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1 Last Ship Out 7 December 1941 Lieutenant Alexander Kennedy drove eastwards along the coast of Hong Kong Island till he had left the city behind. Just before the beacon at Lyemun Pass, he parked his car—a sporty little Standard 9 saloon with sliding sunroof—and stood on the headland, gazing down at the entrance to one of the finest harbours in the world. Across the narrow blue strait, 500 yards away, Devil’s Peak reared up from the mainland. Beyond it, a range of higher mountains—the ‘nine dragons’ that gave the Kowloon peninsula its Chinese name—rose dreamily in a grey-blue mist above the scattered villages and paddy fields of the New Territories. Just behind them, on the Chinese border, 20 miles from where he stood, the Imperial Nipponese Army was readying for attack. The handsome, red-headed young Scot needed little reminding of just how close the Japanese were. He was commanding officer of a motor torpedo boat—one of a flotilla of MTBs that formed a major part of Hong Kong’s token navy. On their patrols around the waters of the British colony, the unit’s eight small boats had from time to time come across wrecked fishing junks which had been attacked by Japanese warships. These attacks were apparently meant to discourage Hong Kong people from smuggling war materials or other goods to their compatriots in China, who had been resisting Japanese aggression for years. Kennedy and his crew had also exchanged wary looks with Japanese soldiers stationed along the Chinese coast near Mirs Bay. It was his favourite part of Hong Kong, where the innumerable bays and inlets of crystal-clear water and the surrounding steep green hills reminded him of his sailing days back home. Kennedy had joined the Clyde Division of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) as a midshipman in 1937, while still in his first year of a science tripos at Cambridge. He signed up partly to open an avenue of escape from his family’s prosperous laundry and dyeing business in Glasgow, but mainly because of a visit to the 1936 Olympics. His parents—proud of their only child’s excellent sporting and academic performance at one of Scotland’s finest schools, 4 Escape from Hong Kong Loretto—had taken him to Berlin as a treat before he went up to university . The Games themselves had been well organized and spectacular , he later recalled. But the ‘hysterical sieg heils’ had come as a shock. As those around them leaped to their feet with right arms extended, the family from Kelvinside remained silently and defiantly seated. After mobilization in August 1939, Kennedy was promptly dispatched to Hong Kong. Defending a small colony in South China against possible attack from Japan—a country Britain wasn’t even at war with—didn’t seem the most obvious way to stop Hitler, to either Kennedy himself or the rest of the colony’s 10,000-strong British garrison. But his grandmother’s parting words remained with him: ‘Remember, Alick, always do your duty.’ As well as the regular troops—from Britain, India and Canada— there were locally recruited volunteers. While they may have been less well trained than the professionals, many of these were more motivated, since this was, temporarily at least, their home. Even so, there were few places available among their ranks (and still fewer at officer level) for the ethnic Chinese who formed the overwhelming majority of the population. On land, there was the Volunteer Defence Corps (VDC), up to 2,000 strong; at sea, the HKRNVR, or Hong Kong Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, whose strength of just 300 at the outbreak of the war in Europe had now been brought up to 800. Almost all the dozen or so young officers in Kennedy’s flotilla belonged to this local branch of his own ‘Wavy Navy’. In fact, the only one of them wearing the straight stripes of the regular Royal Navy was Kennedy’s flatmate, John Collingwood, who had moved in just last month to share his spacious naval officers’ bachelor flat on the upper floor of a two-storey building on the corner of Cameron and Nathan Roads. Aged twenty-eight—four years older than Kennedy—Collingwood was a fellow lieutenant who had come to Hong Kong two years previously as a gunnery officer, and was now second-in-command of the MTB flotilla. Some thought he might even have got the top job when...

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