The Battle for Hong Kong 1941-1945

by Oliver Lindsay

  On 24th October 1942 China-based aircraft of the American 14th Air Force bombed selected targets, returning the two following days to drop incendiary bombs. This was tangible evidence that the tide was turning. Our morale soared.

  The leading American bomber carried B A Proulx, a Canadian who had escaped through a sewer from North Point Camp. He had made contact with General C L Chennault and briefed the American pilots on the location of the POW camps. We did not know that the next raid would not be for another 10 months, after which they averaged almost one a month. We were not allowed to dig air-raid shelters. In Shamshuipo Camp we knew that some oil drums containing high-grade aviation gasoline were stored in pits within the camp’s perimeter. The Japanese optimistically left the drums there, confident that the Allies would not bomb their own men.

  The excitement of the bombing raid had not diminished when a small miracle occurred. On 1st November 1942 Red Cross parcels were delivered to the camps. “Oh brother!” wrote G White of the Royal Army Service Corps. “We all went crazy – talk about kids at a Christmas tree, nothing to the way we danced round here.”

  As another POW put it in November: “We were amazed to receive the shipment of foodstuffs. Bully beef, cigarettes, jam, meat and vegetable rations, cocoa, dried fruit, sugar and clothing. This changed the whole picture. We now had reason to hope that these shipments might be repeated and that we stood a good chance of surviving. We did not allow our optimism to govern our judgement and we doled out the foodstuffs very carefully, enough to bring the calorific value up to about 2,800 calories, with a protein content from all sources of about 70 grammes. In this way we managed to spin out this supply of food for some 15 months. It was just as well that we did for never again did we get such a shipment.”

  According to Captain J L Flynn, working parties were very occasionally provided with a lorry enabling the POWs to loot warehouses and the private houses formerly occupied by Europeans.

  As Christmas 1942 and the first anniversary of our imprisonment approached, it would be silly to pretend we had anything other than deep forebodings as to the future. The Japanese had told us of endless British and American defeats: the loss of the bases in the Far East, nasty setbacks in the Middle East including North Africa and the fall of Tobruk, the Mediterranean largely closed to us, the Germans having the Russians on the run – naturally we didn’t know what to believe.

  We undoubtedly had traitors in our midst. Maltby and Wallis discussed what to do with one suspect who was believed to be informing the Japanese on us. “We considered whether I should walk round the camp with him on the exercise circuit and accidentally see to it that he fell into the live wires,” wrote Brigadier Wallis. A doctor planned a more sinister death for the traitor. “We decided against any such action, feeling that in the end God would bring him to his just deserts.”9

  Lieutenant Tanaka Hitoshi, a guard at Shamshuipo, received a message from a POW that a certain hut should be watched as a particular officer was planning to escape. The message had been attached to a slate and hung in the guard’s office. The Japanese watched the hut before accusing Lieutenant Hyland of being the potential escaper; he admitted that this had been the case and agreed not to do so. This incident was related at the trial of Colonel Tokunaga in January 1947.

  Suddenly the Japanese started sending shiploads of us to Japan to work, we assumed correctly, as slave labour in conditions which were doubtless even worse than those which were killing some of us in Hong Kong.

  Notes

  1. Interview Lt Col. P K Betty/Brig. C Bullock, 11.3.04, quoted in The Simouree, Winter 2004/5, p. 48.

  2. Greenhous, B, “C” Force to Hong Kong: A Canadian Catastrophe 1941–1945, Canadian War Museum Historical Publication No. 30, 1997, p. 122.

  3. Letter Wallis to OL.

  4. Townsville Sun, November 1976.

  5. Bowie, D C, ‘Captive Surgeon in Hong Kong’, Journal of the HK Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, March 1977, Vol. 15, p. 173.

