The Battle for Hong Kong 1941-1945

by Oliver Lindsay

  Another British officer also saw the charge. (He was possibly 2nd Lieutenant R H Challoner of the Hong Kong and Singapore Royal Artillery.) He recalled “the last glorious charge of the Canadians, up through the graveyard and into the windows of the bungalows up at the top. We saw the Japanese escaping through the back of the houses, and then return with grenades which they lobbed among the Canadians in occupation. Very few of the Canadians survived that gallant charge.”

  Twenty-six Canadians were killed and 75 wounded in that attack; fewer than a dozen came back unharmed. The company had been virtually wiped out in an attack that was doomed to fail, states their Regimental and other histories.

  “Meanwhile, Wallis – who really seems to have lost his senses by this point and entered into some kind of maniacal frenzy – had ordered Home to send yet another company on yet another counter-attack up through the main road through Stanley village… ” states a Canadian historian.7 They advanced through a heavy artillery barrage which quickly cut down 18 men, six of whom were killed. By now the rest of the garrison in the north had surrendered but Wallis was unaware of this. At this point he was “considering blowing up the fort by detonating the magazine should the enemy penetrate into the whole fort area. Survivors would, if time permitted, join the wounded elsewhere. This matter was a last resort and kept secret,” states the War Diary.

  The end of the slaughter then occurred. At about 8.00 p.m. a car arrived at Stanley Fort carrying a white flag. It contained Lieutenant Colonel R G Lamb from the Royal Engineers Fortress HQ staff. He was accompanied by Lieutenant J T Prior, King’s Own Scottish Borderers, from the operations branch. Wallis knew Lamb and had spoken on the telephone to him over the last three days.

  Lamb and Prior informed Wallis that General Maltby had told the Governor that further resistance was impossible, “that H.E. the Governor, the GOC and several senior officers had gone to Japanese HQs to negotiate. They said my orders were to surrender and hand over all arms and equipment without destruction.”

  This surely was the moment for Wallis to do just that. He knew that hundreds of men were scattered over the countryside dying of their wounds and thirst. He knew that women and children had been abandoned at the Repulse Bay Hotel and were unaccounted for. He knew that nurses and medical staff were close by at St Stephen’s College and were extremely vulnerable. (In fact, four Chinese nurses and three British had already been raped and murdered there early that morning; many wounded soldiers in bed had been bayoneted and the British doctors shot and “bayoneted dozens of times as they lay on the ground”.)

  Those defending Stanley Fort, Wallis knew, were short of ammunition and had been on short rations of food for several days; water was minimal and everyone was exhausted.

  Yet what was Wallis’s reaction to General Maltby’s categorical order, relayed verbally by Lamb, to surrender? “After careful consideration, I decided I could not surrender when this action seemed to me to be locally unwarranted, without written confirmation,” wrote Wallis, who sent his Brigade Major, H Harland, to obtain the orders to surrender in writing. The Japanese resumed shelling the fort at point blank range and fired machine guns at the defences.

  At last, at 2.30 a.m. on 26th December, Major Harland returned with the orders in writing. Wallis at last ordered the white flag to be hoisted and the cease-fire. For many of the wounded, amidst the hills and gulleys, it was too late. The ‘missing in action’ columns in the military cemeteries testify to that.

  * * * * *

  In 1977, 36 years after the above events, I asked Brigadier Wallis why he did not surrender earlier. He replied that waiting for reliable orders “delayed the enemy an extra day and delayed the departure for Malaya of quite a number of enemy troops”.

  We can see how ludicrous this explanation is. As Major General J N Kennedy, the Director of Military Operations in the War Office, had pointed out to Alanbrooke, resistance in Hong Kong would not prevent concurrent Japanese advances elsewhere. (Moreover the Japanese involved were destined for the south and not for Malaya.)

  The crucial point is that the slaughter of many fine Canadian soldiers could not possibly be justified in such circumstances. Dying to capture a few bungalows at Stanley, in the final moments of the fall of Hong Kong, is the ultimate disaster of the short campaign.

