The Battle for Hong Kong 1941-1945

by Oliver Lindsay

  The British, Canadian, Indian and Chinese soldiers would be called upon in Hong Kong to face the pandemonium of battle – the explosions of shells and mortars, machine-gun fire, hearing the screams of the wounded and the loss of close friends to their left and right – such was the full horror of war in December 1941.

  Luckily for us in the mid 1970s no Chinese threat developed and we concentrated on internal security scenarios, jungle warfare, counter-revolutionary war and civil assistance. Nevertheless some of us recognised that any limited war involving the withdrawal from the border through built up areas towards Victoria Harbour, regardless of civilian casualties, chased by the Chinese Communist Army, was a concept which was scarcely credible.

  I recently asked Lieutenant General Sir Peter Duffell, the Commander of the British Forces in Hong Kong in 1990, what the concept of operations amounted to in his day. Had he favoured an ‘open city scenario’ as Major General Bartholomew had proposed in 1938, or to even reduce the garrison, as suggested by some in the War Office, in 1940? General Duffell replied as follows.

  “In the mid 1980s when I became Brigade Commander in Hong Kong under Major General Derek Boorman who was Commander British Forces, the negotiations on the 1997 agreement were in hand. I had inherited a defence plan that saw the brigade fighting a classic withdrawal battle down to Kowloon (and through the Gin Drinkers’ Line) and the Island in the face of an all out invasion by the People’s Liberation Army. This seemed to me to be both an unlikely and impracticable scenario and one that was out of touch with military and political reality. We did not have the military strength to take on the PLA even if such a scenario was likely and anyway for the Chinese there were other ways to skin a cat or exert their will. It seemed to me that the British were not going to go to war to attempt to save Hong Kong. I saw in defence terms that the threat lay in the potential for the Chinese government to exert pressure on the British and Hong Kong governments in a variety of ways and that the border and its security and integrity was the key to any plans that we had. This ignored the possibility of air and maritime incursions which were also a possibility. On the former, unless we had a good deal of warning, we had no means to counter such an incursion. On the maritime front the best we could do was to shadow and confront any such maritime adventure with our patrol craft.

  “On land my assessment was that the Chinese might exert some form of threatening pressure on the border to extract diplomatic advantage during negotiations with the British. I sketched an escalatory series of possible scenarios that started with verbal exchanges and stone throwing/banners, etc. from across the border and moved through mass illegal immigrant and civilian incursions, militia and PLA troop movements to the north of the border, closing up to the border; possible attempted incitement of military exchanges and eventually some form of military incursion. For each scenario I outlined a series of non-escalatory responses designed to hold the line – in a non-confrontational manner – that would allow us to maintain the sovereignty of the territory within the closed area while diplomatic measures to defuse the situation were put in hand. Our response was to be controlled and disciplined, limited, until military life was threatened, and in the style of our response to the border problems that occurred during the cultural revolution. I could not see any advantage in taking on the PLA full frontal and escalating matters to a situation where the whole territory could possibly be laid bare and diplomatic opportunity thrown away. We needed to buy time with our response. I put this plan to Derek Boorman who told me it was music to his ears.

  “Later when I returned as CBF in 1990 I found that the brigade had reverted to the old defence plans. I reintroduced my original 1985 plans in the tense post-Tiananmen situation. We had one such confrontation where the Chinese after some difficulties with the Hong Kong Government in one aspect of our negotiations suddenly decided that they would not take back captured illegal immigrants. The result was a mass influx. We responded by upping our presence on the border, opening holding camps and holding the line while diplomatic exchanges continued. A few days afterwards the Chinese reverted to the old procedure and announced that they had ‘taught us a lesson’. The realities were plain enough. As Kissinger used to say, ‘There is a China card and China holds it.’”