  6. FO 9/6 761 HN 00649.

  7. The Hong Kong News, 15.7.42, 4.9.42 and 28.10.42.

  8. South China Morning Post, 17.9.45, interview with C D W Man.

  9. Letter Wallis to OL.

  CHAPTER 18

  The Sinking of the

  Lisbon Maru

  “In September 1942 Japanese soldiers arrived in Shamshuipo Camp, leant their rifles against a wall, donned white coats and medically examined us,” recalls Lance Corporal A J Taylor of the Hong Kong Signal Company. “They wanted to be sure that no disease should be carried to the graceful land of the rising sun. Each POW was inoculated and his anus probed with a glass tube. It was rumoured that the inoculations were to sterilise one, and so some avoided the draft, leaving others who were less fit to make up the numbers.”1

  The first draft of 700 POWs left for Japan in early September. On 25th September POWs were paraded in Shamshuipo and Argyle Street to be selected or otherwise for the second draft. Men on my immediate left and right were called forward. Why wasn’t I chosen, I wondered? Perhaps because I looked a bit weedy in those days? The Japanese would give no indication of the draft’s destination; there was just a vague promise that the climate would be better.

  Two days later 1,816 British POWs left Hong Kong in a 7,000-ton freighter, the Lisbon Maru. Lieutenant Colonel H W M Stewart OBE MC, the Commanding Officer of 1st Battalion the Middlesex Regiment, commanded the POWs despite being sick with pellagra and malnutrition. His batman carried a wooden box-like stool. Rumour had it that a wireless set was in the box, which was the only object never searched.

  The Royal Navy POWs were squeezed into hold No. 1 nearest the bows, the Middlesex and Royal Scots in the middle hold No. 2, and the Royal Artillery in the stern in No 3. The ship also carried 800 Japanese troops. She had only four lifeboats and six life rafts, two of which were for the POWs. Half the POWs had life jackets.

  Food was good by Shamshuipo standards, from where most of the POWs had been chosen. The sun shone and the nights were warm. Prisoners were sometimes allowed on deck for fresh air and exercise; those who resembled prematurely old men began to get a touch of colour in their cheeks. But the filth and slime in the holds from those who were too weak to get up and wash themselves was terrible.

  Dr Selwyn-Clarke had warned the British Consul in Macao that POWs were on the Lisbon Maru, which carried no markings indicating that they were on board. Almost 12 weeks earlier, on 1st July 1942, the American submarine USS Sturgeon had sunk the Japanese Montevideo Maru. Of the 1,053 Australian soldiers and 200 civilians battened down below decks, none survived.

  At 7.04 a.m. on 1st October USS Grouper of the Pacific Fleet Submarine Force began her approach off the coast of Shanghai to the Lisbon Maru. Her first three torpedoes, fired at 3,200 yards, missed. The fourth led to a loud explosion. There were no casualties on the ship and some POWs assumed there had been an internal explosion in the engine room. Grouper was commanded by Lieutenant Commander Rob Roy McGregor. The submarine came under fire: “Sharp explosions all around us,” noted the Commanding Officer, whose last two torpedoes, fired at 1,000 yards, also missed.2 The American torpedoes early in the war malfunctioned; the heavier operational warheads ran well below the depth of the training heads. The faults were not fully recognised for a further year.

  The POWs listened to the explosion of depth charges and a Japanese light bomber patrolling overhead. It was the beginning of a long and increasingly anxious day because the ship was slowly listing. The Japanese pulled heavy tarpaulins over the hatches, thereby sealing the POWs down and preventing fresh air reaching them.

  Colonel Stewart shouted to everyone in his middle hold to be quiet. He told them what he thought had happened and asked for silence so he could appeal to the Japanese. The stench of those who could no longer use the wooden latrines on deck was asphyxiating.

  Tapping on the bulkhead from No. 1 hold indicated that two diphtheria patients had died and there was no way of escaping. Meanwhile the sea was entering the third ho
ld. Gunners working on the pumps quickly lost consciousness owing to the heat and lack of air. At 5.00 p.m. the Japanese destroyer Kure took off the 800 Japanese troops, leaving only the crew and 25 guards under Lieutenant Wada, and the ship’s Captain, Kyoda Shigeru, who pointed out that the POWs were likely to drown. Wada replied that the Master of the ship had no authority to interfere. At 9.00 p.m. the heavy hatches were closed over the holds. Attempts were made to tow the Lisbon Maru towards Shanghai but the towline was heard to snap.

  The heat in the holds was terrific. The night was made more hideous by the curses and the moans of the sick, some of whom were calling for the padre. Everyone was told to lie quietly, stop talking and try to sleep to conserve air and strength.

  By 9.00 a.m. on 2nd October, over 24 hours after the torpedoing, the air in the holds was dangerously foul; it was obvious that the men could not survive much longer. Captain Kyoda Shigeru knew that the ship was in imminent danger of sinking. All the Japanese, less five guards, were taken off leaving the POWs to drown.

