23

It took Mickey several hours to travel the five miles to Queen Mary Hospital. Each time Japanese planes flew over, Mickey and her escort ran for their lives. Fortunately, it was quieter downtown, where the two parted company. British troops were still in control there, and the Japanese were not bombing or shelling; they did not want to destroy their prize.

Mickey chanced to run into Gordon King, the doctor who had delivered Carola. King and two medical students were on a supply mission for an emergency clinic at Ling Nan University. Mickey walked to the campus with them, then caught a ride in an ambulance going to Queen Mary Hospital, where she arrived about 3 P.M.

All was quiet in the streets around the hospital, and apart from the fact that the elevators were not working, everything seemed normal. Neither the doctors nor the nurses gave any hint they were concerned about the battle that was raging all around them. Mickey concluded they were calmed by the “serene conviction that they, above all others, were immune” from the carnage that was taking place.1 She hoped that they were right.

At first Mickey did not recognize Charles, so pale was he from loss of blood. He lay on a camp cot in a room in the maternity ward, which he shared with another wounded British army officer, a fair-haired, twenty-four-year-old captain named Bill Wiseman. He had only one leg, having apparently lost the limb some time earlier, for it was the ankle on his good leg that was bandaged. It did not matter that the bullet had been a British machine-gun bullet—so-called friendly fire; Wiseman was in a lot of pain.

But Charles was alert. He looked up in surprise when Mickey took off her tin helmet. She sat down on a chair next to his cot and reached for his hand. “I didn’t mean for you to come,” Charles said weakly. “I just wanted them to notify you.”

“Well, I wanted to come,” Mickey replied.

As they talked, Charles explained what had happened to him. He and Alf Bennett had driven to the south side of the island, to a residential enclave known as Shouson Hill, where fighting was intense. There they encountered a small group of retreating East Indian troops whose commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Gerald Kidd, had been killed. Charles stepped into the breach and attempted to lead a counterattack. That is when “some bugger got me just as I was climbing out of a nullah. I never even saw him,” Charles explained.²

Afterward, he lay where he had fallen, and the battle moved on. Flies buzzed, and the sun shone down relentlessly. Then came the chill of the night. The blood oozing from Charles’s chest wound colored the muddy ground beneath him a sticky reddish brown. As his life slowly drained away, there was nothing he could do about it. Charles was too weak to move; he could not even cry out. “I thought I was dying,” he recalled. “I lay there wishing I would hurry up and die, because it was so cold.”3 By the time a British naval officer—who was himself killed in battle the very next day—chanced to find and rescue him, Charles was delirious and near death. His biggest concern was not dying, but rather the fact that he had money in his wallet. He asked over and over for someone to notify Mickey and let her know that he had $112 for her.

Charles was taken to Queen Mary Hospital, Hong Kong’s best. Following emergency surgery, doctors decided Charles might live after all. The Japanese sniper’s bullet had passed through the left side of his chest, narrowly missing the lung and other major organs. A fraction of an inch either way and Charles would have died instantly.

Determined to do all that she could for Charles, Mickey arranged to stay at the home of a nurse who lived near the hospital, a woman named Veronica Weill. The fighting was drawing ever closer, and it was now impossible for Mickey to return to War Memorial Hospital, even if she had wanted to do so. Mickey learned that Veronica’s mother had taken refuge there and was a member of the Food Control Committee. At Mickey’s urging, Veronica phoned her mother to ask about Carola. The news was not reassuring. Ah Cheung and Carola had waited all day for Mickey’s friend Vera Armstrong to come for them. When Vera had failed to appear, Ah Cheung and Carola vanished. Veronica rang the Armstrong house to speak with Vera. Over a crackling line, Vera explained that she had been unable to reach the hospital; the ferocity of the bombardment had forced her to turn back. Mickey, sick with worry and guilt, was “ready to tear my hair out by the roots,” as she said.⁴ She could do nothing other than wait and pray that Carola and her amah were safe.

Captain Bill Wiseman, 1946. He’s looking smug because he has returned home to England following his liberation from a Hong Kong POW camp to find his bank account “flush” with five years of back pay.

