Hong Kong (39 page)

Before long the Japanese gunners were shelling across the harbour, the dive-bombers were screaming down on Central, and for the first time chaos struck the waterfront we have seen growing and enriching itself so steadily decade by decade through the chapters of this book. It was hardly to be imagined. It was like a dream, in which all things familiar were suddenly shattered or distorted. The
Tamar
was scuttled. Fires raged in Wanchai. Statue Square was thick with acrid smoke. At midnight one night bombs hit the Jockey Club stables at Happy Valley, and the horses escaped. Trembling and streaked with blood they raced in panic here and there through the dark streets.

By 13 December all the British forces were assembled within the thirty-one square miles of the island. ‘We will hold off the enemy,’ said an official communiqué, ‘until the strategical situation permits relief. The simple task before everyone now is to hold firm.’

The Governor of Hong Kong was Sir Mark Young, a handsome and reserved Etonian, who had arrived from Barbados to take up his duties two months before. The Colonial Secretary, his right-hand man, was Franklin Gimson, who had arrived from England, never having been in Hong Kong before, on the very day of the invasion. Far away was Winston Churchill, Prime Minister, war-lord and imperialist, who had spoken of the British Empire lasting a thousand years, and who had now changed his mind about the futility of resistance. ‘There must be,’ he said in a message to the Governor, ‘no thought of surrender … 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.’

The War Cabinet in London had been advised that, even after the loss of the New Territories and Kowloon, Hong Kong Island should be able to hold out for at least four months. It held out for rather more than a week. Far from fighting to the last man, seven out of ten of the servicemen under British command survived to surrender, and they handed over to their enemies enormous quantities of material. The control of the defence was ineffective, the troops were generally road-bound and inefficient, the equipment was inferior and the attitude to war was anachronistic. The defending force included Indians and Canadians who spoke no English, engineers fighting as infantry, infantry battalions without transport, RAF ground crews and Royal Navy seamen. It was a campaign summed up by the opposing boots – on the one side the British ammunition boots, heavy hobnailed things of coarse leather, their pattern unchanged since the Boer War, on the other side the light Japanese combat boots, supple, rubber-soled, silent. Clumping, unimaginative and archaic was the British conduct of the battle; swift, audacious and innovative the Japanese.

Yet the failure was understandable. This was the first armed conflict ever between the Japanese and the British, and the British were taken fearfully by surprise. Frozen in their attitudes of imperial complacency, they had come to believe that no Asian could be their match. The Japanese had been enormously admired for their fighting abilities half
a century before; they had performed better than anyone during the siege of the Beijing legations in 1900, and Admiral Heihachiro Togo, victor of the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, had actually been made a member of the British Order of Merit. Now however, for reasons unclear, they were thought to be hopelessly inferior – short-sighted, poorly equipped and incapable of fighting at night. It had come as an appalling shock to the British when the tough and wonderfully enterprising Japanese regiments threw them with such appalling ease out of the peninsula and across the harbour strait. Maltby and his soldiers never really recovered their confidence. The battle for Hong Kong was lost on Smuggler’s Ridge.

The 38th Division’s intelligence was good. The large Japanese community in Hong Kong before the war (of whom eighty remained even on the day of the invasion) included many spies – the well-known barber of the Hong Kong Hotel, whom we met briefly in an earlier chapter, turned out to have been a naval commander all the time. The division was well supplied with maps of the British defences, and was never short of local guides. Equipped with these advantages, the Japanese prepared a plan for the capture of Hong Kong Island that was simple, decisive, and worked perfectly. Heavily shelling and bombing the island first, they landed their first troops at East Point, not far from the old Jardine’s headquarters, on the night of 18 December. Next they advanced straight across the middle of the island, over the high country east of the Peak, to divide the British forces into two parts, east and west. Finally they turned upon those separate parts, each cut off from the other, and mopped them up.

