key point of Hong Kong’s military defence. It was here on the night of 9 December 1941, in the Crown Colony’s centenary year, that the 38th Division of the Japanese 23rd Army, falling upon those bunkers, throwing grenades down those air-shafts, machine-gunning those staircases, in a few hours of fighting broke the British resistance, and so made it certain that the 1940s would be a decade apart in the history of Hong Kong.
Like nearly everyone else, the Japanese had been threatening and bullying China for years. In 1933 they had seized Manchuria, far to the north, and founded the puppet kingdom of Manchukuo under Puyi, the pretender to the Manchu throne. In 1937 they had taken Beijing and embarked upon a long and sporadic movement southwards through the Chinese provinces. Their advance put a temporary end to China’s endemic civil war, and for a time the forces of the Kuomintang and the Communists fought together under the command of Chiang Kai-shek, with his capital at Chong-qing (Chungking). The Japanese had set up a second puppet Government at Nanjing (Nanking) under the former Kuomintang politician Wang Jing-wei; since the autumn of 1939 they had been ensconced in Guangzhou, just up the river from Hong Kong, and had stationed troops on the frontier with the colony (where they sometimes exchanged beers and civilities with the British sentries on the other side).
For years too the British military planners had been considering what best to do if the Japanese ever turned upon Hong Kong. Their views differed, and they kept changing their minds. The chief British fortress of the east was now Singapore, towards the cost of whose defences the Hong Kong Government had prudently offered £250,000, and the colony’s own defences were slight. Nevertheless some strategists argued that at least it ought to be denied to an enemy as long as possible, and some thought it should be held at all costs until relief could come. Sometimes the plan was that the whole colony would be defended, sometimes that the mainland would be abandoned and the island held as a siege-fortress. Sometimes it was suggested that the place should be demilitarized, and not defended at all, and sometimes, perhaps most often, that it should offer a merely token resistance, for purposes of symbolism or example.
By 1941 the British Empire was at war with Germany and Italy, with whom Japan was in alliance, and Winston Churchill the Prime Minister in London seemed to have made up the planners’ minds for them. If the Japanese did attack, Hong Kong was not worth defending with any seriousness. Its garrison consisted only of two British infantry battalions, two battalions of the Indian Army, some artillery fixed and mobile, a local volunteer force, a handful of small warships, two flying-boats and three venerable torpedo bombers without any torpedoes. ‘If Japan goes to war with us,’ decreed the Prime Minister, ‘there is not the slightest chance of holding Hong Kong or relieving it.’ The garrison could only be symbolical, and token resistance was the only sensible choice. ‘I wish we had fewer troops there, but to move any would be noticeable and dangerous.’
There matters stood in the autumn of 1941. The general opinion in Hong Kong then was that, crazily though the Japanese were acting, they would not be so crazy as to attack this famous outpost of the British Crown. It had never been attacked, and was supposed to be impregnable anyway. Also it had old, friendly and profitable links with the Japanese. There was a prosperous Japanese community in the colony, and people often went to Japan for their holidays (‘Oriental charms’, as the travel advertisements said, ‘are jealously preserved intact amidst the most advanced Oriental civilization’).
The public attitude was defined by the South China Morning Post as a compound of reaction, faith, determination, nervous anticipation, evasion and simple fatalism. The conflict in Europe seemed remote indeed, but like all British possessions Hong Kong had officially been on a war footing since 1939. Adult British males were liable to conscription, and in June 1940 European wives and children were compulsorily evacuated to Australia (though some 900 women, many with children, had wangled a way to stay). Important buildings were sandbagged against bomb blast. Beaches were wired. There were practice black-outs now and then, and publicity campaigns to raise war bonds or prevent careless talk – as the makers of Tiger Beer characteristically told the citizenry in one of their advertisements:
Scraps of information,
Jeopardize the nation,
TALK ABOUT TIGER INSTEAD!