Courtesy Bill Wiseman

Mickey spent the next few days at Charles’s bedside. Sometimes she helped the nursing staff make bandages for the steady stream of casualties who were arriving. The job helped Mickey keep her mind off her missing baby. It also allowed her to escape Charles’s questions. Now that he was becoming more aware of his surroundings, he wanted to see Carola. Each time that he did, Mickey evaded his requests. She could not bear to tell him the truth: she had no idea where their baby was.

This uncertainty lasted for three days. Mickey later would learn how Ah King had saved Carola’s life. The baby’s amah Ah Cheung wanted to run off in search of her own twelve-year-old daughter, but faithful Ah King had convinced her to stay with Carola. Ah Cheung and the baby hid in a room in the hospital’s cellar to escape the shelling. Ah King brought them food and water, which he smuggled out of the pantry under the noses of the nurses and members of the Food Control Committee.

A friend of Mickey’s, an American businessman named Bill Hunt, saved the day. Sick with worry, Mickey had called various people to inquire about Carola. Hunt, who was in Hong Kong only because he had missed a plane, was holed up with six other men at a room in the Grips. He volunteered to go to the War Memorial Hospital to look for Carola and her amah. If they were there, he pledged to bring them to Mickey. That was much easier said than done, of course. By the morning of December 24, the battle for Hong Kong was in its final hours. The Japanese now controlled most of the island. From across the harbor in Kowloon came the sounds of Christmas music. “A Merry Christmas to the gallant British soldiers,” a Japanese voice intoned over loudspeakers. “You have fought a good fight, but you are outnumbered. Now is the time to surrender. If you don’t, within twenty-four hours we will give you all that we’ve got. A Merry Christmas to the gallant British soldiers.…”5

The scene in Victoria’s streets was bizarre. Shells were exploding everywhere, there was constant gunfire, and Christmas music blared from across the harbor. Bill Hunt dodged the shell fire, wreckage, snipers, and gangs of roving looters to race at breakneck speed to the War Memorial Hospital. When the car he was driving was wrecked, he commandeered Selwyn-Clarke’s vehicle. Late that morning, Hunt and his passengers—who included Carola, Ah King, and Ah Cheung—and a load of canned goods arrived at the Weill home. A tearful Mickey was reunited with Carola. Mickey was forever grateful to Bill Hunt, who had bravely risked his own life to save the lives of a child and other people who were strangers to him.

Hilda Selwyn-Clarke, Veronica’s mother, and several other people who had been at War Memorial Hospital appeared at Queen Mary not long after Hunt’s arrival. The situation on the Peak was deteriorating rapidly, and there were terrifying rumors about atrocities being committed by the advancing Japanese troops. Charles had warned Mickey that it was customary whenever the Japanese army captured a city for the officers to turn their men loose for three days to “enjoy the fruits of victory.” Sometimes things got out of control, as they had in Nanking. There were fears that the same kind of frenzied, drunken bloodletting would take place in Hong Kong. All signs pointed in that direction. On that hot, sunny Christmas morning of 1941, Japanese soldiers massacred more than fifty wounded Canadian soldiers at St. Stephen’s Emergency Hospital, on the south side of the island. The helpless men were dragged from their beds, their bandages were ripped off, and then they were bayoneted to death. Two attending doctors were cut down at the door; seven nurses were gang-raped before being bayoneted to death.

This was no isolated incident. A St. John’s Ambulance Corps nurse who survived a similar ordeal recounted to Gwen Dew what had happened at a military hospital near North Point where the Japanese had shot all the doctors and raped the nurses before killing them too. Dew reported that one doctor had “rushed the Jap firing line with bare hands,” only to be slashed to bits.6 Similar atrocities occurred all over Hong Kong.

