1940s: WAR AND PEACE 1940s: WAR AND PEACENORTH-WEST OF KOWLOON, BETWEEN THE BIG JUBILEE reservoir and the southern coast of the New Territories, there is a ridge called Smuggler’s Ridge. Though it is bare itself, it looks northward into wooded country, and southwards over the high-rise blocks of Kwai Chung that creep year by year inexorably into the higher ground.
A line of electric pylons crosses the ridge, a hiking path named for Sir Murray MacLehose passes nearby, and not far away there is a picnic site with explanatory noticeboards; but on the top, almost immediately below the electric cables, lies a place of distinctly unpleasant numen, where even on a bright sunny day, even with the cheerful voices of walkers echoing through the shrubbery, one can feel disconcertingly alone.
Scrabbled in the sandy soil up there, half-buried, all abandoned, are the remains of a redoubt. There are steps leading into sand-filled bunkers, gun-slits in concrete slabs, air-shafts protruding from the ground, underground corridors which lead nowhere but are marked with names like Shaftesbury Avenue or Regent Street. It is a very haunted place. The wind blows constantly over the ridge and whistles in the cables above. The derelict subterranean chambers are littered with rubbish, foul with excrement, and sometimes your heart leaps when, like a demon out of the earth, a scavenging dog suddenly appears from a dark tunnel and leaps crazily past you into the daylight. The rolling country to the north looks desolate. The familiar blocks of Kwai Chung, just out of sight, seem all too far away.
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:
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.
The Japanese had said they would incorporate Hong Kong into their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Zone. They pointedly set up their administrative headquarters in the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank building (Isogai had the chairman’s flat on the ninth floor), and ship after ship of booty sailed home to Japan, taking most of Hong Kong’s cars with them – an American journalist,1 crossing the harbour that January, counted twenty-six ships with deck-loads of cars. But as it turned out Hong Kong brought few other benefits to the Co-Prosperity Zone. It was not much use to the Japanese militarily, either, and in the long run was probably far more a nuisance to them than an asset. On orders from Tokyo it was not incorporated into the administration of Japanese-occupied China, which held sway up the river in Guangzhou, and it was never offered to either of the two puppet Governments which now ruled so much of China under Japanese auspices. It remained a military governorate, ‘The Captured Territory of Hong Kong’.
They did very little with it. Even their monuments of conquest were few. Government House was rebuilt by a twenty-six-year-old railway engineer, Seichi Fujimura, redecorated by a firm from Osaka, re-landscaped by a gardener from Kyoto, and Nipponized with a tall eaved tower. On the summit of Mount Cameron, above Central, the foundations were ceremonially laid of a crowning victory memorial, the Temple of the Divine Wind. Shinto priests presided, and a sacred sword was embedded in the masonry of the monument, which was to be eighty feet high, supported on twelve concrete legs, and engraved with fifteen feet high Chinese ideograms meaning ‘Heroic Memorial’. Otherwise the new rulers of Hong Kong built practically nothing, but merely used what they found as if it had always been their own: Japanese wrestling teams were awarded medals engraved, as it might be with depictions of their club-house, with a bas-relief of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank building.
By and large the conduct of the Japanese in Hong Kong was despicable. During the battle they repeatedly bayoneted prisoners, after binding them hand and foot, and murdered doctors, nurses and patients in military hospitals. Immediately after the surrender they deliberately let their troops run wild, raping and looting everywhere. Their treatment of prisoners, military and civilian alike, was cruel, dishonest and apparently capricious – poor General Maltby was once beaten for allegedly having dirty fingernails. If the Japanese regular army, and more often the Japanese navy, sometimes behaved honourably, the unspeakable Kempeitei, the military police, tortured victims as readily and as brutally as any Gestapo.
Inasmuch as this ugly occupation had any logical aim, it was to replace one empire by another, and the Japanese did their best to discredit their predecessors. They deliberately destroyed British records, and replaced the British administrative system with a hardly less elaborate bureaucracy of their own. But there was no consistency to their methods. On the one hand the Chinese population was treated with vicious arrogance – for example passers-by who failed to bow to Japanese sentries were at best slapped on the face or hit with a rifle-butt, at worst thrown into jail. On the other hand the Japanese tried hard to win Chinese cooperation. Which was the better, they used rhetorically to ask, the corrupt alien way of the British, decadent, materialist and selfish, or the Kingly Way of the Imperial Army, the Confucianist way common to Japanese and Chinese alike?
