TODAY Hong Kong observes its 48th Liberation Day with befitting pomp and circumstance.
It is therefore timely to remind both the British and Hong Kong governments of their undischarged debt of honour to those, who 52 years ago, volunteered to risk life and limb for King and Country, when Hong Kong was attacked on December 8, 1941 by the overwhelming might of the Japanese armed forces.
After 17 days of savage combat, the hopelessly outnumbered garrison was forced to capitulate on Christmas Day 1941.
On December 21, Winston Churchill signalled the Governor, Sir Mark Young, ''The enemy should be compelled to expend the utmost life and equipment. 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.'' Churchill, in his monumental history of World War II had this to say about Hong Kong's heroic stand against the Japanese, ''Those orders were obeyed in spirit and to the letter. The Colony had fought a good fight. They had won indeed 'the lasting honour'''.
Following the surrender, some 7,000 dejected men of the surrendered garrison were interned by the Japanese at Shamshuipo Camp. There, and subsequently in Japan, thousands of the once physically fit men languished miserably behind a tall, forbidding and electrified barbed wire fence in what to them would be a nightmare 44 months of dark despair.
During their cruel captivity the men were fed on a deliberate starvation diet which, predictably, resulted in an early outbreak of a spate of vitamin deficiency diseases, such as pellagra, blindness and dry beri beri, which is a form of neuritis in whichthe feet and hands went alternatively numb, followed by agonising shooting pains which made sleep impossible.
Malnutrition reduced droves of once portly men to pathetic walking skeletons. Bacillary dysentery and diphtheria raged unchecked and caused hundreds of deaths. Despite frantic appeals by Major Ashton Rose, the Senior Camp Medical Officer, to his Japanesecounterpart, it was not until 100 men had died of diphtheria that a woefully inadequate supply of the life-saving anti-toxin was delivered.