In the face of such savagery, Governor Mark Young was determined to somehow hold out to the bitter end, as were Maltby’s advisors. Another Japanese surrender demand was rejected early on Christmas morning, but by midday, the situation was hopeless; Hong Kong’s remaining defenders were badly outnumbered and bone weary after eighteen days of hard fighting and relentless bombardment. Most were down to their last few rounds of ammunition. Japanese troops had begun occupying key buildings on the Peak. The water supplies in most of Victoria had been cut, as had many of the telephone lines, and Major General Maltby could no longer communicate with the defenders of besieged Fort Stanley on the south side of the island.

At 3 P.M., Sir Mark turned off the gramophone in his office at Government House, where he had been listening to Beethoven records. He then strolled around the corner to see Maltby at the underground military bunker. Maltby’s aide-de-camp, Second Lieutenant Ian McGregor, saw the governor approaching. He seemed oblivious to the shells and gunfire. Young was dressed in a beautifully tailored light gray suit and a matching homburg hat. His polished black shoes glistened in the sunlight. “He was unconcernedly swinging a malacca walking stick, as if he was playing truant from the Colonial Office and taking a quiet walk in St. James Park,” McGregor would remember. “I called out: ‘It’s getting a bit hot along there, Sir; better take cover.’ He smiled and said, ‘Hullo McGregor! Lovely day, isn’t it.’ And he strolled on, neither slackening nor quickening his pace, completely composed and apparently without a care in the world.”7

Inside the bunker, Maltby repeated the same message a group of fearful civilians had told Sir Mark only a few hours earlier: the only hope for Hong Kong’s defenders and for the 1.7 million civilians trapped by the fighting was to lay down their arms and pray that the Japanese commanders could—and would—restrain their troops. Initially, the governor was adamant that the colony’s defenders should fight to the end; in his mind, anything else was unthinkable. He changed his mind after a long and very frank discussion with the general. Sir Mark then instructed Maltby to arrange a surrender. In a final dispatch to his troops, Maltby explained the decision, saying further resistance could only mean “the useless slaughter of the remainder of the garrison, risked severe retaliation on the large civilian population, and could not affect the final outcome.”⁸

In late afternoon, just before 5 P.M., the remaining defenders began waving white flags. At first, the Japanese troops assumed it was some sort of trick, so the fighting continued. Then two small parties of British soldiers were sent into Japanese lines to announce Maltby’s surrender decision. British historian Oliver Lindsay reported in his book The Lasting Honour that a Lieutenant-Colonel White led one of the three-man delegations. The other was headed by H. V. M. (“Monkey”) Stewart, the commander of the 1st Middlesex Regiment. Bill Wiseman, who knew Monkey Stewart, recalled him as “a very strong character” who kept a Jack Russell terrier. Oliver Lindsay wrote that Stewart was sent out to convey word of the surrender to the Japanese commander in the Wanchai district of town. “Colonel Shoji Toshishige gleefully reported that a military representative of the Governor, a British Lieutenant-Colonel, accompanied by another man with a small dog had arrived by truck,” Lindsay said.⁹

Early that evening, Sir Mark, Major General Maltby, and some of his staff boarded a torpedo boat for the crossing to Kowloon. There they met for forty minutes with General Sakai at his headquarters in the Peninsula Hotel. Then in a brief ceremony in a candlelit ballroom, at 7:30 P.M. on Christmas night, the governor of Hong Kong signed a formal, unconditional surrender. More than 10,000 surviving British, Canadian, and Indian troops laid down their weapons. The next morning, most of them were rounded up and marched off to hastily created prisoner-of-war camps. Some British soldiers who were cut off in the hills above Victoria and at Fort Stanley at first did not hear news of the surrender or refused to believe it; they continued fighting for a brief time. For the most part, though, the British guns fell silent.

Casualty figures revealed that 3,445 Allied soldiers had been killed, were missing, or were seriously wounded; 7,500 civilians were dead. On the other side, 675 Japanese soldiers had died in the battle. What the Times of London had described as the “valiant defence” of Hong Kong10 had come to a terrible, bloody, and (some would later argue) inevitable conclusion. The Union Jack that Japanese soldiers tore down from the flagpole at Fort Stanley on Boxing Day was made of a tattered, bloodstained hospital sheet.

