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Next morning, a severely wounded Charles Boxer was brought into Queen Mary Hospital. He had found the road east of Aberdeen blocked by abandoned vehicles below Shouson Hill, and had continued on foot. He was crossing some open ground with Lieutenant TJ Price and Sub-Lieutenant JJ Forster of the HKRNVR when they came under fire from a collection of huts. A bullet entered Boxer’s chest close to the lung and came out near the middle of his back. As the shooting intensified and grenades were thrown, the two naval officers carried him to safety, and he was taken to the Aberdeen Industrial School. After a night in the Queen Mary’s resuscitation ward, it was decided he would live. Boxer’s place at the daily intelligence meeting in Shell House was taken by Max Oxford. After hearing reports of how local residents had been killed, raped or robbed by the Japanese troops, or kidnapped as porters, Chan Chak said he could no longer tolerate his people’s suffering . He was now proposing that his Loyal and Righteous vigilantes should join the fighting on the front line. But he needed the British to provide them with guns and grenades, and this they seemed reluctant to do. He complained later that as soon as he brought up the subject, ‘all the British representatives expressed confidence in their ability to defend Hong Kong’. And when the weapons finally did come, it was a matter of too little, too late. But the Admiral refused to be disheartened. He continued to give hopeful reports about the progress of a 60,000-strong army led by Yu Hanmou. General Yu was commander of China’s 7th War Zone, an area that included Guangdong Province. His army’s advance guard was now said to be ‘on the frontier and about to attack’. Britain’s military attaché in Chungking had just sent a telegram saying the main Chinese attack couldn’t start for another ten days. But Fortress HQ felt sufficiently emboldened by Chan’s optimism to put out a moraleboosting if cautiously worded signal to all units: 8 Death of a Gunboat 21 December Death of a Gunboat 61 There are indications that Chinese forces are advancing towards the frontier to our aid. All forces must therefore hold their positions at all costs and look forward to only a few more days of strain. There was also another message from Churchill: ‘Every day your resistance brings nearer our certain victory.’ The Prime Minister seemed to be insisting that lives be sacrificed in Hong Kong to keep the enemy tied down and thus delay its advance elsewhere. But resistance in other parts of Asia was already crumbling. Thailand had succumbed to Japanese occupation within the first few days; in Malaya, Penang had been evacuated; in the Philippines, a large Japanese army had landed and was advancing on Manila. As enemy soldiers continued to race westwards across Hong Kong Island, the Royal Navy ordered its forces in Aberdeen to fight to the last man. Most of them were now sailors without ships. They were each issued with a rifle and bayonet, a revolver and a bag of grenades, and sent up into the hills in their conspicuous blue uniforms, their bell-bottom trousers tucked into their boots. Those who were still alive after a day or two would wander back into the Industrial School in search of food and shelter. They reported that the enemy seemed to know the lie of the land much better than they did: every Japanese soldier had been equipped with his own pocket-sized map. The biggest fighting ship still afloat was the 615-ton HMS Cicala, with a length of 238 feet and a beam of just 38 feet. The flat-bottomed Insect-class gunboat had first seen action in the 1914–18 War—as had its present captain, Lieutenant Commander John Boldero, as a fifteen-year-old at Jutland. After working between the wars for the Shanghai Waterworks Company, Boldero was recalled to duty in 1939 and appointed commander of the motor torpedo boat flotilla in Hong Kong. He was replaced by Gandy after losing his right arm in a collision on a night exercise in April 1941, but discharged himself from hospital and took over Gandy’s earlier command of Cicala. He now steered the river gunboat with his left hand—to such good effect that over the previous two weeks she had proved a constant menace to the...

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