A Time of Tyrants

by Trevor Royle

  The order to surrender was given on 15 February, and the remaining members of the Plymouth Argylls were marched into captivity in Changi Prison. Led by Piper Charles Stuart, they marched along streets lined by hundreds of Allied soldiers who, to salute their courage during those last desperate days of fighting, stood to attention as they passed. In his report, Field Marshal Sir Archibald Wavell added his own words of praise: ‘There was one battalion – a battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders – commanded by a remarkable commanding officer – which he trained most intensively in jungle fighting. There was no doubt whatever that this battalion was as good as and better than any of the Japanese, and naturally this battalion did quite magnificent work until they were practically wiped out in the battle of the Slim River on 8 January after a gallant fight.’19

  Some of the survivors managed to escape on board naval vessels or Chinese junks – fifty-two Argylls and twenty-two marines made it to Ceylon; amongst their number was Colonel Stewart, who had been unwillingly evacuated and was later promoted to command 144 Infantry Brigade. Of those who went into captivity many were sent to work on the notorious Burma Road railway in Thailand. All told, the Argylls suffered 244 casualties killed in action, and 184 as a result of disease and deprivation while in Japanese captivity. Astonishingly, two soldiers in the battalion remained at large in Malaya where they helped to train Malay and Chinese resistance fighters.

  For the rest of the Singapore garrison, ahead lay a season in hell as they went into Japanese captivity and slave labour. Amongst them was 2nd Gordons which had mounted a counter-attack at Bukit Timah village near the Alexandra Barracks before being forced to give up the unequal fight against superior numbers. With them went 14,000 Australian, 16,000 British and 32,000 Indian troops. Ahead lay long and painful years of slave labour on the Burma-Siam railway where the sickness rate and death rate quickly soared although, with a touch of regimental pride, the Gordons’ war historian noted that ‘in the Highlander abode a tough pride – almost arrogance – which no indignity devised by an Asiatic could subdue.’20 In his memoirs Alistair Urquhart provides chilling descriptions of the barbarities inflicted by the Japanese as they took control of the city. While marching into captivity in the notorious Changi prison the men of the Gordons were confronted with ‘a thicket of severed Chinese heads speared on poles on both sides of the road.’ Broken bodies bore witness to massacres where people had been machine-gunned at will, and every scene spoke of devastation.21 During the Singapore operations and the years in captivity 2nd Gordons lost 380 officers and men; their sacrifice is remembered on a memorial plaque in the Presbyterian Church in Singapore. Amongst those who eventually returned home after the war was Urquhart who survived the Burma railway, as well as being torpedoed while being transported to Japan as a slave labourer.

  Equally devastating was the retreat from Burma which followed when it was invaded by the Japanese from Raheng in Thailand. Originally the Japanese had not been interested in occupying the whole country, and believed that their strategic needs would be served by taking the port of Rangoon and the airfields on the Kra isthmus. However their minds were changed by the realisation that the Allies could use Burma as a springboard to attempt to retake Malaya, and also by the threatening presence of the Chinese 5th and 6th Armies to the north along the lines of communication known as the Burma Road.

  The Japanese plan to rectify the situation was based on a three-pronged attack – on Rangoon, the Salween River and the Sittan River – and, as had happened in Malaya, they relied on speed and aggression to accomplish these objectives. On 11 February they crossed the Salween. The retreating 17th Indian Division blew the bridges across the Sittang three days later, and by 18 March Rangoon had fallen. Although the British and Indian forces counter-attacked in the Irrawaddy Valley at the end of the month, they were outflanked to the east and to the west where the Japanese drove General Chiang Kai-shek’s army back towards the Chinese border. Short of supplies, exhausted and demoralised, the two armies went their separate ways, and the British and Indian forces began what came to be known as ‘the longest retreat in British military history’. Following a march of 900 miles, the survivors crossed over the border into India on 19 May: of the original 30,000, 4,000 were dead and another 9,000 were missing.