News of the governor’s decision to surrender was greeted with shock and disbelief at the Queen Mary Hospital. Mickey and Charles had been celebrating the day with a bottle of whisky when Hilda burst into the room. She was in tears, her voice breaking. Hilda reported that her husband had telephoned to say Sir Mark had surrendered. Bill Wiseman remembered that a continuous stream of visitors, men and women, military as well as civilians, had come by in the two days before Christmas. Most related news of the battle to Charles and sought his reassurances on various matters.¹¹ Mickey later said that Charles seemed stunned by the decision to surrender, which he had opposed. “They didn’t tell me,” he muttered.¹²

Mickey wept on Charles’s good shoulder while Hilda went off to spread the news. From outside came the sounds of loud explosions; Charles surmised that British troops were destroying their remaining big guns. That may have been so, or else it is possible that they heard British mines exploding. “There was a tremendous roar as the minefields went up, the entire southwest arc of the sea, three or four miles offshore,” Bill Wiseman recalled.¹³

Presently, Wiseman reappeared in his wheelchair to ask “C.R.B.”—his nickname for Charles—if the rumors of a surrender were true. Charles said he believed they were, and his words were confirmed when a group of Japanese cavalry charged past the hospital. Mickey knew that the enemy infantry would not be far behind. By the time Mickey’s friend Veronica came by to suggest it was time to go home, it was already too late to do so. Through the window came a cacophony of excited voices shouting in Japanese, sporadic gunfire, and the roar of truck engines. Veronica went out onto the veranda to see what was happening. “There they are,” she said flatly. “Japs. Little beasts. Swarming all over.”¹⁴

Mickey took a look. Down below, the road was filled with Japanese army trucks. They were pulling up to the front doors of the hospital. As the vehicles screeched to a halt, soldiers leaped out the tailgates and raced off in all directions, rifles at the ready. Mickey knew that she was trapped; there was no point in trying to run or hide. “I had seen Japanese armies before,” she later wrote. “I saw the Victory March in Shanghai. My stomach felt queasy, and I knew we would have to face it now or I would begin to be really afraid. I picked up my bag.”15

Mickey bid Charles a tearful farewell as she and Veronica set off for home on foot. Their plan was simple: walk as quickly as possible without drawing attention to themselves. They prayed that the Japanese soldiers outside would be so busy with other things that they would not notice them. Mickey knew that she had good reason to be fearful. That morning, as she and Veronica were en route to the hospital, they had seen a truck full of auxiliary nurses. When it stopped, several of the women tumbled out and staggered into the hospital arm in arm. After speaking with their companions, Veronica commented about how the nurses were in a “bad way.” Mickey asked why. The women had been taken prisoner by Japanese troops at a first-aid post at Happy Valley, Veronica explained; all had been raped and beaten.

That terrible memory was still fresh in Mickey’s mind as she, Veronica, and another woman beetled out the gates of Queen Mary Hospital. They had gone only a few steps when two Japanese soldiers spotted them. One was an officer with a sword on his belt. The other was a private. “Ai!” shouted the private. The women pretended not to hear and continued on their way. “Ai!” came a second shout, louder and this time edged with anger. The two soldiers ran after the women. As they stopped, the private approached menacingly. He pointed his rifle and motioned toward the women’s arms. Mickey was relieved that he only wanted their wristwatches; they were being mugged. The man grinned with a mouthful of crooked, dirty teeth as he then took the watches from Mickey’s companions. He missed hers because she wore it high on her right arm, and in his hurry he did not bother to check there. What Mickey remembered most about the soldier as he walked away with his booty was the overpowering stench of body odor.

Mickey and her companions encountered more Japanese soldiers at home. Three officers had already taken up residence in the Weills’ living room. Veronica’s mother, who spoke some Japanese, had evidently arrived at an accommodation with them. For now, the officers and their men were sober and reasonably well behaved, although one of them had stolen a wristwatch from an elderly woman who was staying in the house. While doing so, the soldier had motioned toward a sofa and made a crude gesture indicating he wanted something more than just the woman’s time. Fortunately, she was able to dissuade him.