In the course of the battle the Governor, from his bunker under Government House, echoed the Churchillian style in a message of his own – ‘Fight on. Hold fast for King and Empire. God bless you all in this your finest hour’ – and Churchill himself signalled to say that every part of the island must be fought for, if necessary from house to house. There were repeated reports, officially sponsored for the sake of morale, that Chinese armies were on their way to relieve the island. Until the reality of Pearl Harbor became clear, it was hoped that the US Navy might come to the rescue; until the sinking of the Royal Navy’s capital ships
Repulse
and
Prince of Wales
in the South China Sea, it was still hoped that something might arrive from Singapore. But it was all illusion. The British had no chance. Their forces were irrevocably split and scattered, and were presently reduced to isolated units fighting on more or less ignorantly of each other. They evolved no
coherent strategy of resistance, but merely fought back wherever the enemy dictated, in a helpless series of defensive actions and half-cock counter-attacks. The poor half-trained Canadians, so recently disembarked in this totally unfamiliar environment, never did get their motor transport, and seldom knew exactly where they were. Even the Royal Scots, one of the most famous of British infantry regiments, fought with a sad lack of conviction. For nearly everyone it was a baptism of fire – only a few individuals had seen action in Europe or Africa, and a handful of veterans had fought, in very different circumstances, in the First World War. They never had a hope, and anyway their resistance made not the slightest difference, one way or the other, to the course of the war; it was an effect of grand tragedy that so much rhetoric was expended, and so many lives were thrown away, to demonstrate so desolate a point.

The British gave up on Christmas Day, to the gratified surprise of the Japanese, who had expected to be fighting for at least a month. Casualty figures have never been properly established, but the British side are said to have suffered about 2,000 killed and 1,300 seriously wounded, the Japanese rather more. At least 4,000 civilians died, nearly all Chinese. Some 9,000 British Indian and Canadian soldiers were taken prisoner. The defence had not been a disgrace, but it had certainly not been the epic Churchill seemed to want; the loss of Hong Kong was a humiliating event for the British Empire, and a curtain-raiser to the far more dreadful calamity of Singapore.

Still, in the face of this astonishing and terrifying new enemy, fighting with such sneaky subtlety and courage, some on the British side did respond with the old flair. In particular many of the men of the Hong Kong Volunteers, British and Chinese, set heroic examples. They knew the place and had a stake in it, and whenever the British armies scored a temporary success, or so it seems from the records, Hong Kong men contributed. At the North Point power station, by the northern waterfront, one of the most determined of the rearguard actions was fought by four officers and fifty-five men of the Volunteers’ Special Guard Company, organized by an insurance manager named A. W. Hughes. They were all over fifty-five, were variously nicknamed the Hugheseliers and the Methuseliers, and were led by J. J. Paterson, taipan of Jardine’s and a veteran of the First World War. One of the privates, aged seventy, was a nephew of Governor Des Voeux; another, aged sixty-seven, was taipan of Hutchison’s (later Hutchison-Whampoa).
For fourteen hours these elderly gentlemen, very pillars of the Hong Kong Establishment, held out at the power station against repeated Japanese attacks and unrelieved mortar barrages, surrendering only when all their ammunition was expended.

The Royal Navy, too, faithfully honoured its traditions. We read of the old river gunboat
Cicala
, under her one-armed captain John Boldero, rushing here and there throughout the battle zone, now off the New Territory bombarding the Japanese with her 3-inch gun, now ferrying people across the harbour, now storming into the Japanese invasion flotillas, undaunted for all her thirty years, until at last, after surviving sixty-four bombing attacks, she is sunk in the Lamma Channel. We read of the five motor torpedo boats of No. 2 Flotilla hurling themselves past Green Island, all guns blazing, at full speed into the junks, barges and sampans that were taking the Japanese armies across the harbour, sinking ships right and left until two of the boats were lost, one was crippled and half the crews were casualties.

A handful of soldiers and sailors escaped to the unoccupied part of China. For the rest, on Christmas Day, 1941, Sir Mark Young the Governor and Commander-in-Chief handed them over, together with all his authority, to Lieutenant-General Takashi Sakai of the Imperial Japanese Army. It was the first time a British Crown Colony had ever been surrendered to an enemy. ‘I had believed,’ said a Portuguese officer of the Hong Kong Volunteers, ‘and had been told to teach my troops that we would fight to the last man, to the last bullet. So to be told to capitulate was a serious blow to me.’