  Notes

  1. Letter MacGregor to author.

  2. File 106/2420 A (PRO).

  3. War Diary, p. 68.

  4. Montagu-Douglas-Scott, C A, ‘Tunisia 1943: A Battalion Commander’s Viewpoint’ in The Guards Magazine, Winter 2004/5, p. 237.

  5. War Diary, p. 84.

  6. The Royal Rifles of Canada in Hong Kong, Quebec: Hong Kong Veterans’ Association of Canada, 1980, p. 85.

  7. Greenhous, B, “C” Force to Hong Kong: A Canadian Catastrophe 1941–1945, Canadian War Museum Historical Publication No. 30, 1997, p. 96.

  CHAPTER 15

  Truth is the First

  Casualty in War

  To anticipate events, on 18th April 1942, almost five months after the surrender, most British officers were moved into the Argyle Street prisoner of war camp on the Mainland.

  Compiling an official account of the units’ performance in the war became all important. Bill Wiseman, the Royal Army Service Corps Captain who had lost his leg when a schoolboy, wrote: “When I arrived, there seemed to be a tremendous amount of scribbling and typing going on. It appeared that the General wanted to write his dispatch and had called for War Diaries. Before long I even got involved, having to write an account of the Island Vehicle Collecting Centre, and then to re-write it to comply with Commander RASC’s ideas on how it ought to have been operated! All this near history bred so much ill will and bad blood that General Maltby decided to clear the air by expounding his views on the fighting in the Commodore’s ‘garden’.

  “I went with Charles Boxer who had recently been transferred from Bowen Road Hospital. The place was overflowing and the crowd had attracted quite a few Nips including several NCOs. Charles nearly had a fit when the General started ‘At 4.45 a.m. on 8th December when Major Boxer had decoded…’”

  * * * * *

  Three questions were posed at the beginning of Chapter 8 – first, was it appropriate that the Canadians should be so severely criticised in the first draft of the Official History? Montgomery had to intervene to remove much of the criticism. Secondly, can credible new evidence be produced, 64 years after the battle, to convince the reader of this book, however sceptical, that grave injustices on soldiers’ reputations have been committed? And thirdly, was it fair that one of the two British Regiments should be denied the coveted Battle Honour ‘Hong Kong’?

  * * * * *

  A retired officer, who was the editor of a distinguished Corps’ regimental journal, told a meeting of other Service editors in London in the early 1990s that “discretion and sensitivity is the order of the day; nothing derogatory should be published; our job is to be the guardians of our units’ reputations…” I told him that such a view is rubbish. Just as truth is the first casualty in war, so most Service editors prefer to see their role as being to present facts, not tactful fiction.

  How is a Regimental History, written in recent years, best tackled? Regimental Trustees may start by appointing an elderly military historian who never served in the Regiment. He laboriously copies out bits and pieces, seldom having the energy to tour the country to interview sufficient people. The Trustees may well reject his manuscript as an expensive failure and appoint a serving or recently retired regimental officer instead – to be overseen by a group of senior, elderly retired officers. They meet infrequently over gin and tonics; each in turn may demand in all perhaps 50 cuts. “Oh, of course it’s true, yes,” they will agree, “but we can’t have the press knowing about that, can we?” In Britain, a serving or retired serviceman or woman signs a certificate, on retiring from the Forces, stating that he or she will first clear with the MOD anything written on Service matters. The MOD may end up by asking for anot
her 50 changes (some, but certainly not all, with good reason).

  By now the author is beside himself with frustration. One was so angry with the cuts that he refused to have his name associated with his work, because a ‘squeaky-clean, second to none’ type regimental history is extraordinarily boring; it will not catch the eye of reviewers; few outside the regimental circle will know or care that the book exists. The Regimental Trustees may decide instead on an admirable, flashy, coffee-table type history with lots of photographs, a few good captions and very little else because 300 years have to be squeezed into 200 pages.