Mickey, Carola, Veronica, and several other young women who had taken refuge in the house lay low for the next few days. They did so partly for their own safety and partly because they were concealing Veronica’s brother, a British soldier who for now had eluded capture. Mrs. Weill did her best to divert the attentions of the Japanese. She strode about the house, talking to the soldiers and doing whatever she could to make them content.

In the long, idle hours that they spent in hiding, Mickey and her companions had lots of time to think and to worry. They worried about loved ones. They worried about what would happen to Hong Kong. But mostly they worried about themselves and the dangers they faced from the Japanese soldiers who seemed so intent on committing mayhem. Mickey wondered if they would be robbed or murdered. Or raped. “When you talk about (wartime) ‘atrocities’ that is the first thing you think of,” Mickey later wrote. “There is a horror about it, and there is also a fascination.… We seem to have a sort of race jealousy that is manifested in our lynchings and in the special interest people always show in the sex behavior of other races.”16

Mickey had been in China long enough to know that Japanese officers allowed their men to engage in mass rape for a reason. “They know that it is the quickest, surest way to humiliate a community. I think that they rape almost as a religious duty, a sacrifice to the God of Victory, a symbol of their triumphant power,” she wrote.¹⁷

The more Mickey mused about this, the angrier it made her. After all, she decided, stripped of its psychological terror, battlefield rape is just another physical aggression men commit against women. What gives rape its real impact as a weapon of war is the age-old notion that women are the prized property of men. To the victor go the spoils of war; thus, the ultimate humiliation a victorious soldier can heap on his vanquished foe is to defile that man’s wife and daughters. In Mickey’s mind, the most effective means of dealing with “the misery caused by war rape” was to change the way we react to it. “My suggestions to alleviate the misery … are not too practical,” she conceded. “I want us to lift the guilt burden from the minds of victims. To do this we would have to uproot centuries of diametrically opposed ideas. We would have to teach [young women] that rape is simply a physical hazard, one of the penalties of war which might possibly happen to anyone.… I realize I am trying to go against nature. We don’t scare the girls deliberately; we are scared ourselves, and we just pass it on.”¹⁸

When Mickey wrote those words more than half a century ago, most people had trouble dealing with them rationally. Many people were puzzled, some were outraged. The whole issue of war rape was still too raw, too emotional, and too immediate. Mickey accepted this and did not let it bother her. Holed up in a spare room in the Weill house as she was, powerless, vulnerable, and surrounded by drunken enemy soldiers, Mickey drew strength and courage from her unorthodox views. They helped her survive the ordeal of those dark days.

Later, when she encountered friends, the question that inevitably came up was, “Were you, um … Did you have any trouble with the Japanese soldiers?” Mickey’s answer was no; she escaped being raped, although many other women in Hong Kong were not so fortunate. The situation was at its worst in the Happy Valley section of the island, where some of the fiercest fighting of the Battle of Hong Kong occurred. “[People] who lived there told me they can never forget the screams of the women,” Gwen Dew reported. “No woman was respected—Chinese, Portuguese, Filipino, French, and British. Nor was age given any consideration.”19

Mickey saw none of this where she was, although she did hear many stories of Chinese women being raped. Was it because drunken Japanese soldiers found Chinese women more attractive than whites? she wondered. Or had the soldiers been reined in by their officers, who were determined to show the snooty Brits that they, too, could behave as gentlemen? Mickey could not decide.

As Rudyard Kipling had observed, “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”²⁰ The world was a much bigger place in 1941. Few Westerners ever visited Japan, and vice versa. There was little trade, and little other contact; the era of Japanese-manufactured goods flooding the Western retail market was still a long way off. Prejudice and racism, fueled sometimes by simple ignorance, sometimes by pseudo-scientific or quasi-religious theories of racial superiority, had always been central to the behavior of whites in the Far East. With the war raging, the same antipathies now fed incredible brutality and hatred on both sides.