Throughout the occupation the Japanese printed an English-language newspaper, the Hong Kong News, which had belonged to Japanese owners before the war. In retrospect the files of this publication give a chill insight into the life of the captive colony – so recently dominated by Stubbses, Pattersons and Lady Southorns, now in the hands of Isogai and the Kempeitei.
Of course it was a propaganda sheet, presumably intended to circulate among those who could read neither Chinese nor Japanese – the few neutrals left in the colony, collaborating Indians and the prisoners in their camps. One of its concerns was to give an impression of normality. Its language remained quite literate English. Its tone, at least in the early years, was jaunty. ‘The Onlooker’, for instance, in his column ‘Looking at the World’, offered the familar bottom-of-the-page quips, perhaps left over from stock (‘Many a man today is living by the sweat of his frau’), while the column called ‘About Town’ tried to maintain an air of soigné gossip (‘In contrast to the days immediately after the local hostilities, many pretty girls are now seen in town, beautifully dressed and generally without male escort’).
The small advertisements also exude an everyday air. There are cameras for sale, rooms to let, a Japanese tutor is required by English-Speaking Neutral, Chinese Gentleman Requires Japanese Partner in Enterprising Import Business. Jimmy’s remains The Place to Eat. Though the Hong Kong Hotel’s snack-bar has been turned into a tempura grill, George Pilo-Ulski the Accordion Virtuoso plays during tiffin. Harry Roy’s Tiger-Ragamuffins may still be heard on the radio and Frau A. Steinschneider, former member of the Vienna State Opera, continues to offer singing lessons.
But gradually a sinister strain surfaces even in the Hong Kong News. Though the form was familiar, and the style assiduously maintained, day by day the paper became a reminder that Hong Kong was utterly at the mercy of its conquerors, utterly beyond the reach of friends. What could be more depressing for the imprisoned British, than to learn that ‘high German and Italian officers’ had been ‘inspecting’ their colony? The news from Europe came only from the neutral countries, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, or from Vichy France, and as the years passed Britain was portrayed more and more dismissively as a vassal of the United States. Allegations of Japanese atrocities were dismissed with a cynicism hardly worth disguising, since everybody in Hong Kong knew the truth: they had been invented by the British propaganda machine, a Tokyo spokesman was reported as saying, and were ‘utterly fantastic’.
Even Britain’s supposedly loyal subjects, the newspaper constantly suggested, had deserted her. Leaders of the Chinese Rehabilitation Committee have sent a message to the Emperor, on behalf of the population of Hong Kong, congratulating him on Japanese victories. The Chinese Representative Council decrees that, the next day being Navy Day, commemorating the Japanese victory over the Russians in 1905, all business firms and residences must fly the Japanese flag. Mr P. A. Krishna, chairman of the Indian Independence League, has handed over 20,000 Yen to the New War Weapons Fund …
And sometimes the sense of cold triumph was more frankly revealed. ‘Woe to all those who break the law!’ an editorial warns, and every now and then hard chill decrees are printed in full. Heavy penalties would be inflicted on the owners of dirty premises, said the News one day in 1942, after the coming inspection of all residents’ houses. Readers are warned that while English may have been the dominant tongue when Hong Kong was British, Japanese was the most important language now; and there was a daily Japanese language lesson in the paper, together with a selection of Old Nippon Proverbs, sometimes rather gnomic.
The impression meant to be given by the Hong Kong News was of an occupation assured, efficient, stern but generally benign. It is true that the Japanese administration had a few merits. Its delegation of responsibility to local elders theoretically took the people closer to self-government than the British ever had. In the towns its merciless house inspections did keep disease in check. Its engineers extended the airport and put the first electric cable under the harbour, to restore the island’s power (ships kept dragging it with their anchors, though, and it was not renewed until the 1980s).
But in general the three years of the Japanese presence were utterly wasted years, and the conquerors showed themselves only at their worst. The British were paragons by contrast. Pompous the old Governors may have been, but at least you were not thrown into the cells for failing to stand stock still at their passing. The British police were sometimes bullies and often crooks, but they were angels compared with the men of the Kempeitei, with their terrifying network of informers and their torture cubicles erected contemptuously on the verandahs of Sir Aston Webb’s Supreme Court.