  While these disastrous events were unfolding, three Japanese divisions had begun moves to invade the British colony of Hong Kong in southern China. This vital port and trading centre had been in British hands since 1842 when it was ceded by the Treaty of Nanking as an open port. In 1860 further territory was acquired on the mainland at Kowloon, and under the Peking Convention of 1898 the New Territories were taken over from China under a ninety-nine year lease. As a British Crown Colony, Hong Kong prospered as it offered a secure and dependable base during a period of upheaval which included the fall of the Manchu dynasty and Japanese intervention in China’s internal affairs in the 1930s. It was, though, something of a strategic backwater, and at the outbreak of the Second World War its defences were pitiful. In the event of enemy attack the civil and military authorities had simply been told to hang on for as long as possible as there was no hope of any immediate help or reinforcement. The question of Hong Kong’s position was put into stark relief by Winston Churchill on 7 January 1941 when he rejected the idea of sending reinforcements as ‘there is not the slightest chance of holding Hong Kong or relieving it . . . we must avoid frittering away our resources on untenable positions.’22

  As a result, in the summer of 1941, the land forces element of the Hong Kong garrison was extremely meagre: two British infantry battalions, 2nd Royal Scots and 2nd Middlesex Regiment (a machine-gun battalion); and two Indian battalions, 5/7th Rajput Regiment and 2/14th Punjab Regiment. These were supported by local artillery and volunteer defence units, but they were modestly equipped and trained. Two raw Canadian militia battalions were added in November, but apart from adding numbers and increasing morale their arrival only added substance to Churchill’s warning about frittering away resources. The naval and air forces were also modest: one destroyer, eight motor torpedo boats, four gunboats and seven obsolescent reconnaissance aircraft. In short, ‘Hong Kong was a “hostage to fortune” and it fell before the Japanese onslaught on Christmas Day 1941.’23 However, that bald and historically accurate statement does not tell the whole story of the valiant attempt to defend an impossible position, and the suffering which was visited on those who survived the short but fiercely fought battle for Hong Kong.

  The 2nd Royal Scots had arrived in the colony in January 1938 following a lengthy deployment in India, and the men quickly felt at home in a place where Scottish voices were familiar in the trading community, and where ‘they could hear that most familiar of noises of the Auld Reekie [Edinburgh] of that time – the clank of jolting tramcars.’24 The scenery, too, was pleasing, and the atmosphere within the colony was vibrant and exotic. For officers and men alike, Hong Kong was an ideal posting with its sporting and social opportunities, and a climate which provided hot summers and mild, refreshing autumn and winter days. As for training, it was pursued enthusiastically, but as Hong Kong was low on the army’s priorities it proved difficult to keep the battalion up to scratch. Unit cohesion was not helped by the fact that the men were spread over four separate barracks, with some elements operating on the mainland. During those difficult early days of the war it was also impossible to hold on to key personnel: all too often experienced officers, warrant officers and non-commissioned officers were posted out of Hong Kong to serve in other units or training establishments elsewhere. As a result, when 2nd Royal Scots went to war it had only four pre-war regular officers, and the commanding officer Lieutenant-Colonel S. E. H. E. White only took over command a matter of weeks before the Japanese attack began.

  To add to the difficulties in retaining personnel there had been a last-minute revision of the defence plan occasioned by the arrival of the two Canadian battalions. Already there had been a number of proposals ranging from m
anning a secure defensive ‘inner line’ on the mainland to a more limited plan to deploy mobile forces on the mainland before pulling back to the island. Shortages of manpower and equipment meant that the defence of the mainland positions was always going to be a problem, and by the outbreak of hostilities its pill boxes, weapons pits and trenches had been largely abandoned.