Fortunately, the situation in Hong Kong calmed down after the first few days. Japanese commanders finally reasserted control over their men. By that time, the jubilant soldiers had begun to sober up after drinking all the liquor they had looted from homes, shops, and restaurants—every bottle that Hong Kong residents had been unable to pour down their drains before fleeing.

Veronica’s mother did what she could to placate the Japanese who had taken up residence in her house; when one of the soldiers fell ill with malaria, she located some quinacrine. Her efforts paid off, for the soldiers in the Weill home remained relatively well behaved. Unfortunately, their civility did not extend to the matter of toilet manners. They urinated everywhere in the house, mostly on the floors. One of Mickey’s friends reported that when the Japanese soldiers who had occupied her flat moved on, they trashed the place. But not before carefully arranging her best linen doilies on the living room floor and methodically defecating on each little square.

After several days in hiding, Mickey and her companions gradually emerged. The women found if they stayed together in groups of three or four, dressed inconspicuously, they could make it back and forth to the hospital, usually without any trouble. Initially, the Japanese had not disturbed the patients in the hospital. “The only Nips seen on the wards were offering to buy Parker pens and/or Rolex watches,” Bill Wiseman later recorded in an account of those days that he wrote for his sons.21

The situation changed soon enough. Enemy officers began coming “in droves” to visit Charles; he still had many friends and admirers in high places. Some Japanese officers came because they knew him from his prewar liaison work with the 38th Infantry Regiment. They were eager to pay Charles their respects, as was required by bushido, the ancient code of honor among Japanese warriors. Others came by for “business reasons”—because of who Charles was and what he knew in his work as a British intelligence officer. Some arrived simply because they were curious to see this foreigner who wrote and spoke Japanese like a gentleman. If Charles’s visitors came calling while Mickey was at the hospital, she quietly retreated to a corner. Mickey stepped forward to offer a light any time one of the Japanese took out a cigarette. Invariably, someone would ask Charles who Mickey was. There would be much nodding of heads as he explained. Then attentions would turn to Bill Wiseman, lying in the bed beside that of Charles. The Japanese were fascinated by his missing leg.

Wiseman, who spoke no Japanese, wondered what was being said about him. When he found out one day, he also learned that as Charles gained strength he also recovered his sense of humor, which was mischievous at times. Wiseman recalled waking one day to find the room filled with Japanese officers. “I thought, ‘Christ, this is a nightmare!’ So I went back to sleep again,” he said. “I woke up after a bit, and the room was full of Nips. Judging by their rank tabs, they were pretty senior. They all stood up and bowed when they saw I was awake. I was dumbfounded. Charles was nattering away in Japanese, and so I lay back and wondered what was going on.

“When they left, several Japanese soldiers brought in canned goods for Charles. He distributed a whole whack of stuff to all of the wounded officers. I said to Charles, ‘What was all that about? Why did those Japanese stand up and bow to me?’

“‘Oh,’ he said. ‘They wanted to know why you had a wooden leg. I told them you’d stopped a German tank at Dunkirk by sticking your foot into the track.’

“Although he was a senior officer, I said, ‘You bloody fool!’ Charles laughed and laughed. He thought it was very funny. I was horrified. But that was typical of Charles. Fortunately, my ‘heroic past’ never returned to haunt me, though I was very worried it would.”22

Wiseman, like all the patients, found there were far more pressing concerns; food was one. Getting enough to eat was a problem. The hospital administrators and staff were rationing supplies. While that in itself might have been justifiable under the circumstances, Mickey could not help but notice it was only the patients who went hungry; the doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators continued to eat well in their own mess. When Mickey complained to Hilda, her protests were ignored. “I shall never, I suppose, stop being bitter about that period,” Mickey later wrote.²³

She was no less distressed by the disappearance of several tins of the powdered milk she was using to feed Carola, and by her own dwindling purse. When Ah King told Mickey that he was broke, she gave him $50 and advised she could no longer afford to pay him; the Japanese had frozen all bank accounts, leaving Mickey with just the $200 she had in her pocket. Ah King smiled wanly; she could pay him whenever she had money again, he said.