  Colonel Stewart ordered Lieutenant W M Howell, Royal Army Service Corps, to make a second attempt to make a hole in the hatch covers, using a long butcher’s knife which Private Speight HKVDC had smuggled into the ship.3 With a great effort, he forced his knife between the baulks of timber, slit the tarpaulin, forced up one of the timbers and climbed through the gap. He and Lieutenant Potter who followed him saw POWs from No. 3 hold struggling to get out through the portholes on the well deck. Howell opened the bulkhead to release them.

  The Japanese guards on the bridge opened fire at the hole in the hatch, killing one man who was just emerging. Potter was also killed.

  The Lisbon Maru suddenly gave a fearful lurch; water gushed in through the first opening in the hatch. “Wild panic ensued,” remembers Lance Corporal Taylor. “Within seconds the ladders to the second deck were a mass of writhing, struggling bodies.” Order was quickly restored and the men formed up into long queues at the stairway and ladders. Water poured into No. 2 hold; there seemed little hope of getting out in time. In the dim light which filtered through, Captain N H Cuthbertson, Adjutant of the Royal Scots, carefully put on his glengarry: he said that he preferred to meet his God properly dressed.

  The ship went down by the stern but by good fortune the water was shallow and the stern rested on a sandbank while the bows remained clear of the water. Many of those in No. 3 hold drowned before they could get out.4

  Hundreds of men took to the sea; a swift current was running westwards towards some islands four miles away; they looked rocky and dangerous. Four Japanese auxiliary transport boats were slowly circling the Lisbon Maru shooting at the POWs in the water. Taylor, still on deck, made two rafts from ammunition boxes and planks for the non-swimmers. Just as he was wondering how to launch them, there was a muffled explosion and the ship sank instantly, sucking many down with her.

  The Japanese at last started to pick up survivors, possibly because some POWs were seen to have reached the Islands and might live to say what had happened. Indeed Howell was among the first to do so. The Sing Pang Islands are in the Chusan Archipelago off the Chekiang province. Howell spoke a Shanghai dialect and explained to the villagers that the numerous heads in the water were British prisoners and not Japanese, whose fate the Chinese villagers had been cheerfully contemplating. The villagers immediately set off in junks and sampans and rescued about 200. Many other POWs were unable to obtain a footing and were swept past the Islands before drowning.

  The Chinese fed and clothed the POWs before the Japanese landed on the Islands the following morning. The Chinese males then put on their militia uniforms of the Wang Chai Wan, Japan’s puppet leader in the territory conquered by Japan.

  Japanese Marines rounded up the POWs, making them return most of the clothing given to them by the villagers. On board one of the Japanese ships, the body of a POW who died was tossed overboard without a hint of humanity, while on another ship Company Sergeant Major E J Soden of the Middlesex remembers that they were treated very well. “The Japanese said that they had been trained by our Navy and fed us well, giving full military honours to those who died.”5

  The survivors of the Lisbon Maru reached Shanghai on 5th October. Out of 1,816 POWs, 843 had been shot in the water or drowned. Two weeks later the Japan Times Weekly claimed the Japanese had done their utmost to save the POWs following the sinking of the ship by the Americans.

  The dependants in Britain and Australia of those who had died quickly received a lower scale of allowance as their husbands were missing. The internees at Stanley learnt of the “atrocities by Americans” but had no information for 18 months about who had died.

  Fortunately, thanks to the villagers of Woo Tung-Ling on the Sing Pang Islands, a civilian called A J W Evans, Warrant Officer J C Fallace and W C Johnstone (both of HKRNVR) survived. They were led to Free China by guerrillas from neighbouring islands; their statements reached the Foreign Office in January 1943.6 The Swiss Government was asked to communicate the true facts to the Japanese, based on the first-hand evidence of the three escapees. “The treatment of the prisoners amounts to flagrant violation of the customs and usage of war…” read the British Government demand for a full investigation. In November 1943 the Japanese replied that the British should be grateful for 900 prisoners being rescued.

  The responsible officers were brought to trial in Hong Kong in 1947, as will be related. However for many POWs it was too late; they were so weakened by their treatment that 244 died during their first year in Japan. Among the dead was Lieutenant Colonel Stewart. Thus, of the original 1,816 POWs only 724 survived.