  * * * * *

  To revert back to the situation 40 years earlier, why didn’t the British declare an ‘open city’ in 1940 in the face of the overwhelming threat posed by the highly experienced Japanese forces just beyond the border, saving many thousands of British, Canadian, Indian and Chinese lives thereby? Why take on the Japanese Army “full frontal – and escalating matters to a situation where the whole territory could possibly be laid bare…” – an option General Duffell sought to avoid, in quite different circumstances, in the 1980s?

  The Chiefs of Staff wanted the garrison to fight in 1940 because it was all a matter of Britain’s prestige. For political and moral reasons Hong Kong had to be defended. Moreover many Chinese would have been seriously discouraged from continuing their weary and interminable struggle against Japan, if Britain had lacked the courage and determination to resist and had abandoned the Colony to the mercy of the Japanese before they had even declared war. Such a sordid act of appeasement would also have shaken the neutral Americans who were then strengthening their forces in the Pacific while critically assessing Britain’s determination to fight on. The Chiefs of Staff had no wish to blatantly broadcast the extent of Britain’s military weakness not only in the Far East, but throughout the world.

  But other considerations were at play – those in Hong Kong and Singapore gradually came to believe that the Japanese Army was a second rate, contemptible force. Major General A E Grasett, Bartholomew’s successor, urged that his garrison be strengthened by one more battalion. It would enable him to defend the Mainland, he said, against Japanese incursions from the north. Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, as indicated earlier, also believed that greater robustness would defeat the Japanese.

  Grasett was a Canadian who had graduated from the Royal Military College in 1909, having won the Sword of Honour before being granted a British commission in the Royal Engineers (John Harris’s Corps). He had won the DSO and MC during the First World War after which he had attended the Staff College at Camberley and the tri-service Imperial Defence College when he and his colleagues studied the Hong Kong situation in 1934. It was remarkable how closely the exercise mirrored the actual development of events through to 1941. Their prophetic conclusion had been that the risks involved in holding Hong Kong were unjustifiable.

  Yet, strangely, Grasett throughout 1940 became convinced that the Colony was defensible, believing that the Japanese troops were vastly inferior to Westerners in training, equipment and leadership. Japan’s inability to defeat Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists in battle was put down to incompetence.

  In August 1941 Grasett was posted back to Britain, travelling via Ottawa where he held long discussions with his Royal Military College classmate, Major General H D G Crerar, Chief of the Canadian General Staff. Crerar subsequently told the Royal Commission convened in March 1942 that “Major General Grasett informed me… that the addition of two or more battalions to the forces then at Hong Kong would render the garrison strong enough to withstand for an extensive period of siege an attack by such forces as the Japanese could bring to bear against it.”5

  Grasett briefed the Chiefs of Staff on 5th September 1941 to persuade them to reverse their policy and recommend to the Prime Minister that significant reinforcements be provided.

  The existing force in Hong Kong, he argued, was quite insufficient to deter an attack, or even delay the enemy sufficiently to destroy the port and installations, while the addition of two battalions would enable a full brigade of three battalions to deploy on the Mainland, with a second brigade defending the Island from a seaward assault. In addition, the Chinese would be encouraged by confirmation that Britain and her Empire were determined to fight for their possessions in the Far East.r />
  “The Chiefs of Staff heard an interesting account on the present situation in Hong Kong from General Grasett,” read the memorandum to Winston Churchill. “He pointed out the great advantages to be derived from the addition of one or two battalions, and suggested that these might be supplied by Canada. The Chiefs of Staff have previously advised against despatch of more reinforcements to Hong Kong because they considered that it would only have been to throw good money after bad, but the position in the Far East has now changed. Our defences in Malaya have been improved and Japan has latterly shown a certain weakness in her attitude towards Great Britain and the United States …. The Chiefs of Staff are in favour of the suggestion that Canada should be asked to send one or two battalions… ”6 Some five months earlier Churchill had advocated that the isolated Hong Kong garrison be reduced to a symbolic scale: “We must avoid frittering away our resources on untenable positions,” he had argued.7 But now he was not sure whether to agree or not to the new suggestion that Hong Kong, if reinforced, could be held after all. “It is a question of timing,” he replied a week later. “There is no objection to the approach being made [to the Canadians for two battalions] as proposed; but further decisions should be taken before the battalions actually sail.”

