THE British Government believed it might have trouble convincing Hong Kong people to return to colonial rule at the end of World War II and developed propaganda plans to try to create a pro-British atmosphere, according to UK records released yesterday. London's wartime secret agents also saw ''bribery and corruption'' as the only ways to remove any communist or nationalist government which might establish itself in the territory replacing the occupying Japanese power in the final days of the war. The agents, from the Far East section of the wartime Special Operations Executive (SOE), were concerned that without ''subversive operations'' the territory could be swallowed back into China by nationalist or communist forces. SOE agents were already supporting communist groups in the New Territories in their guerilla actions against the Japanese, according to the documents released by the Public Records Office. A top secret memo sent from the SOE at its base in Chungking to the War Office in London in July 1945, less than a month before the end of the war, said: ''Whatever Chinese group organises itself into a de facto government in Hong Kong before occupation, the only way of getting it out, or of getting its permission to put in selected Europeans at the head of it, will be by purchase.'' The warning memo urged SOE experts in black marketeering to come up with an immediate assessment of who to bribe and ''put one of their men into Hong Kong with the necessary inducements as soon as possible, so that the good work of bribery and corruption can start now''. There was little confidence that there would be a general welcome in the territory for the resumption of British rule. Such was the concern that the Colonial Office in 1944 discussed ''creating or fabricating the semblance of pro-British demonstrations in Hong Kong'' and even planned to bring in large quantities of small Union Jacks.