The British having almost all been locked up, the soldiers in prisoner-of-war camps in Kowloon, the civilians in an internment camp beside the sea at Stanley, the Governor for a few weeks in a suite at the Peninsula Hotel, before he was shipped away with other important captives to Manchuria – the British having been put away, the Japanese were left to do what they would with Hong Kong. In February 1942 a military Governor arrived. He was Lieutenant-General Rensuke Isogai, a Chinese specialist. He was said to be a gifted calligraphier and a master of the tea ceremony, but his first proclamation, put up in permanent form on the pedestal of Queen Victoria’s statue in Statue Square, said: ‘For those who transgress the path of right and do not keep within their correct places, I will deal with these according to military law, without mercy.’ It was a warning ironically like Blake’s
threat to the newly conquered natives of the New Territories, forty-four years before.

The Japanese had said they would incorporate Hong Kong into their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Zone. They pointedly set up their administrative headquarters in the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank building (Isogai had the chairman’s flat on the ninth floor), and ship after ship of booty sailed home to Japan, taking most of Hong Kong’s cars with them – an American journalist,
¹
crossing the harbour that January, counted twenty-six ships with deck-loads of cars. But as it turned out Hong Kong brought few other benefits to the Co-Prosperity Zone. It was not much use to the Japanese militarily, either, and in the long run was probably far more a nuisance to them than an asset. On orders from Tokyo it was not incorporated into the administration of Japanese-occupied China, which held sway up the river in Guangzhou, and it was never offered to either of the two puppet Governments which now ruled so much of China under Japanese auspices. It remained a military governorate, ‘The Captured Territory of Hong Kong’.

They did very little with it. Even their monuments of conquest were few. Government House was rebuilt by a twenty-six-year-old railway engineer, Seichi Fujimura, redecorated by a firm from Osaka, re-landscaped by a gardener from Kyoto, and Nipponized with a tall eaved tower. On the summit of Mount Cameron, above Central, the foundations were ceremonially laid of a crowning victory memorial, the Temple of the Divine Wind. Shinto priests presided, and a sacred sword was embedded in the masonry of the monument, which was to be eighty feet high, supported on twelve concrete legs, and engraved with fifteen feet high Chinese ideograms meaning ‘Heroic Memorial’. Otherwise the new rulers of Hong Kong built practically nothing, but merely used what they found as if it had always been their own: Japanese wrestling teams were awarded medals engraved, as it might be with depictions of their club-house, with a bas-relief of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank building.

By and large the conduct of the Japanese in Hong Kong was despicable. During the battle they repeatedly bayoneted prisoners, after binding them hand and foot, and murdered doctors, nurses and patients in military hospitals. Immediately after the surrender they
deliberately let their troops run wild, raping and looting everywhere. Their treatment of prisoners, military and civilian alike, was cruel, dishonest and apparently capricious – poor General Maltby was once beaten for allegedly having dirty fingernails. If the Japanese regular army, and more often the Japanese navy, sometimes behaved honourably, the unspeakable Kempeitei, the military police, tortured victims as readily and as brutally as any Gestapo.

Inasmuch as this ugly occupation had any logical aim, it was to replace one empire by another, and the Japanese did their best to discredit their predecessors. They deliberately destroyed British records, and replaced the British administrative system with a hardly less elaborate bureaucracy of their own. But there was no consistency to their methods. On the one hand the Chinese population was treated with vicious arrogance – for example passers-by who failed to bow to Japanese sentries were at best slapped on the face or hit with a rifle-butt, at worst thrown into jail. On the other hand the Japanese tried hard to win Chinese cooperation. Which was the better, they used rhetorically to ask, the corrupt alien way of the British, decadent, materialist and selfish, or the Kingly Way of the Imperial Army, the Confucianist way common to Japanese and Chinese alike?