But otherwise things were pretty normal. The ships still came and went, the Pan Am flying-boats still arrived, nobody went short of anything. A robber, we see from the South China Morning Post, September 1941, is sentenced to five years’ hard labour and twelve strokes of the cat. His Excellency the Governor attends the All China Premiere of Lady Hamilton, with Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier. Jimmy’s Kitchen advertises its tasty tiffins. The official Government Gazette invites tenders for the erection of dry latrines at Telegraph Bay Village, and publishes proposed new trademarks for the Wing Hing Knitting Family.
But that same month the Japanese occupied Indo-China, unopposed by the French Vichy Government there, and in response first the Americans, then the British imposed embargoes on all exports of steel and oil to Japan. This was a drastic blow to the Japanese – ‘the most drastic blow’, thought The New York Times, ‘short of war’ – and it instantly increased tension throughout the Pacific. Hong Kong now prepared more urgently for its own war. Major-General Christopher Maltby, Indian Army, the commanding general, was bullish about the prospects of defending the colony. He believed indeed that it could be turned into an offensive base, for attacks upon the Japanese in China, and he had faith in the line of strong-points, centred upon the Shing-mun redoubt, which ran from east to west of the New Territories. There, he thought, some twelve miles south of the frontier, any invading force could be held long enough to allow an orderly evacuation of Kowloon and a build-up of strength on the island – which could itself hold out until help came from Singapore. Minefields were laid to protect the sea-approaches, and a network of seventy-two pillboxes was completed on Hong Kong Island.
Inexplicably Churchill, preoccupied perhaps with events elsewhere, was now converted to Maltby’s view, and was persuaded that only a modest reinforcement would enable Hong Kong to put up a worthwhile resistance. As a result two battalions of half-trained Canadian troops, most of them French-speaking, disembarked in Hong Kong on 16 November, without motor transport, to help defend the indefensible colony. They were officially categorized in Ottawa as ‘not recommended for operational consideration’. Just three weeks later, on 8 December, the Japanese, simultaneously attacking Pearl Harbor and invading the Malay Peninsula, crossed the border out of China into Hong Kong. Savagely bombing Kai Tak, where the Royal Air Force was instantly put out of action, they swept through the British advance guards in the northern New Territories, and on the following evening reached the Shing-mun redoubt.
It hardly delayed them at all. Maltby had thought it could hold out for a week, but it fell in a few hours, never to be remanned from that day to this. Many of its garrison died within their pillboxes, the rest abandoned the position. The Japanese did not pause. Bombing and shelling Kowloon, strafing ships and roads, they drove British and Indian troops alike helter-skelter down the peninsula and into ferry-boats, sampans, warships and lighters for the crossing to Hong Kong Island. In four days they were in full control of the whole peninsula. The last Star Ferry retreated to Blake Pier. The last exhausted rearguards were brought back across the Lyemun Gap. The British on Hong Kong-side, terrified and aghast, could see the troops of the 38th Division massing on the Kowloon waterfront, and hear the eerie cries of their loudspeakers, interspersed with recordings of Home Sweet Home, booming across the familiar waterway – ‘Give up, and the Japanese will protect you! Trust in the kindness of the Japanese Army!’
Before long the Japanese gunners were shelling across the harbour, the dive-bombers were screaming down on Central, and for the first time chaos struck the waterfront we have seen growing and enriching
itself so steadily decade by decade through the chapters of this book. It was hardly to be imagined. It was like a dream, in which all things familiar were suddenly shattered or distorted. The Tamar was scuttled. Fires raged in Wanchai. Statue Square was thick with acrid smoke. At midnight one night bombs hit the Jockey Club stables at Happy Valley, and the horses escaped. Trembling and streaked with blood they raced in panic here and there through the dark streets.
By 13 December all the British forces were assembled within the thirty-one square miles of the island. ‘We will hold off the enemy,’ said an official communiqué, ‘until the strategical situation permits relief. The simple task before everyone now is to hold firm.’