  There are, of course, exceptions. To give two examples, the Regimental History of the Royal Scots, published in 2001, is certainly a much welcomed ‘warts and all’ type history. It is of interest that A Muir, writing the 1961 version, did not include embarrassing detail – for example the account of Private Wyllie locking three of his officers in the observation post at the climax of the battle at the Shingmun Redoubt.

  Another exception is the post-war 1945–1995 history of the Grenadier Guards. Detail is included on 40 reservists who marched on the Officers’ Mess in Malta in 1956 to protest; and a few years earlier in North Africa three other reservists purposely dropped their rifles on a parade, also as a form of protest – all because they wanted to go home! I am conscious of making quite a few references to the Grenadier Guards: I do so because I am familiar with the facts, having served with them for 35 years. (Moreover, the Winnipeg Grenadiers before the war had some things in common with the Regiment.)

  * * * * *

  Newly released files show how Whitehall vetoed former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s proposed memoirs, the April 2005 edition of History Magazine reveals. The passage, written in 1970, which most disturbed the Ministry of Defence was the negotiation of an Anglo-American agreement jointly to defend Hong Kong in the event of a Chinese attack. Macmillan reluctantly ‘modified’ his memoirs, omitting this and other important passages.

  Will the Freedom of Information Act enable the truth to be known about important political or military matters which hitherto have been kept secret, quite needlessly? Apparently Government departments have been shredding record numbers of official files in the months leading up to the enforcement of the Act, which empowers any member of the public to apply to see secret files. The increase in the destruction rates in one department is 500 per cent. A culture of evasion leads to the destruction of evidence, to avoid coping with an era of openness.

  Then there’s another problem: “Up to 10 million pages of vital military secrets have been rendered unusable by exposure to asbestos,” states a report. “The contamination threatens the operation of the Act. The 63,000 files include the official versions of events such as the sinking of the Belgrano in 1982 and the killing of IRA terrorists in Gibraltar by the SAS in 1988.” According to Professor Matthew Jones of Nottingham University, “These files are irreplaceable records of this nation’s defence and foreign policy during the 20th century.”

  Incidentally, on the subject of the Belgrano, immediately after the Falklands War a small group, led by an Under Secretary of State, was sent to Australia and New Zealand to lecture the Governments’ Cabinets and senior officers on lessons learnt during the war. We took considerable trouble to clear scripts with the three Services to ensure they were true. Yet we were fed at least one factual error; for example I was astonished to discover years later that the Belgrano had been sailing away from the Falklands exclusion zone, and not towards it as we had said.

  I fear that the first book I wrote in 1978 contained some factual errors and wrong inferences, partly because I was then relying on a very elderly and prejudiced veteran’s memory.

  * * * * *

  In 1942 officers in Hong Kong were inevitably and understandably anxious that their regiments and corps would be shown in the best possible light. Eventual promotion, decorations and certainly their reputations might depend upon it. They had, after all, plenty of time in the POW camps to write and rewrite their accounts. Most if not all the War Diaries, like the ciphers, had been destroyed in the final days before the surrender, to prevent the Japanese capturing them. The memory of some people, exhausted during the fighting, had to form the basis for their memories on “uncertain recollections of those who survived, some assembled during a malevolent captivity, some in the immediate aftermath of war, others long afterwards from memories embittered by injustice, embellished by time, or embroidered by both,” as Brereton Greenhous put it so admirably.1 Japanese records are not much help. Much of their original documentation stored in Tokyo was destroyed by bombing later in the war.

  So how accurate is Maltby’s Official Report? “Have finished first draft of story of war in Hong Kong – great labour – much counter checking still to be done though, and gaps filled,” wrote Colonel Newnham, the General’s principal operations officer on 24th March 1942 in tiny writing on tissue paper. By 10th May the Report was finished.