  On 19th September the Dominion Office cabled Ottawa stating that “Approved policy has been that Hong Kong should be regarded as an outpost… a small re-enforcement of the garrison of Hong Kong, e.g. by one or two battalions, would be very fully justified. It would increase the strength of the garrison out of all proportion to the actual numbers involved and it would provide a very strong stimulus to the garrison and to the Colony, it would further have a very great moral effect in the whole of the Far East and would reassure Chiang Kai-shek as to the reality of our intent to hold the Island.”

  * * * * *

  With the benefit of hindsight, we must ask ourselves how was it that Britain’s, and in particular Hong Kong’s and Singapore’s, intelligence gathering was so bad in the months leading up to the Japanese onslaught throughout the Far East?

  Major General C M Maltby, Grasett’s successor as GOC Hong Kong, reassured by further reports from his staff of the inferior quality and material of the Japanese, and by the prospect of reinforcements from Canada, decided to deploy almost half his force forward on the Mainland. He referred in a signal to the War Office to holding the Gin Drinkers’ Line “permanently” in order to protect Kai Tak airfield, simplify civil defence problems and make possible eventual offensive operations. Maltby posed the question a month before the catastrophic defeat by the Japanese: “Is not the value of Hong Kong as a bridgehead increasing every day? Looking at the future, a complete mobile brigade group could undertake offensive operations to assist Chinese forces operating in Japanese-occupied territories.”8

  Maltby saw Hong Kong as the potential springboard for Britain, Canada and her allies to liberate South China from the Japanese. A month later in Shamshuipo prisoner of war camp, the terrible anguish and despair he felt at his defeat was so much greater because, through no fault of his own perhaps, the Japanese threat had been so misrepresented to him.

  A heavy responsibility for the misreading of the intelligence, it appears, must fall on Maltby’s senior officer, Major Charles R Boxer, arguably the most experienced Intelligence Officer in the Far East.

  Educated at Wellington College, Boxer had been commissioned in 1923 into The Lincolnshire Regiment after 18 months at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. Over the next seven years he successfully developed two careers – his military one, and secondly as an historian and author, learning Dutch, Portuguese and Japanese.

  Boxer learnt Japanese at the School of Oriental Studies at the University of London. In 1930 he undertook an additional year of intense instruction in Tokyo before being assigned to a Japanese regiment as a Military Language Officer where, it was confidently believed by the British Ambassador in Japan, Sir Robert Craigie, that the British Language Officers were in a much better position to understand the minds and ambitions of their Japanese hosts than were the ordinary British Military Attachés on his staff. In the months to come, Boxer formed lasting friendships with fellow Japanese army officers, and scholars who shared his academic interests.

  By 1931 he was serving with the 38th Nara infantry regiment at Kyoto, living with his Japanese hosts in their barracks. They ‘leased’ him a cook-concubine who saw to his needs and improved his colloquial Japanese. In mid 1933 he returned to his regiment in Yorkshire before a posting to the Intelligence division of the War Office in London.

  This then was the man who became a key member of the intelligence-gathering Far East Combined Bureau (FECB), and the GOC’s principal Intelligence Officer and Interpreter. He travelled extensively in China and became highly thought of, despite his remarkable private life. After his wife had been despatched to Australia with others, he took an American journalist and one time opium addict, Emily Hahn, as his lover, having an illegitimate child with her. As we will see, he was probably responsible for one of the most erroneous signals ever sent on the eve of battle to the War Office.

  The other important Intelligence Officer in Hong Kong was Flight Lieutenant H T ‘Alf’ Bennett, also a Japanese linguist.

