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SCMP Reporter

The Battle for Hong Kong 1941-1945: Hostage to Fortune

by Oliver Lindsay,  with John Harris

University of Hong Kong Press, $195

The Battle for Hong Kong lasted 18 days. When  it ended in surrender on Christmas Day, 1941, there were 2,113 British soldiers killed or missing and Japanese casualties of 2,654. Nobody seems to have counted the civilian toll.

Although the guns stopped blazing 64 years ago, controversy still  surrounds the hopeless defence of the city against a determined, skilled, ruthless and vastly superior invading army.

This is two books in one. Oliver Lindsay has researched the wartime history of Hong Kong  for 30 years and has written two earlier, well-regarded books - about the fall of the city and the second world war in Southeast Asia. He makes the point that nobody should write the history of a battle without having walked the ground. He has done that.

Half the book comprises the memories of John Harris, a soldier during the fighting and a prisoner of war afterwards. His personal account recalls the desperation and starvation of long years of imprisonment. It's grippingly told.

Harris was one of the brave prisoners who acted as a conduit in an espionage ring. He  passed messages about Japanese shipping movements and other military information. If he'd been caught, he would certainly have been executed after the customary protracted torture.

Lindsay sets the scene well, outlining the other-worldly existence of expatriate Hong Kong, where the bands gaily played on as the Japanese geared-up for invasion along the border.

It was a pillar of British belief that the Japanese soldier was a near-pathetic individual who couldn't shoot at night, and that the Imperial Japanese Army was 'a second rate, contemptible force'.

The wisdom of the Commander in Chief,  Far East, Sir Robert Brooke-Popham,  is truly enlightening. After inspecting defences in Hong Kong, he addressed the garrison. A former governor of Kenya, his opinion was that the 'greatly inferior' Japanese wore 'dirty uniforms' and were 'sub-human specimens' incapable of forming an intelligent fighting force.

A  month before the invaders swept across the Shenzhen River, the British commander Major General Maltby  was theorising about the value  of Hong Kong as a bridgehead from which his troops could launch attacks to help Chinese forces in occupied southern China. His assessment of the threat couldn't have been more wrong.

The general had been in Hong Kong only since July 1941. He relied on advice from the most experienced British intelligence officer in the Far East, Major Charles Boxer. He was a rum cove.  A Sandhurst graduate and linguist, he'd studied Japanese in Tokyo and then been attached to a Japanese regiment as a language officer. His wife, like most military spouses,  had been evacuated to Australia - giving the major the opportunity to move in with his mistress,  an American journalist and opium addict, with whom he had a child.

As the battle  moved towards the inevitable end and the surrender of 12,000 British, Indian and Canadian troops and Hong Kong Volunteers, there were calls for Maltby and the Governor,  Sir Mark Young, to yield.

But from distant London, Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered them to fight on. They did so. Pointlessly.

Lindsay is good on the troop movements  and the details of units falling back, regrouping, attacking and suffering casualties. Harris is  informative on life in the PoW camps.

But, once again, I ask myself (as I've done many times reading accounts of the Battle of Hong Kong): What of the civilians?

There is scant mention of the rape, looting and murder in Kowloon after the British had left the mainland to its fate and before the Japanese  imposed a brutal but effective military rule.

For those with an interest in Hong Kong, this  is a fascinating read. But there's still a history book waiting to be written about what the Battle of Hong Kong meant to the 1.6 million civilians, many of them already refugees from Japanese ferocity, who trembled during those 18 long winter days and for the grim three years and eight months of occupation that followed.



The Battle for Hong Kong 1941-1945: Hostage to Fortune