Behind the mountains grim and bare
(wrote a British soldier during the wait for the assault)
Like a wounded lion we lay,
Oh that the mother lion was there
To help defend her peaceful lair
And win the hard-fought day …
The Governor of Hong Kong was Sir Mark Young, a handsome and reserved Etonian, who had arrived from Barbados to take up his duties two months before. The Colonial Secretary, his right-hand man, was Franklin Gimson, who had arrived from England, never having been in Hong Kong before, on the very day of the invasion. Far away was Winston Churchill, Prime Minister, war-lord and imperialist, who had spoken of the British Empire lasting a thousand years, and who had now changed his mind about the futility of resistance. ‘There must be,’ he said in a message to the Governor, ‘no thought of surrender … Every day that you are able to maintain your resistance you and your men can win the lasting honour which we are sure will be your due.’
The War Cabinet in London had been advised that, even after the loss of the New Territories and Kowloon, Hong Kong Island should be able to hold out for at least four months. It held out for rather more than a week. Far from fighting to the last man, seven out of ten of the servicemen under British command survived to surrender, and they handed over to their enemies enormous quantities of material. The control of the defence was ineffective, the troops were generally road-bound and inefficient, the equipment was inferior and the attitude to war was anachronistic. The defending force included Indians and Canadians who spoke no English, engineers fighting as infantry, infantry battalions without transport, RAF ground crews and Royal Navy seamen. It was a campaign summed up by the opposing boots – on the one side the British ammunition boots, heavy hobnailed things of coarse leather, their pattern unchanged since the Boer War, on the other side the light Japanese combat boots, supple, rubber-soled, silent. Clumping, unimaginative and archaic was the British conduct of the battle; swift, audacious and innovative the Japanese.
Yet the failure was understandable. This was the first armed conflict ever between the Japanese and the British, and the British were taken fearfully by surprise. Frozen in their attitudes of imperial complacency, they had come to believe that no Asian could be their match. The Japanese had been enormously admired for their fighting abilities half a century before; they had performed better than anyone during the siege of the Beijing legations in 1900, and Admiral Heihachiro Togo, victor of the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, had actually been made a member of the British Order of Merit. Now however, for reasons unclear, they were thought to be hopelessly inferior – short-sighted, poorly equipped and incapable of fighting at night. It had come as an appalling shock to the British when the tough and wonderfully enterprising Japanese regiments threw them with such appalling ease out of the peninsula and across the harbour strait. Maltby and his soldiers never really recovered their confidence. The battle for Hong Kong was lost on Smuggler’s Ridge.
The 38th Division’s intelligence was good. The large Japanese community in Hong Kong before the war (of whom eighty remained even on the day of the invasion) included many spies – the well-known barber of the Hong Kong Hotel, whom we met briefly in an earlier chapter, turned out to have been a naval commander all the time. The division was well supplied with maps of the British defences, and was never short of local guides. Equipped with these advantages, the Japanese prepared a plan for the capture of Hong Kong Island that was simple, decisive, and worked perfectly. Heavily shelling and bombing the island first, they landed their first troops at East Point, not far from the old Jardine’s headquarters, on the night of 18 December. Next they advanced straight across the middle of the island, over the high country east of the Peak, to divide the British forces into two parts, east and west. Finally they turned upon those separate parts, each cut off from the other, and mopped them up.
In the course of the battle the Governor, from his bunker under Government House, echoed the Churchillian style in a message of his own – ‘Fight on. Hold fast for King and Empire. God bless you all in this your finest hour’ – and Churchill himself signalled to say that every part of the island must be fought for, if necessary from house to house. There were repeated reports, officially sponsored for the sake of morale, that Chinese armies were on their way to relieve the island. Until the reality of Pearl Harbor became clear, it was hoped that the US Navy might come to the rescue; until the sinking of the Royal Navy’s capital ships Repulse and Prince of Wales in the South China Sea, it was still hoped that something might arrive from Singapore. But it was all illusion. The British had no chance. Their forces were irrevocably split and scattered, and were presently reduced to isolated units fighting on more or less ignorantly of each other. They evolved no coherent strategy of resistance, but merely fought back wherever the enemy dictated, in a helpless series of defensive actions and half-cock counter-attacks. The poor half-trained Canadians, so recently disembarked in this totally unfamiliar environment, never did get their motor transport, and seldom knew exactly where they were. Even the Royal Scots, one of the most famous of British infantry regiments, fought with a sad lack of conviction. For nearly everyone it was a baptism of fire – only a few individuals had seen action in Europe or Africa, and a handful of veterans had fought, in very different circumstances, in the First World War. They never had a hope, and anyway their resistance made not the slightest difference, one way or the other, to the course of the war; it was an effect of grand tragedy that so much rhetoric was expended, and so many lives were thrown away, to demonstrate so desolate a point.
