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The Japanese finally made their move on the island on the night of 18 December, crossing the harbour in the same area where the three men from Z Force had blown up the observation ship. There had been several days of increasingly heavy bombardment of the defences around Lyemun and along the island’s adjacent northeast coast. The oil and petrol storage tanks at North Point were set on fire and then shelled continuously. The resulting thick black smoke combined with a moonless night, a heavy ground mist and an unusually high tide to provide perfect conditions for a landing. An advance party of swimmers was followed by other special forces in collapsible boats. They slipped across the narrow strait and established a bridgehead, virtually unobserved. Command HQ had dealt with so many false alarms by now that the first reports of the actual landings were shrugged off with a dismissive: ‘windy buggers— at it again’. A venerable group of local businessmen known as the Hugheseliers, none of them less than fifty-five years of age, put up a stout defence of the North Point Power Station. But otherwise, the thin line of defending infantry soon gave way, allowing fresh waves of Japanese soldiers to wade ashore and move swiftly up into the tangled, scrub-covered hills. The billowing smoke from the oil tanks could still be seen early next morning from as far away as Aberdeen on the other side of the island, where the boats of the 2nd MTB Flotilla were returning from their overnight patrols far to the south and west. But no one here seemed to know what exactly had caused the smoke—still less that there were now enemy troops on the island. Protected by hills on all sides, Aberdeen’s natural harbour had sheltered seagoing craft from Hong Kong’s earliest days. It was now home to some 20,000 Hoklo and Tanka shuishang ren (‘water people’), who lived on board their fishing junks. Stately as galleons when out at sea under sail, the many hundreds of still unmechanized junks were moored together in a forest of masts and banners, their decks stepped 6 Naval Light Brigade 19 December 42 Escape from Hong Kong up by planked levels to high poops, where whole families squatted under canvas awnings over their breakfast. Long thin sampans wove between their ranks selling vegetables and other supplies, each boat poled with one long oar by a single standing figure in a black shiny tunic and a hat like a huge bamboo lampshade. In peacetime you could almost walk across the mass of junks to the little island opposite , called Aplichau (Duck’s Tongue Island). But since the reopening of two small dry docks at the western end of the Aberdeen waterfront, a passage had been closed off to native craft for the use of the Royal Navy, and these days, the stench of cordite had taken over from the more traditional smells of incense, sandalwood and drying salt fish. Aberdeen was not the most convenient base for motor torpedo boats, whose light wooden build and unconventional design meant they required constant maintenance. (Ashby and his colleagues irreverently referred to their section as the Department of Costly Farces rather than Coastal Forces.) The slipway took only one boat at a time, and the offices and workshops were at the other end of the village, in a high-chimneyed, three-storey building known as the Industrial School. This had formerly been run by the Salesian Fathers as a school for disadvantaged children, but it had been taken over at the start of the battle and turned into a military headquarters. Onshore naval staff and various platoons of soldiers stationed in the southern half of the island were billeted in the dormitories upstairs. The officers and crews of the MTB flotilla lived permanently on their boats—or in the case of the two Thornycroft boats, 26 and 27, which had no accommodation, they slept on board the small China gunboat, HMS Robin. As the boats of the flotilla tied up alongside Robin at nine o’clock that morning, orders were received for an urgent new mission: ‘proceed into Kowloon Bay . . . and fire at everything in sight’. They were to keep firing until ‘nothing remains . . . or your ammunition is expended’. Lieutenant John Collingwood later called it ‘the most daring adventure ever carried out in broad daylight by MTBs’. A more modest description appears in the diary of one of his crew, twentyone...

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