Much of the Japanese energy went into changing the forms of the place. Superficially at least everything was Nipponized, the stores, the banks, the hotels, the Jockey Club and even its horses, which were renamed with Japanese names, and supplemented with Japanese ponies. Lane Crawford’s became Matsuzakaya, and its staff were photographed, just as they had been in the old days, grouped formally outside the front entrance around their Japanese managing director. The Peninsula Hotel became the Toa, Jimmy’s Kitchen became the Sai Mun Café, Queen’s Road became Nakameiji-dori. The military governor did not in fact move into his newly orientalized Government House, preferring requisitioned quarters at Repulse Bay, but Japanese sentries stood at the old guardhouses on Upper Albert Road, and the Rising Sun flew largely, of course, above the new tower. The Star ferry-boats were requisitioned, and some of them were used on the Guangzhou run – the first time they had ever sailed outside the harbour. All the royal statues were eventually removed from Statue Square (‘a logical step’, observed the News obsequiously), and were shipped to Japan to be melted down.
What was it all about? The Japanese must surely have sometimes wondered, as they kept guard on their prisoners down the years, and watched Hong Kong decline into misery at their hands. For bombed, shelled and burnt during the fighting, the place certainly did not recover under the auspices of the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Zone. The New Territories became more or less anarchic, fought over by gangs of bandits and pirates, by Communist liberation groups, by supporters of the Nanjing puppet Government, riddled with agents of the Kuomintang, the Communists, the absent British and the Japanese themselves. The towns became dingier, poorer, emptier, sadder. The schools emptied. Food and fuel became desperately short, and the Japanese resorted to all-but-compulsory evictions, packing as many Chinese as possible back into mainland China, and sometimes it is alleged dumping old people, women and children on barren islands or unfrequented Chinese shores. They aimed to reduce the Chinese population by a thousand a day, and they managed a figure of 23,000 a month throughout the occupation.
How nightmarishly sudden, how sterile, and as it turned out how brief, was this metamorphosis! It was as though all the century of Hong Kong’s colonial history had been negated at a stroke. The famous exuberance of the place was all quashed, and gradually its vitality too wasted away. As the fortunes of war turned against the Japanese, and perhaps it dawned upon them that Hong Kong was proving a perfectly useless acquisition, the third port of the British Empire sank into destitution. Money lost its meaning and a black market, run by Triads, virtually took over the feeding of the populace. By 1945 the twin cities of the harbour were half-deserted.
Even the News, as the months dragged on, came to reflect this sense of abject failure. A whining, self-justificatory note crept into its prose. The Japanese had not been fighting for themselves, said an editorial in May 1945, but for the thousand million inhabitants of Great East Asia. ‘Around Town’ had long lost all its cockiness, and was reduced to a string of bureaucratic handouts – a forthcoming inspection of bicycle licences, a rise in telephone charges. Hitler was still glorified from time to time, and Mädchen in Uniform, a UFA all-women production, was advertised at the Meiji Theatre, but now there were reports of German defeats in Europe, and even references to the horrors of the concentration camps. When the nuclear bomb fell on Hiroshima the news led the paper; ‘the Enemy’s Last Card’, the News called it, but not with much conviction.
The final issue, almost at the moment of Emperor Hirohito’s surrender, contained an editorial entitled ‘Health is Wealth’, about Japanese medical achievements in Hong Kong, an essay about factors in the formation of the Japanese national character, a report headed Sumatra Appreciates Japan’s Benevolence, a Want Ad for a ‘lady golf set’, and the last, and not the least enigmatic, of the Old Nippon Proverbs (‘An east wind to the horse’s ears’).
When the British military prisoners were marched off to their camps, at the start of the occupation, they found that Chinese bystanders were perfectly ready to carry their bags for them, and throughout the occupation Chinese hawkers managed to sell foodstuffs and the odd luxury through the wire to the European prisoners. Sometimes their prices were outrageous, but often they were willing to accept cheques or IOUs redeemable only when the war ended, if it ever did, in a return to normal circumstances. It was only to be expected that in these wretched times, as in all others, they would display their usual commercial buoyancy; what was more surprising was their frequent genuine loyalty to a colonial Power which had not always been, as we have seen, very considerate to them.