The British gave up on Christmas Day, to the gratified surprise of the Japanese, who had expected to be fighting for at least a month. Casualty figures have never been properly established, but the British side are said to have suffered about 2,000 killed and 1,300 seriously wounded, the Japanese rather more. At least 4,000 civilians died, nearly all Chinese. Some 9,000 British Indian and Canadian soldiers were taken prisoner. The defence had not been a disgrace, but it had certainly not been the epic Churchill seemed to want; the loss of Hong Kong was a humiliating event for the British Empire, and a curtain-raiser to the far more dreadful calamity of Singapore.
Still, in the face of this astonishing and terrifying new enemy, fighting with such sneaky subtlety and courage, some on the British side did respond with the old flair. In particular many of the men of the Hong Kong Volunteers, British and Chinese, set heroic examples. They knew the place and had a stake in it, and whenever the British armies scored a temporary success, or so it seems from the records, Hong Kong men contributed. At the North Point power station, by the northern waterfront, one of the most determined of the rearguard actions was fought by four officers and fifty-five men of the Volunteers’ Special Guard Company, organized by an insurance manager named A. W. Hughes. They were all over fifty-five, were variously nicknamed the Hugheseliers and the Methuseliers, and were led by J. J. Paterson, taipan of Jardine’s and a veteran of the First World War. One of the privates, aged seventy, was a nephew of Governor Des Voeux; another, aged sixty-seven, was taipan of Hutchison’s (later Hutchison-Whampoa). For fourteen hours these elderly gentlemen, very pillars of the Hong Kong Establishment, held out at the power station against repeated Japanese attacks and unrelieved mortar barrages, surrendering
only when all their ammunition was expended.
The Royal Navy, too, faithfully honoured its traditions. We read of the old river gunboat Cicala, under her one-armed captain John Boldero, rushing here and there throughout the battle zone, now off the New Territory bombarding the Japanese with her 3-inch gun, now ferrying people across the harbour, now storming into the Japanese invasion flotillas, undaunted for all her thirty years, until at last, after surviving sixty-four bombing attacks, she is sunk in the Lamma Channel. We read of the five motor torpedo boats of No. 2 Flotilla hurling themselves past Green Island, all guns blazing, at full speed into the junks, barges and sampans that were taking the Japanese armies across the harbour, sinking ships right and left until two of the boats were lost, one was crippled and half the crews were casualties.
A handful of soldiers and sailors escaped to the unoccupied part of China. For the rest, on Christmas Day, 1941, Sir Mark Young the Governor and Commander-in-Chief handed them over, together with all his authority, to Lieutenant-General Takashi Sakai of the Imperial Japanese Army. It was the first time a British Crown Colony had ever been surrendered to an enemy. ‘I had believed,’ said a Portuguese officer of the Hong Kong Volunteers, ‘and had been told to teach my troops that we would fight to the last man, to the last bullet. So to be told to capitulate was a serious blow to me.’
The British having almost all been locked up, the soldiers in prisoner-of-war camps in Kowloon, the civilians in an internment camp beside the sea at Stanley, the Governor for a few weeks in a suite at the Peninsula Hotel, before he was shipped away with other important captives to Manchuria – the British having been put away, the Japanese were left to do what they would with Hong Kong. In February 1942 a military Governor arrived. He was Lieutenant-General Rensuke Isogai, a Chinese specialist. He was said to be a gifted calligraphier and a master of the tea ceremony, but his first proclamation, put up in permanent form on the pedestal of Queen Victoria’s statue in Statue Square, said: ‘For those who transgress the path of right and do not keep within their correct places, I will deal with these according to military law, without mercy.’ It was a warning ironically like Blake’s threat to the newly conquered natives of the New Territories, forty-four years before.