  However, for all that the defence of the mainland was considered a non-starter, it was put into effect by the colony’s new garrison commander, Major-General C. M. Maltby, General Officer Commanding, China Command. Under his revised plan three battalions would form a new brigade which would be responsible for defending the positions on the mainland. These would be the Royals, the Rajputs and the Punjabis, while the Canadians and the Middlesex took up defensive positions on the island of Hong Kong. Right up to the last minute, Maltby believed that the inner lines on the mainland could be held for up to seven days, even though intelligence reports revealed that the attacking Japanese forces would number up to 20,000 troops. The thinking behind Maltby’s plan was plain – to provide a first line of defence which would give the colony some breathing space and the opportunity to destroy key installations – but it failed to take into account the enfeebled state of the physical defences and the fact that the positions were supposed to be held by a full infantry division. Unhappily, like many other senior army officers of his generation, Maltby had a low regard for the military abilities of the Japanese, and held to the view that they would be unable to compete against western soldiers – among the many absurd misapprehensions was a widely accepted belief that they were incapable of fighting at night due to their allegedly poor eyesight. There was even optimism that the Japanese were bluffing, and that the expected attack on Hong Kong would fail to materialise. During the weekend, when war broke out in the east, no one saw any reason to cancel parties or dances in Hong Kong, and church parade was held as usual on the day that Pearl Harbor was attacked.

  For the Royals the move into Lo Wu Camp on the mainland had come as an unpleasant surprise. Not only was the change ordered a bare three weeks before the Japanese attack began, but the defenders soon discovered that many of the positions were ‘at best, makeshift’.25 As described by Captain David Pinkerton of D Company, the Royals’ sector lay to the north-west of Kowloon and from the left, it:

  . . . ran from the sea across the valley between the Tai Mo Shan and Golden Hill ranges up to the Shingmun Redoubt, a miniature fortress of pill-boxes and concrete trenches communicating with each other by underground passages. The redoubt stood on the forward slope of a knife-edged ridge, overlooking a reservoir, on the far side of which the middle slopes of Tai Mo Shan rise up to its summit. From this point, the Inner Line slanted backwards, so that the redoubt was the apex of an angle facing the enemy, and obviously a key point.26

  The general lie of the land would have been known to many of the men as the mainland was used for annual training exercises but the battalion was now forced to put itself onto a war footing in a tactical position which was unfamiliar to them. For a start the positions had to be renovated. Pill boxes had to be cleaned out and new trenches had to be dug. Wiring had to be replaced, communications enhanced and minefields created, although the latter activity was hampered by an acute shortage of anti-personnel mines. One fact stands for many: the key position was thought to be the Shing Mun Redoubt yet it was manned by forty-two soldiers consisting of A Company headquarters (one officer and nine soldiers), an artillery observation post (one officer and four soldiers) and one officer and twenty-six soldiers of 8 Platoon. All told, the Royals were expected to hold a defensive line which stretched over five thousand yards, five times the recommended minimum. The only artillery support came from sixteen howitzers and from the six-inch guns of the elderly Insect Class gunboat HMS Cicala. Other than the name of the defences – Gin Drinker’s Line – there was not much to smile about, although with typical resolve, Pinkerton noted his belief that on the eve of battle ‘we felt we were quite prepared to receive the Japanese’.

  The battalion’s war began at dawn on 8 December on what many soldiers remembered as a perfect Hong Kong winter’s morning, crisp and sunny. As the Japanese air force flew missions to attack and destroy the RAF base at Kai Tak airfield, the Japanese army’s 38th Division, commanded by Lieutenant-General Sano Tadayoshi, crossed the Sam Chun river into the Leased Territories, and by the following day had reached the main Allied defensive line. Despite determined resistance from the Royals, the Shing Mun Redoubt quickly fell into enemy hands, and its loss made the already over-extended defensive lines untenable. Much to Maltby’s anger and disappointment there was no option but to order withdrawal from the mainland, and the operation was completed on 13 December. During this initial phase of the battle the Royals lost ninety-nine casualties, most of them in D Company which had begun the battle with seventy men, and had lost sixteen killed and seventeen wounded. Amongst the survivors was 2nd Lieutenant James Allan Ford, who remembered that ‘after all the Battalion had come through we left the battlefield in buses, as if we were going back to the barracks after an exercise in the hill.’27 Later still, after the war, Ford became a distinguished writer, and his novel The Brave White Flag is his own comment on the tragedy of the fall of Hong Kong.