Many, of course, were compromised. The Fifth Column which guided the 38th Division in its swift advance was mostly Chinese, and after the defeat the Japanese found their inevitable quota of collaborators. There were three principal puppet bodies, the Rehabilitation Advisory Committee, the Chinese Representative Council and the Chinese Co-operative Council, and some of the best-known Chinese citizens joined them, abandoning their British titles to do so; Sir Robert Kotewall, before the war the senior member of the Executive Council and one of the best-known men in the colony, became Lo Kuku-wo. In the New Territories there was the Asia Prosperity Institution, whose members were known colloquially as shing lei yau, ‘victory fellows’. Some Chinese, at least in the beginning, supported the Japanese simply as fellow-Asians, and some believed in the puppet Government in Nanjing, which was in fact truly dedicated to Chinese traditional interests – it was said to include more poets than any other Government in the world – but saw the Japanese as less of a threat than the Kuomintang or the Communists. Some became informers and agents of the Kempeitei as they had been of the British colonial police before.
But in general they were not traitorous. If in those days there was hardly such a thing as a Chinese Hong Kong patriot, most people undoubtedly felt a loyalty towards China, so barbarically assaulted by the Japanese, and many revealed a staunch personal affection for the British. ‘It may be assumed,’ said an American intelligence report of the time, ‘that the British must have rather a strong hold on many of these people,’ and it was true that many Chinese ran terrible risks to help their colonial masters. They smuggled messages and medicines to the prisoners, they helped escapees, and they maintained a constant link with the British military forces in unoccupied China. Agents who worked for the British included a former chauffeur to the Governor, a garage assistant at Government House, a hospital cook, a dockyard clerk and several students. One of the great heroes of the war was a medical student, Ha Chan, who escaped to China when the Japanese invaded but repeatedly returned to Hong Kong, though twice arrested by the Kempeitei, on terrifying intelligence missions for the British – a slight bespectacled figure, like thousands one sees in Hong Kong today.
Even some of the more prominent collaborators may have thought they were morally justified – Kotewall and several others claimed that before the surrender they had been specifically asked by senior British officials to cooperate with the Japanese in the interests of the Chinese community. For the rest, they were seldom politically motivated, but were simply concerned for their own survival. For the vast majority of the population the alternative was no more heroic, but was simply to plug along as best one could, looting a deserted European house if the occasion arose, or taking its timbers for firewood, making full use of the black market which was active in every locality, and depending as always upon quick wits and family connections.
Almost all the British and their imperial soldiers were imprisoned, but some were freed and a few were left at large. Chinese servicemen were soon released, while many Indian prisoners-of-war opted to join the Indian National Army, the independence force sponsored by the Japanese, and served the occupying authorities as guards and auxiliaries. During the first months of occupation a number of bankers and their families were put up at one of the obscurer hotels in Victoria, so that their expertise would be available to the Japanese, and a Government doctor, Selwyn Clarke, was also retained by the military. (The University’s Professor of Pathology, instructed to continue his work at the Bacteriological Laboratory, killed himself instead.)
Inevitably a few adventurers managed to keep their freedom, by pretending to be neutral subjects, or just by lying low. A handful escaped to China, and some of these, led by the University’s Professor of Medicine, the Australian Lindsay Ride, were formed into an intelligence unit, the British Army Aid Group. Among its sponsors was John Keswick, formerly of Jardine’s, now an intelligence agent at the British Embassy in Chong-ging. The BAAG operated from unoccupied Chinese soil, but sent emissaries frequently into Hong Kong, and kept in contact with the prison camps. At one time it cherished an epic plan for a mass escape of all the prisoners, and it remained throughout the one direct line of contact between the British held in Hong Kong and the world outside.
Inside the wires things went on very Britishly, though with decreasing conviction as malnutrition and sickness weakened authority and enterprise alike. Several thousand of the soldiers were sent as labourers to Japan (but more than a thousand of them died when their ship was torpedoed by an American submarine), and many of the others were made to work on projects like the extension of Kai Tak airport. There were sporadic attempts to escape to unoccupied China, a few of which succeeded, and several officers and men were shot because of their contacts with the British Army Aid Group. Otherwise their long period of imprisonment followed the standard pattern of misery, common to all prisoners-of-war in Japanese hands – boredom, hunger, ill-health, sporadic cruelty and constant humiliation.