Not everyone Mickey encountered was as selfless or accommodating as Ah King, or as the owner of the Grips, who came by the hospital one day to leave off a twelve-pound can of powdered milk. Day-to-day living conditions worsened as the Japanese tightened their grip on Hong Kong. A favorite topic of debate among the British was the reason for the harsh treatment of both the military POWs and the civilians. Some felt it was revenge for the alleged mistreatment of Japanese prisoners by the British; others argued it was simply a case of payback—Asians treating whites with the same disdain with which the imperial powers had long treated persons of color. When Charles raised the issue with a Japanese consul who visited him at the hospital, the man expressed surprise; all prisoners were being “well treated,” he insisted. Mickey decided the consul actually believed that to be the case. “I think the Japanese were that way,” she said. “Their prisons were nearly always unspeakable.”²⁴

In the wake of the colony’s surrender, the Japanese had confined all British, Canadian, and Indian soldiers to hastily created POW camps. The Japanese were initially too busy to be concerned about Hong Kong’s civilian population. As a result, many Europeans and Americans were left free to wander about, although doing so proved risky and sometimes fatal. Foreign nationals who were captured during the battle were held in makeshift jails. What happened to Gwen Dew was typical. She was taken prisoner at the Repulse Bay Hotel, one of the first big buildings on the south side of the island to surrender. Dew and two hundred other civilians—men, women, and children—were marched eight miles at bayonet point to an old paint factory, where they awaited their fate. At one point, the prisoners were paraded through a Chinese neighborhood. “Struggling with our bundles, exhausted, our tongues swollen, our feet blistered, we were the perfect picture of the Fall of the White Man in the Far East,” Dew wrote. “A white man lying disemboweled in the dirt, a white woman stretched naked and gang raped, a parade of whites carrying their own pitiful burdens—these pictures delighted the Jap heart.”25

Perhaps. But if such scenes really did “delight” the Japanese military, it was small consolation. Apart from the plunder, there was little else to recommend Hong Kong to the Japanese as a prize. One of the first things the victors did when the shooting stopped was to compile an inventory of all the buildings and property they had seized. Street and building names were changed, sometimes repeatedly and usually without warning, in an effort to “Japanize” them. The Peninsula Hotel—known affectionately as the Grips—became the Tao (which means Great Eastern); Queen’s Road, one of Victoria’s main thoroughfares, became Nakameiji-dori (central street).

Items of personal property looted from private homes were shipped to Japan as war booty. All bank accounts were frozen and the assets siphoned off as Hong Kong dollars were exchanged for devalued Japanese military yen. Many of the wealthy taipans who had ruled the colony were held prisoner in former brothels and were forced to go to their offices each day to balance the books and sign “duress” currency. Meanwhile, Chinese merchants and industrialists were “encouraged” to join associations that supported Japan’s war efforts. Keeping them in business furthered these ends and provided fodder for the Japanese propaganda mill. It also gave the Kempetai, the ruthless Japanese secret police, and their friends ample opportunity to engage in the age-old Chinese custom known as “the squeeze.” Mickey had seen the same game played in Shanghai, albeit on a lesser scale; the threat of kidnappings, murder, and robbery were used to extort money. No one was immune from the lawlessness. Mickey received a terrifying reminder of this on New Year’s Eve.

She, the Weills, and some friends were having a candlelit dinner when armed men burst through the front door. Some wore Japanese army uniforms. The others were dressed in civilian garb. It was apparent to Mickey these men were just “Chinese rabble” who had stolen the Japanese weapons and clothing. They were looking for a large sum of money the leader of the gang was convinced that Mrs. Weill had hidden in her house. After tying up the men, the bandits proceeded to slap the terrified women in an effort to frighten them into saying where the money was hidden. Throughout the ordeal, all Mickey could think of was that her time had come. She was certain that she and the other women in the house would be raped, then killed. From upstairs came the sounds of rooms being ransacked. Carola shrieked. As Mickey rose to run to her, the guards shouted at her to sit back down. Mickey’s knees turned to jelly, and she fainted to the floor.