  * * * * *

  A further 2,000 POWs including 1,184 Canadians were sent from Hong Kong in 1943. The Japanese split up the British, American, Australian, Dutch and Canadian POWs in Japan among 120 camps, making them work in shipyards, docks, mines, quarries and factories. There were 250 more POW camps in Burma, Malaya, Borneo and the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, Thailand, Indo-China, the Philippines and Hong Kong.

  Conditions in the camps varied considerably. Some POWs were treated as slave labour, just as the Germans treated some of their captives in Nazi Germany in 1941–1945.

  The POWs who worked in semi-darkness in mines faced a constant danger of being entombed by landslides. The more fortunate worked in the docks; they suffered less, partly thanks to their ingenuity in stealing food.

  CSM E J Soden was sent to Kobe near Osaka, where many died through lack of proper medical treatment – so many that the bodies were squeezed into an apple barrel before they were cremated. “I still get a lump in my throat when I hear the song Roll out the Barrel. After a few months I was sent in groups of 20 to work in the docks,” he wrote. “It was of paramount importance to steal food, particularly for the sick. When I was unloading from a cold-storage depot, one of the lads hid a large frozen fish between his legs; it was held in place by string. This caused much amusement among the guards who searched him. Feeling the fish, they mistook it for his penis, shouting ‘Oki Jimpo’, meaning ‘big cock.’” On another occasion the POWs there noticed a Japanese making a hot bran and oat mash for his horse. He left it to cook, and on his return found the container full of water. His bewilderment was watched at a discreet distance by well-satisfied POWs.

  The POWs became increasingly vulnerable to American bombers; some were near both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  At Camp 17 the Japanese displayed a regulation which read:

  It is forbid to plot to kill the Commandant.

  (Penalty: Shoot-ted to death and life imprison.)

  It shall be forbid to steal of Japanese Army.

  (Penalty: The heavy punish, life not assured.)

  All prisoners shall take care of their health.

  * * * * *

  Naturally those of us left in Hong Kong had no knowledge of the utter despair faced by some of the POWs sent to Japan. The physical exhaustion from 11 hours per day breaking up pig iron, for example, was a terrible challenge. “But not a
ll the Japanese were cruel and unjust,” remembers Corporal H F Linge of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps who recalls seeing at a station near Osaka the strange sight of Japanese women and children dressed in brightly coloured kimonos and wooden clogs watching the prisoners. They showed no animosity.

  Notes

  1. Interview Taylor with OL.

  2. Hamilton, G C, The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru, Hong Kong: Green Pagoda Press, 1966.

  3. Article in The Thistle (Regimental Journal of the Royal Scots), April 1946.

  4. RN Archives Adm 199 1286 HN 00493, p. 188.

  5. Letter CSM Soden to OL.

  6. Report 29.12.42, British Embassy Kukong to Foreign Office, CO 980 67 HN 00649.

  CHAPTER 19

  Operations Most Secret

  In March 1943 I was a member of a working party in Argyle Street POW camp unloading firewood from an old lorry which came into the camp on a regular basis. I was in Hut No. 3 and it was our hut’s turn to be on duty to empty it. Suddenly the Chinese driver gave a cough and tossed over his shoulder a crumpled, empty cigarette packet on to the vehicle’s floor, immediately behind the driving seat. I swept the packet up with the bark chippings out of the back of the lorry. I had to be very careful as a Jap sentry was only four feet at most from the driver.

  Six guards were turned out whenever a supply lorry came into the camp. On one occasion the truck was not promptly unloaded by the POWs and so it immediately drove out again amidst laughter from the Japanese guards. Therefore we had to be on duty awaiting the vehicle’s arrival.

  After the lorry had left I picked up the cigarette packet very excitedly and took it to the latrines. Behind a screen there, I unfolded the paper but found it blank. I immediately took it to Colonel Newnham, Maltby’s principal operations officer. I knew him well. Indeed, I regarded him as a good friend although I was very junior; we regularly played chess together. Newnham was clearly delighted by this unexpected development. We went together to the cookhouse. He held up the paper from the cigarette packet in front of a charcoal fire. We saw a message appear. Colonel Newnham showed no emotion. Apparently he had been waiting for over a year for these messages to reach him in Argyle Street. I did not know that messages had already reached the camp in Shamshuipo.