  In September 1990 I was running a major two-day battlefield tour for British Servicemen in Hong Kong. While waiting to be taken by helicopter for a reconnaissance of the Shingmun Redoubt with veterans of the campaign, Bennett approached me unexpectedly. “You should be aware why the intelligence was so bad before the war,” he told me. “It was the fault of the British Ambassador’s staff in Tokyo. They had been there much too long, and had become complacent, some marrying Japanese. Confined to restricted areas of Japan, they were fed false intelligence by Japanese agents. And so it was that we were misled.”

  Sir Sydney Giffard, who served four tours with the Foreign Office in Japan between 1952 and 1980 ending up as the Ambassador, disagrees with Bennett’s assessment “because it had been clear to experienced observers for many years (since the Manchurian Incident and the murder of Prime Minister Inukai) that the Japanese Government was coming under increasing pressure from extreme nationalist elements, especially in the army, bent on expansion in China and against Western interests in Asia”.

  There is no evidence that the British staff had been in Tokyo too long before the war.

  Major General Maltby found it easy to blame the Embassy in Tokyo. He stated in his post war report that the civil defence plan was not fully implemented before Japan’s invasion because of “the belief that Japan was bluffing… the true gravity of the state of affairs was not reflected in the Embassy despatches from Tokyo.”9 Yet the British and American Ambassadors were giving London and Washington grim warnings of impending Japanese operations, and at least one British Military Attaché in Tokyo from 1938, Colonel G T Wards, had accurate views. He was another Japanese linguist who, like Boxer, had been attached to a Japanese regiment. Lecturing to the officers in Singapore in April 1941, he had emphasised the excellent morale and thorough training of the Japanese, condemning the common belief that they would be no match for British soldiers. However, the senior officer present vehemently disagreed, announcing that Wards’ views were “far from the truth” and “in no way a correct appreciation of the situation”.10

  Whether Alf Bennett was right to blame the Military Attachés in Tokyo is therefore highly questionable. Both he and Boxer were frequently across the border in China with their Japanese friends. Surely they were in a good position to discover what was going on?

  Just as Prime Minister Blair and President Bush were seemingly misled, it would appear, by their Intelligence and Secret Service Officers before the 2003 Iraqi war on the question of Weapons of Mass Destruction, so General Maltby must, it appears, have been ill informed by his senior staff responsible for advising him on Japanese intentions and capabilities. Nobody in Hong Kong knew what the Japanese were up to. They were soon to find out.

  Notes

 
1. File 106/2375, Public Record Office (now the National Archives), London.

  2. PRO CAB 80/15, COS (40) 592 (revise), dated 15th August 1940.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Elphick, Peter, Far Eastern File: The Intelligence War in the Far East, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1997, p. 256.

  5. Duff, Sir Lyman P, Report on the Canadian Expeditionary Force to the Crown Colony of Hong Kong, Ottawa, 1942, p. 14.

  6. Memo Mr Hollis to the PM, dated 10.9.41 (PRO).

  7. Churchill, W S, The Grand Alliance, London: Cassell, 1950, p. 157.

  8. File 106/2400 signal 1488, dated 27.11.41 (PRO).

  9. Operations in Hong Kong from 8th to 25th December 1941, supplement to the London Gazette, 27.1.48.

  10. Kirby, S Woodburn, Singapore: the Chain of Disaster, London: Cassell, 1971, pp. 74–5.

  CHAPTER 7

  Battle Stations

  Major General C M Maltby arrived in Hong Kong in July 1941. The GOC had gained useful experience fighting the Pathans on India’s northwest frontier. “He was fit, wiry and lightly-built, rather bowlegged with a slightly rolling gait. His blue eyes could be very kindly or very frosty, always betraying the mood he was in,” remembers his ADC, Captain Iain MacGregor Royal Scots. “His hair, cut very short, was sandy tinged with grey. He had a trim moustache and a complexion like the mellowed red brick of an Elizabethan English country house. He was not amused by caustic or esoteric wit; never by smut. He was almost a British caricature in some ways.”1