For king and country? Not so for the Danish volunteer soldiers in World War II Hong Kong who fought to defend the British colony
- Some were new arrivals, others old China hands. When war began, they were on the side of Hong Kong, loyalty to a king be damned. It’s a story never before told
- Danish novelist Frode Olsen paints a picture of his countrymen’s carefree lives in the run-up to war, and of their sacrifices in desperate defence of the city
There’s a drinking fountain at a school in Copenhagen where, as pupils bend down to sip the water, they can cast their eyes up at a marble plaque that names former students killed in World War II. Retired Danish detective chief superintendent Frode Olsen was a pupil at the school, and as a boy he sometimes glanced at the plaque before running off to play.
Eight years ago, the school celebrated its 100th anniversary, and Olsen had a longer look at the plaque, focusing on one man’s name – Kaj Kjaer. The Dane had been killed in Hong Kong, and Olsen wondered what a young Dane would have been doing fighting in a British colony.
That moment of curiosity led Olsen on a four-year journey, recounted in his book, Fighting for Two Kings: Danish Volunteers in the Defence of Hong Kong 1941 (Earnshaw Books), which for the first time tells the story of the Danish community in Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation that began in December 1941.
Written in Danish, the book has now been translated into English. At the book’s core are the voices of employees of Danish shipping companies who signed up as volunteer soldiers to fight for Hong Kong, their adopted home, and for a foreign king.
Olsen initially searched archives and read newspaper interviews with the Danish volunteers, who had died by the time he began his research. He then set about contacting their families.
“The first call was always a bit emotional. Would I intrude on something?” says Olsen, speaking by phone from his home in Copenhagen.
The horrors they bore: Allied civilians at large in wartime Hong Kong
Perhaps it was the empathetic approach he nurtured from his years as an investigator of war crimes and as a police counsellor posted in the Balkans region of southeastern Europe and in China. But his “intrusion” was welcomed. He writes of about 20 Danes, employees and their wives who worked mostly for Danish shipping companies, and the 10 or so who volunteered to help defend Hong Kong.
He spoke to the men’s children, and was delighted to find that one widow, Lise Huttemeier, who had come to Hong Kong at the age of 21 to join her fiancé Erik Huttemeier, was still alive at 95 and happy to talk to him.
Olsen has written five novels, and in Fighting for Two Kings he builds the narrative tension as the storm clouds gather over Europe in the 1930s. Kurt Wilkens, a 22-year old Dane, bids farewell to his parents and younger brother in January 1939 at Berlin’s main station.
Wilkens is excited, waving out of the train window, about to travel across the world by rail and ship to begin work in Hong Kong with Danish shipping firm EAC.
Through Wilkens and his future flatmate and colleague, Kjaer, 25, Olsen tells the story of these employees in the British colony, some of them old China hands, some new to the East.
The letters these two young men sent home to their families in Denmark often included upbeat accounts of social events, buying a new lamp and deciding on a carpet, a sailing trip, evenings with friends, their dislike of the stuck-up English, and the idiocy of having to wear a tie in a hot and humid office.
Informal photos set the scene. There is a snap of Kjaer in front of his pride and joy, a Ford B Coupe 1933, the shine on his shoes comparable to his polished car, and others of Kjaer and Wilkens deep in thought on a sailing trip, and of the two men having a fun evening, laughing with a young Danish woman, Karen Lisbeth Christensen.
She was married to shipping agent Niels Orskov Christensen, a Dane who signed up to defend Hong Kong and who kept writing in his diary, even after he was interned in a prisoner-of-war camp in Sham Shui Po at the northern end of the Kowloon peninsula.
Eight Danes – Kjaer, Wilkens, Orskov Christensen, Huttemeier, Jorgen Vibe Christensen, Kaj Westergaard Pedersen, Jacob Gundesen, and Holger Dreyer – saw active service in the city’s defence as members of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps, which they joined twice.
They had all signed up in 1939 – but after they were told by the Danish authorities they could not swear allegiance to a second king, they withdrew. They could easily have remained as third-country nationals, considered civilians in Hong Kong during the occupation, but in 1940 they threw scruples to the winds and signed up as volunteers for the second time, an act which inspired the title of Olsen’s book.
“The question came up in the spring of 1940,” says Olsen. “And you can see in their letters this discussion that is going on. No one expected the Japanese would ever attack Britain or Hong Kong, but still the British prepared and encouraged all men of any nationality who were able to join up.”
In his diary, Orskov Christensen wrote of Hong Kong’s last days of liberty before the war arrived and life changed forever.
Twenty-four hours before the Japanese invaded the British colony in December 1941, there was a ball at The Peninsula hotel; men from the British Middlesex Regiment played rugby, and the Danes took part in a dragon boat race. At Volunteer training sessions there were prizes for different feats, including a 300-metre dash in a gas mask.
The men laughed as they put on their Volunteer uniforms but they were soon hit by the reality that the Japanese were battle-hardened veterans. Orskov Christensen describes his growing fear and insomnia as the battle came ever closer over the ensuing days.
“Having many and serious thoughts – thinking endlessly about Karen Lisbeth and little Steen,” he wrote in his diary. “What will happen to them if I die? How will they be treated by the Japanese if they seize the town? I’m practising bayonet fighting. That may be what I’ll have to rely on.
“Was on guard last night together with Reiertsen at Hill 59, shivering from cold because we could not move. Spooky, we could only see 4-5 metres ahead. Everything was pretty quiet.”
Kjaer was killed on December 18, the bloodiest day for the Allied forces. “One of the soldiers saw Kjaer about 600 yards north of Sanatorium Gap [between Mount Butler and Mount Parker, on Hong Kong Island]. He was alone and surrounded by seven or eight Japanese soldiers,” writes Olsen. Kjaer’s close friend, Wilkens, was killed a week later, on Christmas Day, in Stanley.
The Japanese attack on Hong Kong and its 1.5 million population lasted for 18 days. By the time the city surrendered on December 25, 1941, 1,500 Allied soldiers and 4,000 civilians had been killed.
Olsen writes that during the war the Danish women of Hong Kong coped with dwindling money and food supplies, and sent what they could to their husbands held at the Sham Shui Po prisoner-of-war camp in Kowloon. Six Danes were imprisoned in the camp, including Orskov Christensen, who wrote in his diary until his death from the debilitating effects of dysentery and beriberi. A friend in the camp hid his diary and it was later sent to Orskov Christensen’s wife.
Olsen spoke to Lise Huttemeier for the second time, two weeks before her death in 2015. She was frail and bedridden, and their conversation was sometimes a little confused. He says that because he knew so much about her life in Hong Kong, “she thought that I had also been there in Hong Kong”.
She had arrived in the colony in 1939 as a 21-year-old, married her husband, Erik Huttemeier, that year, and soon had a child.
Erik Huttemeier survived the camp at Sham Shui Po but came out weighing half his original weight. His young wife had fled Kowloon to a friend’s villa on The Peak during the first Japanese air raid in late 1941.
“She had grabbed her coat, child and milk powder,” says Olsen. “She had lost everything.”
Olsen, with the help of the South China Morning Post, found a photograph of Erik and Lise Huttemeier’s church wedding on The Peak in October, 1939.
“The South China Morning Post had her wedding photo and I gave it to her,” he says. “She was very happy.”