  It may seem extraordinary, but Maltby and Newnham had to compile the Report without consulting either of the two Brigade Commanders – Lawson had been killed in action; Wallis had been in Bowen Road Hospital for skin grafts as he was injured while on a forward reconnaissance towards Repulse Bay and the wound would not heal. When discharged from hospital on 11th April to Shamshuipo Camp and then a week later to Argyle Street, Wallis shared a room with both Maltby and Newnham. He felt “that the General and staff felt they knew all that there was worth knowing and that any account I might have was not needed to complete the picture. They also knew I was writing the War Diaries as I had many visits from various Commanding Officers and I told them both what I was doing. I gave my completed diaries to Newnham for perusal and to Maltby for information. I don’t think either read them; Maltby was unprepared to amend his own account.”

  The General’s official record of the war was buried in the camp’s grounds to prevent the Japanese finding it. It was recovered after the war.

  How reliable were Wallis’s War Diaries? The Canadians had moved to North Point Camp and so he was not able to consult them. Moreover, during the fighting on the Mainland all his dealings with the Royal Scots were by telephone, before he moved from his Headquarters northeast of Kowloon to Devil’s Peak in the southeast.

  Wallis carried with him his two War Diaries throughout his imprisonment. They amounted to over 220 pages of manuscript. He hid them in the false bottom of a wooden box which he made for that purpose. He kept “personal clothing (rags?!) on top. I always saw to it that at its apparent bottom, the Japs would find a map, some foreign currency or a tool, or something that I was not supposed to have. Once they spotted any such item, I got them engaged in a big argument and sometimes got my face slapped and they would confiscate the offending item and not search further.”

  It is possible that Wallis did not hand his diaries in to the War Office until July 1948. They seem to have attracted some attention then, because the Colonel of the Middlesex Regiment wrote to him asking for evidence of how well his Battalion had done. Maltby’s Report, published in January 1948, did not make any reference to Wallis’s account and so obviously did not mention, to Wallis’s anger, that he had held out at Stanley for 11 hours after the General’s surrender.

  In any event, regrettably, no attention seems to have been paid to Wallis’s recommendations for decorations. He had written a citation in the War Diary strongly recommending a Victoria Cross for Major H R Forsyth of the Volunteers, but Forsyth ended up with nothing, not even a posthumous Mention in Despatches.

  Long after the war, Wallis was living in Vancouver and wanted Canadian citizenship and so kept a low profile on his highly critical report on the Canadians for fear of not getting both citizenship and a Canadian pension.

  Despite doubts on the reliability of both Maltby’s and Wallis’s Reports and Diaries, some references in the latter stand out – particularly Wallis’s writing about shooting the Canadian officers who wished to surrender – clearly indicating his mental instabilit
y at that time. Such references have never been quoted before, although 64 years have elapsed in the meantime.

  Neither the Royal Scots nor, very clearly, the Canadians trusted his judgement. We should respect their views: their reputations were tragically maligned.

  Maltby submitted his Report to the War Office in November 1945 – to be published in the official London Gazette in early 1946. But Canadians protested over its critical comments. Field Marshal Montgomery intervened and had the offending paragraphs removed; the Report, as already stated, was not published until 29th January 1948. Maltby, to do him justice, admitted that “memory is a fickle jade” and his Report could be faulty. Moreover, he had not seen Wallis’s War Diaries or expressed interest in them; nor had he ever seen the Canadians or Royal Scots in action throughout the fighting.

  * * * * *

  The views of the Canadian author, Carl Vincent, should be briefly examined. In his book No Reason Why he states: “It is a very conservative estimate to say that at least half the Japanese casualties were incurred in battles against Canadian troops… the Royal Rifles executed more counter-attacks at company level or above than the British and Indian battalions combined… Maltby’s staff suffered heavy casualties during the battle, largely because of this incredible lack of caution… ”2

  The reader can judge for himself the fairness or otherwise of these statements. Taking his comments in (my) italics, it is not in dispute that the Japanese suffered considerable casualties on the Mainland from Allied artillery, mortars, HMS Thracian and the three forward battalions, in particular the Royal Scots. No Canadian actually participated in the fighting there. When the Royal Rifles were withdrawn to Stanley Fort, at their officers’ request to surrender, the front line was held by others. And so the statement that Canadians caused half the overall Japanese casualties is highly suspect.