Not the Slightest Chance: The Defence of Hong Kong, 1941

Preface

One is not conscious of living history; the burst of bombs, the sense of personal danger, anxiety for one’s friends, hunger and, thank goodness, an occasional episode that strikes one as amusing, do not make for the necessary detachment. It is for the historian afterwards, in the calm of his study, to piece hundreds of such personal stories together into one connected whole. — Phyllis Harrop, Hong Kong Incident, 1943 Not the Slightest Chance was the story that could never be written. More than 10 per cent of the Colony’s defenders had been killed in battle; a further 20 per cent died in captivity. Those who survived the fighting and three years, eight months in brutal POW camps seldom spoke about their experiences. Many died young. Anything written down during the fighting was burnt during the painful years of occupation, and the little ‘primary’ material that we have was written in-camp from memory, or years after the events. No wonder these records are contradictory, fragmented, and confused. I knew nothing of this when I moved permanently to Hong Kong in 1989, but within months of arriving I had been given a book, The Lasting Honour, by Oliver Lindsay. I didn’t know it then, but I couldn’t have found a better book to spark my interest. I read it overnight, and the next day being a Sunday, visited one of the battlefields mentioned — Preface 未命名5? x PREFACE Wong Nai Chung Gap. Less than five minutes after arriving I found a 6. 5-mm cartridge from a wartime Japanese Arisaka rifle hanging out of an earth bank near the old police station. What made the battle of Hong Kong unique was the scale. This was no battle of Berlin with millions of men involved; instead, just 14,000 defended the Colony. But, in an isolated location like this, those 14,000 formed a microcosm of Imperial forces of the time. Navy, air force, army, and every supporting unit was represented. Inside this force was a microcosm within a microcosm, the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps. They too had everything from an air unit to a navy (through the Hong Kong Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve), to an army with all its units. It occurred to me that it might just be possible to write a new type of history — a history based on the individual — all the individuals, rather than the big battalions so beloved of Napoleon and traditional historians. I set to work. First, I put together a basic chronology of the fighting here. On top of that, I overlaid the records of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) for Hong Kong (including civilian records where they existed, and the hard-to-separate naval records). This immediately highlighted fatalities without incidents, and incidents without fatalities. The detective work had begun. The next step was to identity all published (and whenever possible, unpublished) accounts, diaries, and records of the fighting, and correlate them with the data already assembled. This involved processing some 180 works, and almost immediately highlighted a problem: diarists, in particular, habitually make reference to individuals by surname or nickname without any other particulars. Who was ‘Gow’, for example? Why was he at that place at that time? What else did that tell us? There was no option but to compile a database of the entire garrison’s personnel. The Hong Kong Public Records Office had reasonably complete hospital records from the fighting (almost the only records to have survived from the time), and a partial list of POWs completed in January 1942. All went into the computer, and suddenly I knew who I was dealing with. In fact, by looking for groupings of wounded in particular units on certain dates, I was even able to do primary research from within my own book. I now had a map of an entire Colonial garrison of the mid-twentieth century. It soon became apparent that historians up till now had completely ignored some less fashionable units, and others had received more than their fair share of attention. I determined that I should take 未命名5? PREFACE xi the opportunity to write the first comprehensive and balanced account of the fighting, giving fair coverage to each unit involved. And then it started to get interesting. The scene shifted from a backroom historian sifting through dusty papers in the archives, to the world of modern communications and face-to...