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2 One-Legged Admiral 8 December Hong Kong’s natural shape—almost like that of a theatre, with the harbour as its stage—ensured that almost everyone could catch at least a glimpse of the war’s spectacular opening act. As ever, those in the Mid-Levels and on the Peak had the best seats in the house, gazing over their balcony rails at a sky speckled with swooping warplanes . Many thought it must be a training exercise, till they looked again and saw the coils of smoke rising from the airport. Even then, they couldn’t quite believe it was real. Everything else seemed so normal. As one expatriate described the scene, ‘sampans and junks crowded the harbour and all around Chinese were about their usual business. Coolies returned from market with their string bundles and I saw amahs hanging out washing in nearby gardens.’ For Admiral Chan Chak, it was more of a ringside view—of a very one-sided fight. He had left his home in a quiet Kowloon suburb soon after 7 a.m. and was crossing over to the island on a ferry as the raid began. From mid harbour, the red discs of the Rising Sun on the wings of the fighters, the roar of their twin cannons, the splashes in the water around him, the angry thuds of the exploding bombs and the desultory crackle of the ineffective anti-aircraft guns were all only too real. He had seen it all before in China. And he had been expecting it here in Hong Kong, long before being woken by the telephone earlier that morning with the news that Tokyo had announced the start of hostilities against American and British forces. The Japaneselanguage broadcast had been monitored at 4.45 a.m. by the British Army’s chief intelligence officer in the colony, Major Charles Boxer. Further calls told Admiral Chan of bombing raids on Malaya and Manila—and on the US fleet in Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. He had been on the phone almost ever since, talking both to Fortress HQ and to his own military intelligence colleagues in the Chinese capital, Chungking. He had also been busy contacting some of the many mainland Chinese now based in Hong Kong who would be in grave danger were the Japanese to capture the British colony. One-Legged Admiral 13 But no one was higher on Japan’s blacklist than Chan Chak himself. ‘A tough little fellow with a wooden leg and a body that had been battered in every war and dust-up since the Revolution’ was how one Old China Hand in Hong Kong at the time described him. The republican revolution of 1911, which Chan had supported as a radical sixteen-year-old naval college student, marked the end of two thousand years of imperial rule. But it also introduced a new period of no rule at all, when the only power was in the hands of city gangsters and provincial warlords, each with his own army roaming the poverty-stricken countryside. It was a time when just to survive— let alone build up a national navy, as Chan was trying to do by the early 1920s—required toughness and even ruthlessness. ‘Shoot first, report later’ became one of his mottoes. Soon he was virtually a warlord himself, but one whose army was based on ships rather than on land. He had built up a political base in Canton, while remaining fiercely loyal to his friend and patron, Dr Sun Yat-sen, the father of the revolution and leader of the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang (KMT). It was Sun who had given Chan his nickname Chak Suk, or ‘Uncle Chak’, using a Chinese character meaning ‘strategy’ on account of the Admiral’s lifelong gift for getting out of tight situations. Chan was credited with having saved the lives of both Sun and his successor, Chiang Kai-shek, in 1922, when he rescued them both by boat from a rival whose troops had hemmed them in. After Sun Yat-sen’s death in 1924, Chiang, having swiftly seized power as President and Generalissimo, rewarded Chan by giving him what amounted to his own fiefdom along the South China coast. It was a loose arrangement involving many well-placed connections and unspecified ‘rights’. But the two men were never close, Chan believing Chiang Kai-shek had betrayed Dr Sun’s democratic ideals. The Generalissimo switched his attention to fighting the rising Communist movement, while...

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