In Stanley Camp things were rather different. There the civilians reproduced among themselves, in grotesque microcosm, nearly all the characteristics of peacetime Hong Kong. Gimson, as the senior official internee, never for a moment relinquished his Governmental authority over his fellow-prisoners. ‘The British Government in Hong Kong,’ he proclaimed, ‘is still in being and functioning except where prevented by the Japanese’; indeed he claimed that as chief representative of the Crown he should conduct the Government-in-captivity’s foreign policy – that is to say, its relations with its captors. He resisted all proposals that British civilians should be repatriated, as the Americans presently were, on the grounds that this might prejudice the status of Hong Kong after the war, and when some of the internees signed a petition asking him to change his attitude, he called them disloyal to the British cause.
The internees behaved much as you might expect them to behave. They were after all colonial Hong Kong concentrated, men, women and children, people of all ranks, deprived of their servants and thrown into each others’ intimate society. They squabbled about hierarchy and precedence. They formed committees. They put on plays. They remembered the happy old days. They bowed as required when they passed a Japanese and they became far more resourceful, as the years passed, in looking after themselves. The businessmen grumbled, as was the Hong Kong tradition, about Gimson and about the Government, which many of them blamed for its failure to declare Hong Kong an open city. Gimson no less traditionally grumbled about them – ‘they cannot appear to consider any other world than that in which they can make money and retire’.
And secretly, within their ranks, some heroic souls fought on. Links were maintained with the city still – with the bankers at their hotel in the first few months, with Selwyn Clarke who maintained a running supply of medicines into the camp until he was arrested, tortured and imprisoned. Now and then messages of boyish panache arrived from Ride and the BAAG. ‘It is the Empire that needs you, not Stanley,’ said one urging young internees to escape. ‘How many guests would be interested in Liberty Bonds?’ asked another. Sir Vandeleur Grayburn, chief manager of the Bank, was accused of espionage and imprisoned with appalling ill-treatment. In October, 1943, seven civilians were beheaded on Stanley Beach, almost within sight of the camp, for possession of a radio; they included the colony’s former Defence Secretary.
One by one, we see in retrospect, the signs of tragedy sobered and matured the community within the wires. The sad little makeshift gravestones multiplied in the graveyard above the camp. Now one internee, now another, was taken away to torture, imprisonment or death. ‘It is with the utmost regret,’ said a notice signed by Gimson, ‘that I have to report that the death of Sir Vandeleur Grayburn occurred at 7.30 a.m. on the 22nd instant in the Stanley Prison Hospital’ – and everyone knew the horror that lay between the lines. D. w. WATERTON, said a mis-spelled graffito in a cell, with the days on a calendar scratched off beside it, ARRESTED STANLEY CAMP JULY 7TH 1943 COURTMARTIALLED OCT 19TH AND NO DEFENCE CONDEMNED DEATH EXECUTED DATE CALENDER STOPS …
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Through it all the indomitable Gimson maintained his claim to authority, and when news of Japan’s unconditional surrender to the Allies reached Stanley on 16 August 1945, he immediately exerted it. By then everyone in the camp was exhausted. The Japanese were demoralized, the internees were half-starved. There was nobody to object when Gimson declared himself Acting Governor and representative of His Majesty King George VI in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. It was not until eleven days later that a message from London, conveyed via Macao by an agent of the BAAG, authorized him to do so, and by then Gimson had already set himself up with an administrative staff in offices in Queen’s Road, meaningfully close to the Bank. On 30 August the South China Morning Post reappeared on the streets of Hong Kong, after an absence of nearly four years. It consisted in its entirety of seven paragraphs on a single sheet. It was endearingly headed EXTRA, and this is how it began:
The first communiqué from the Hongkong Government to the people of Hongkong since December 1941 was issued this morning at 11 o’clock as follows: ‘Rear Admiral Harcourt is lying outside Hongkong with a very strong fleet. The Naval Dockyard is to be ready for his arrival by noon today …’
Gimson’s action may have changed the course of history. It had been agreed among the Allied Powers that liberated territories should be surrendered to those who had liberated them: since nobody had actually liberated Hong Kong, logic suggested (and the Japanese themselves assumed) that it should be surrendered to the supreme commander of the war zone in which it was situated. This was Chiang Kai-shek, who as we know disputed the legality of the British presence in Hong Kong. Handing the colony over to him, backed as he was by an America distinctly unsympathetic to the British Empire, might well mean that the British flag would never go up above Government House again.