When she awoke, the ordeal was still going on. For two terrifying hours, the men tore the house apart. When finally they left, they did so lugging bags of jewels, clothing, and many personal possessions belonging to the people in the house. Miraculously, no one was raped or killed. Veronica had rescued Carola, and Mickey was relieved to discover that the cardboard box in which she kept her own jewels had been overlooked.

That incident was a stark reminder of how lawless life in Hong Kong was in the weeks after the Japanese victory. Gangs of armed thugs prowled the streets at night. General Rensuke Isogai, the new military governor, had issued an edict in early January of 1942 making robbery and rape punishable by death. However, the ongoing “incidents” underscored the fact that Japanese military planners in Tokyo, who had worked out such a meticulous battle plan to capture the colony, had little idea of what to do with it afterward. Apart from its obvious symbolic value as a war prize, Hong Kong served no real military purpose. “Any supportive role that [the colony] might have played in the battles in Southeast Asia was neutralized in December 1941 by the sinking of the battleships Repulse and Prince of Wales,” historian Alan Birch pointed out. “Hong Kong … was not a great asset, and the Japanese did not intend for it to become a liability. Even just to maintain Hong Kong at its pre-war level of existence would have been an unwarranted luxury.”26

Hong Kong had always been an insatiable consumer of food, goods, and services. In the prewar years, the colony’s harbor was one of the world’s busiest. Most of the food consumed by residents came from the surrounding hinterland. In the wake of the Japanese occupation of southern China, though, this ended. Agricultural production was seriously disrupted. Crops were razed, livestock were slaughtered, and many farmers fled. Widespread famine was the inevitable result. Hundreds of thousands of hungry Chinese refugees with nowhere else to run had sought haven in Hong Kong. There they lived in makeshift shelters under wretched conditions. The outcome of the battle for Hong Kong made little difference to these people, with one exception: whereas the British policy had been one of benign neglect, the Japanese began a “reign of terror.” This ruthless campaign was intended to forcibly depopulate the city of as many of its more than 1.5 million Chinese residents as possible. Japanese propaganda had boasted that the war was being fought to oust the white imperialists and return “Asia to the Asiatics.” None of the half a million Chinese who were forcibly evicted would have agreed.

The Japanese made some effort to grow food for Hong Kong’s remaining population. British crop experts and administrators were conscripted to advise farmers in the New Territories on how to use night soil—human waste—as fertilizer. The program ultimately failed because as the tide of war began turning against Japan and the officials who had devised the program were posted elsewhere, their replacements proved less committed to its success. As historian Alan Birch noted, “Finally, one Japanese governor is reputed to have shrugged his shoulders and said ‘Let them eat grass!’ There was plenty of it growing in the empty streets.”27

Similar efforts to maintain public health in the colony proved more successful. The Japanese, being acutely aware of the dangers of epidemics, enlisted Selwyn-Clarke as an “advisor.” He was given an armband to wear and told to go about his old duties as Hong Kong’s director of medical services. Selwyn-Clarke did so with an at times manic determination, often working nonstop, without food or sleep. It was the same scenario film director David Lean dramatized in The Bridge on the River Kwai, his Oscar-winning 1957 epic movie about British military POWs forced by the Japanese to build a railway bridge in the Burmese jungle. Alec Guinness played the role of a British officer who implored his men to build the best bridge they could. Doing so, he rationalized, would attest to British ingenuity and proficiency and would help his men’s morale. However, the other side was that it also helped the enemy. What to do in such a situation was the moral dilemma. Selwyn-Clarke had no doubts about what he would do. “My duty,” he told Mickey, “is the population of this town—the Chinese and Indians and Eurasians as well as the whites. I shall continue to do my duty, if it is permitted, to keep them as healthy as possible.”²⁸

It was not long before Selwyn-Clarke’s job became much easier logistically. This was because of a secret decision by the Japanese military that only a few weeks earlier would have seemed too crazy, too impossible for Hong Kong residents to believe. As word of the plan leaked out, wild and crazy rumors spread through the colony. While some had suspected what the Japanese had in mind, most refused to believe it.