  Once back on the island of Hong Kong the options facing the defenders were limited, although, once again, the resistance was determined and whole-hearted. In the opening rounds the Japanese bombarded defensive positions and launched air attacks on Victoria, the central business district. During this phase 2nd Royal Scots was deployed in the north-east sector until 16 December when the battalion handed over to the Rajputs and went into reserve. Two days later the Japanese landed in strength between North Point and Aldrich Bay. They moved quickly to bisect the island and split the defending forces. To do this they had to take possession of the strategically important Wong Nei Chong Gap on the slopes of Mount Nicholson which guarded the main north-south road at the narrowest point in the island, but the importance of the feature was overlooked by Maltby. Later this failure to reinforce the position meant that 2nd Royal Scots found itself caught up in some of the fiercest fighting on the island. Despite determined attempts to clear Japanese positions, on 19 December the Royals were forced to withdraw from a hopeless situation, and one subaltern spoke for everyone in the battalion when he said: ‘That was the worst day my men had in all the Hong Kong fighting, and as an officer in battle the worst day I experienced.’28

  The determination displayed by the defenders forced the Japanese to halt temporarily to regroup but by then the end was already in sight. Casualties had been high on the Allied side, and with food, water and ammunition running low it was obvious that the ability to resist had been eroded. By 23 December Colonel White was left with barely 180 men under his command, and was unable to maintain contact with garrison headquarters other than by runner. And yet, in spite of all the difficulties, some sparks of hope remained. On Christmas Eve the arrival of 200 pairs of brown gym shoes allowed the battalion to mount night patrols with some hope of success, Pinkerton noting that ‘by now it had become obvious that our patrols could do little useful work at night on roads or the stony hillsides in ammunition boots.’29 By contrast the ‘un-soldierly’ Japanese had worn rubber-soled boots to good advantage. That proved to be the final piece of resistance. In the afternoon of Christmas Day Maltby gave the order to surrender, and to fly the white flag. For the Royals this came as shattering news as they had been preparing themselves to fight to the last man; instead Colonel White was forced to go forward to the Japanese lines through Wanchai Gap to give his surrender to the Japanese at the Hong Kong Tramway Depot at North Point. When the roll-call was taken it was found that in the course of 17 days’ fighting the Royals had lost 12 officers and 95 soldiers killed, and 17 officers and 213 soldiers wounded.

  The fighting for Hong Kong was over but it was not the end of the war for the survivors – 22 officers and 608 soldiers, who went into Japanese captivity. For them, the
four years as prisoners of war was to be a terrible experience, and three officers and fifty-nine soldiers died whilst in Japanese hands. The treatment meted out to Allied prisoners of war has been well documented – for example, the high casualties on the Burma-Siam railway or the Bataan death march – but the Royals had further reason to be shocked by Japanese barbarity. After the fall of Hong Kong, 1,816 British prisoners of war were transported to Japan on board the elderly freighter Lisbon Maru. As happened on many other ‘death ships’, they were packed into the holds where the average space for one man was one square yard which meant sleeping in shifts and limited availability of latrines. On the night of 30 September 1942 the Lisbon Maru was attacked and torpedoed in the China Sea by the submarine USS Grouper. Although the ship did not sink immediately, the British prisoners of war were battened down in the holds while most of the Japanese crew and guards were taken off. Two days later, with conditions worsening and the ship in danger of sinking, there was a mass breakout which ended in tragedy. Men who jumped into the sea were drowned or were used as target practice by the rescue ships, and the rest failed to escape before the Lisbon Maru sank. Of the 1,816 who set sail for Japan only 970 survived and were taken to Japan where they endured further misery in Japanese camps. It was not the worst incident – a fortnight earlier 5,620 Allied prisoners had been killed when a British submarine sank a larger freighter – but it does mean that the name Lisbon Maru occupies an unhallowed place in the regiment’s history.