But Gimson created a fait accompli which nobody felt able to reverse, and when two weeks later the Japanese formally surrendered Hong Kong after three years and seven months of occupation, they handed their swords to Admiral Sir Cecil Harcourt, RN, who had sailed into the grey and desolate harbour, littered with wreckage, in his flagship the cruiser Swiftsure, attended by the battleship Anson, two aircraft carriers, eight destroyers, eight submarines and a flotilla of minesweepers.
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Captain Shadwell, RN, of HMS Maidstone, was among the first to get to Stanley Camp. He was described by one ecstatic internee as being ‘so lovely and cheerful, plump and priceless’, and the arrival of the Royal Navy certainly did wonders to restore morale and confidence. It was almost like old times! The Navy provided films for the cinemas, dance bands for celebratory reunions, and after three years without much fun the city was, we are told by the South China Morning Post, introduced to jitterbugging ‘under the expert tuition of rhythm-minded members of the Fleet’.
In an astonishingly short time Hong Kong recovered its bearing – sooner perhaps than any other occupied territory, in any theatre of the Second World War. A British military administration took over from Gimson, handing over eight months later to a restored Colonial Government; very soon almost every aspect of the territory’s life was back to normal, and the British had expunged nearly all traces of their humiliation.
They left the railway-station tower on Government House. They had been planning to build an altogether new mansion higher up the hill, but the Japanese had rebuilt the old one so thoroughly that they abandoned the idea, and the tower became one of Hong Kong’s most familiar architectural images: its rooms proved popular among Governors’ wives – sunny little chambers, reached by steep wooden staircases and just as suitable for embroidery as for calligraphy. However after several attempts the military blew up the Shinto-blessed Temple of the Divine Wind, which the Japanese never had time to complete; today only its cyclopean foundations can be seen, acting as podium to the three apartment blocks called Cameron Buildings, above Magazine Gap, and commanding still one of the most triumphant views in Asia.
They tried several Japanese officers and men for atrocities, executing some with a dreadful rightness at Stanley, sentencing some to imprisonment, finding some innocent. They hanged as a traitor one Hong Kong Chinese, a particularly vile creature of the Kempeitei, but decided that only those who had directly helped the Japanese in cruel acts against the populace should be punished for collaboration with the enemy; in the end about fifty of all races were found guilty. They replaced the Japanese military currency with new notes flown in from London within the month. They honoured the so-called ‘duress notes’ – Hongkong and Shanghai Bank notes which had been issued by the Japanese without proper financial backing; there had been much speculation in this strictly illegal currency, and its official recognition in 1946 was the foundation of several fortunes. They also honoured most of their wartime IOUs, even sometimes to the most blatant profiteers.
They commemorated their dead in a beautiful war cemetery above Chai Wan, on Hong Kong Island, looking across the water to the east, where their soldiers of all origins were honoured side by side, Winnipeg Grenadiers beside Rajput infantrymen, six drummers of the Middlesex Regiment beside a host of poor fellows with no known names. They put up a headstone to the only grave within the precincts of the Anglican Cathedral, that of Private R. D. Maxwell, Hong Kong Volunteers, killed 23 December 1941.
They rescued some timbers from the Tamar, and made new doors for the Cathedral out of them. They found the looted statues of the kings and queens of Statue Square, still intact in Japan; but times had changed, and only Queen Victoria’s was re-erected – far from the centre of things, in Victoria Park at Causeway Bay, where under the Pleasure-Ground By-Laws children are forbidden to steer their remote-controlled cars around its plinth.
They confirmed Gimson in his Colonial Secretaryship, and he went on to be Governor of Singapore. They restored Sir Mark Young to his interrupted Governorship. They gave his Professorship back to Lindsay Ride, and he became the University’s Vice-Chancellor. They awarded Ha Chan the Military Cross. They were never quite sure again about Sir Robert Kotewall, but since he was a very old friend of many of them, besides being one of the richest men in the colony, on the whole they gave him the benefit of the doubt.
For a striking thing about this aftermath was its swift decline of recrimination. Getting back to business was everybody’s only aim. The territory was desolate. Bomb damage was everywhere, the harbour was full of sunken ships, everything was dingy and unpainted. Only 150 cars were left in the entire colony, and the 17,000 telephones of 1939 were reduced to 10,000. There was no time for reproach, as Government and business community alike, British and Chinese, civilians and military, set about repairing the damage. Admiral Harcourt himself had defined his task, when his ships swept into harbour that day, as being to return to Hong Kong ‘freedom, food, law and order and a stable currency’. So successfully was the job done, and so quickly was confidence in the colony restored, that by the end of 1945 the population was back to 1.6 million – just what it had been at the beginning of 1941 – and Sir Robert and Lady Ho Tung were able to celebrate their Diamond Jubilee quite in the old style, in the presence of His Excellency at the Hong Kong Hotel.
As the liberated soldiers and the surrendered Japanese departed on their troopships, and many of the Stanley internees sailed home to recuperate, in flooded a new wave of Hong Kong opportunists. They came not only from China, where war was now resumed between Kuomintang and Communists, but also from Europe, Australia and America – a new generation of traders. merchants, speculators and entrepreneurs. In the prevailing post-war climate of liberal imperialism there were plans to give the people of Hong Kong a measure of self-government, but the public response was apathetic, and they were soon shelved. All Hong Kong’s reviving energies went into the accumulation of profit. Within a couple of years all the docks were restored, the wrecks in the harbour were salvaged, and 46,000 vessels cleared the port in a single year. The Bank resumed its glory, the old hongs bounced back, and even the Japanese community was presently flourishing once again. Already we detect, so soon after the calamity, the first tentative outline of the skyscraper City-State that was to come.
Yet Hong Kong was profoundly and permanently changed by the experience of war. The pageantry of Government was soon restored, but this was never again to feel quite like a British colony. Its balance had been permanently shifted. Ride said in 1942 that the British had become known as ‘the run-away British’, and when Admiral Harcourt’s fleet of liberation arrived it found itself greeted only by multitudes of Chinese flags, with hardly a Union Jack to be seen on junk or housetop. After the war the colonists were not, it seems, often taunted with their military failure – they had after all come back in triumph, and there is bound to be a Chinese saying about those who laugh last – but inevitably the relationship between the races had been altered by events. No longer could the British feel themselves in all ways superior to Asiatics, and though the manners of racial prejudice were to linger on, its forms disappeared.
The last vestiges of segregation were renounced – by the end of the 1940s anybody who could afford it could live on the Peak. The Hong Kong Club moved reluctantly towards the admission of Chinese. Old residents returning after a war away were astonished by the new free-and-easiness of racial relations, and the social life of the expatriates was never quite the same again – the tea-parties never quite so ineffable at the Repulse Bay Hotel, the Club never quite so inexpressibly club-like, the bathing beaches, once so comfortingly reminiscent of Bournemouth, now swarming with Asians. Very soon Chinese had broken into every sphere of life, social and economic, and were challenging the British for the financial dominance of Hong Kong.
More and more, too, Hong Kong began to behave like a semi-autonomous State. The British Empire was now moving towards its swift disbandment, as colony after colony gained self-government or independence, but Hong Kong stood apart. None of the usual standards of aspirations, it seemed, applied to this peculiar territory, Curzon was proved right, in his prophecy that when India was lost the rest of the Empire would go too, but Hong Kong did not count. Hong Kong marched to a different drum. Hong Kong ran its own economic affairs, Hong Kong soon evolved a new and even more glittering image of itself, and was indeed the one territory of the dependent Empire, presently to be reduced to hardly more than a ragbag of indigent islands, which was able to stand on its own feet. As the years passed, and arrogant Empire faded into generally amiable Commonwealth, successive Governments in London learned to make Hong Kong a perpetual exception to everything.
The end of the imperial era, in fact, was leaving Hong Kong high and dry, but at the same time another mighty historical progression was about to toss the territory in its wake; for in the last year of the 1940s the Communists came to power in China, and everything changed again.
1 Gwen Dew, Prisoner of the Japanese, New York 1943. The Japanese also took a number of books from the library of the Hong Kong Club, found on the quayside at Yokohama after the war and returned to their stacks.