Hong Kong (38 page)

It all seems natural enough, in this bastion of capitalism. It is the system that underlies everything. The public-private alliance is very old, and each side has gifts to bestow upon the other. In the 1980s six members of the board of the China Power and Light Company were Commanders of the British Empire, and it was soon after the company commissioned from British manufacturers the equipment for its new Castle Peak station, one of the largest single orders ever awarded to British industry, that its chairman became Lord Kadoorie.

1940s:
WAR AND PEACE

N
ORTH-WEST OF KOWLOON, BETWEEN THE BIG JUBILEE
reservoir and the southern coast of the New Territories, there is a ridge called Smuggler’s Ridge. Though it is bare itself, it looks northward into wooded country, and southwards over the high-rise blocks of Kwai Chung that creep year by year inexorably into the higher ground.

A line of electric pylons crosses the ridge, a hiking path named for Sir Murray MacLehose passes nearby, and not far away there is a picnic site with explanatory noticeboards; but on the top, almost immediately below the electric cables, lies a place of distinctly unpleasant numen, where even on a bright sunny day, even with the cheerful voices of walkers echoing through the shrubbery, one can feel disconcertingly alone.

Scrabbled in the sandy soil up there, half-buried, all abandoned, are the remains of a redoubt. There are steps leading into sand-filled bunkers, gun-slits in concrete slabs, air-shafts protruding from the ground, underground corridors which lead nowhere but are marked with names like Shaftesbury Avenue or Regent Street. It is a very haunted place. The wind blows constantly over the ridge and whistles in the cables above. The derelict subterranean chambers are littered with rubbish, foul with excrement, and sometimes your heart leaps
when, like a demon out of the earth, a scavenging dog suddenly appears from a dark tunnel and leaps crazily past you into the daylight. The rolling country to the north looks desolate. The familiar blocks of Kwai Chung, just out of sight, seem all too far away.

Fifty odd years ago, when Smuggler’s Ridge really was a more solitary place, the Shing-mun redoubt was the key point of Hong Kong’s military defence. It was here on the night of 9 December 1941, in the Crown Colony’s centenary year, that the 38th Division of the Japanese 23rd Army, falling upon those bunkers, throwing grenades down those air-shafts, machine-gunning those staircases, in a few hours of fighting broke the British resistance, and so made it certain that the 1940s would be a decade apart in the history of Hong Kong.

Like nearly everyone else, the Japanese had been threatening and bullying China for years. In 1933 they had seized Manchuria, far to the north, and founded the puppet kingdom of Manchukuo under Puyi, the pretender to the Manchu throne. In 1937 they had taken Beijing and embarked upon a long and sporadic movement southwards through the Chinese provinces. Their advance put a temporary end to China’s endemic civil war, and for a time the forces of the Kuomintang and the Communists fought together under the command of Chiang Kai-shek, with his capital at Chong-qing (Chungking). The Japanese had set up a second puppet Government at Nanjing (Nanking) under the former Kuomintang politician Wang Jing-wei; since the autumn of 1939 they had been ensconced in Guangzhou, just up the river from Hong Kong, and had stationed troops on the frontier with the colony (where they sometimes exchanged beers and civilities with the British sentries on the other side).

For years too the British military planners had been considering what best to do if the Japanese ever turned upon Hong Kong. Their views differed, and they kept changing their minds. The chief British fortress of the east was now Singapore, towards the cost of whose defences the Hong Kong Government had prudently offered £250,000, and the colony’s own defences were slight. Nevertheless some strategists argued that at least it ought to be denied to an enemy as long as possible, and some thought it should be held at all costs until relief could come. Sometimes the plan was that the whole colony would be defended, sometimes that the mainland would be abandoned and the
island held as a siege-fortress. Sometimes it was suggested that the place should be demilitarized, and not defended at all, and sometimes, perhaps most often, that it should offer a merely token resistance, for purposes of symbolism or example.

By 1941 the British Empire was at war with Germany and Italy, with whom Japan was in alliance, and Winston Churchill the Prime Minister in London seemed to have made up the planners’ minds for them. If the Japanese did attack, Hong Kong was not worth defending with any seriousness. Its garrison consisted only of two British infantry battalions, two battalions of the Indian Army, some artillery fixed and mobile, a local volunteer force, a handful of small warships, two flying-boats and three venerable torpedo bombers without any torpedoes. ‘If Japan goes to war with us,’ decreed the Prime Minister, ‘there is not the slightest chance of holding Hong Kong or relieving it.’ The garrison could only be symbolical, and token resistance was the only sensible choice. ‘I wish we had fewer troops there, but to move any would be noticeable and dangerous.’

There matters stood in the autumn of 1941. The general opinion in Hong Kong then was that, crazily though the Japanese were acting, they would not be so crazy as to attack this famous outpost of the British Crown. It had
never
been attacked, and was supposed to be impregnable anyway. Also it had old, friendly and profitable links with the Japanese. There was a prosperous Japanese community in the colony, and people often went to Japan for their holidays (‘Oriental charms’, as the travel advertisements said, ‘are jealously preserved intact amidst the most advanced Oriental civilization’).

The public attitude was defined by the
South China Morning Post
as a compound of reaction, faith, determination, nervous anticipation, evasion and simple fatalism. The conflict in Europe seemed remote indeed, but like all British possessions Hong Kong had officially been on a war footing since 1939. Adult British males were liable to conscription, and in June 1940 European wives and children were compulsorily evacuated to Australia (though some 900 women, many with children, had wangled a way to stay). Important buildings were sandbagged against bomb blast. Beaches were wired. There were practice black-outs now and then, and publicity campaigns to raise war bonds or prevent careless talk – as the makers of Tiger Beer characteristically told the citizenry in one of their advertisements:

But otherwise things were pretty normal. The ships still came and went, the Pan Am flying-boats still arrived, nobody went short of anything. A robber, we see from the
South China Morning Post
, September 1941, is sentenced to five years’ hard labour and twelve strokes of the cat. His Excellency the Governor attends the All China Premiere of
Lady Hamilton
, with Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier. Jimmy’s Kitchen advertises its tasty tiffins. The official Government Gazette invites tenders for the erection of dry latrines at Telegraph Bay Village, and publishes proposed new trademarks for the Wing Hing Knitting Family.

But that same month the Japanese occupied Indo-China, unopposed by the French Vichy Government there, and in response first the Americans, then the British imposed embargoes on all exports of steel and oil to Japan. This was a drastic blow to the Japanese – ‘the most drastic blow’, thought
The New York Times
, ‘short of war’ – and it instantly increased tension throughout the Pacific. Hong Kong now prepared more urgently for its own war. Major-General Christopher Maltby, Indian Army, the commanding general, was bullish about the prospects of defending the colony. He believed indeed that it could be turned into an offensive base, for attacks upon the Japanese in China, and he had faith in the line of strong-points, centred upon the Shing-mun redoubt, which ran from east to west of the New Territories. There, he thought, some twelve miles south of the frontier, any invading force could be held long enough to allow an orderly evacuation of Kowloon and a build-up of strength on the island – which could itself hold out until help came from Singapore. Minefields were laid to protect the sea-approaches, and a network of seventy-two pillboxes was completed on Hong Kong Island.

Inexplicably Churchill, preoccupied perhaps with events elsewhere, was now converted to Maltby’s view, and was persuaded that only a modest reinforcement would enable Hong Kong to put up a worthwhile resistance. As a result two battalions of half-trained Canadian troops, most of them French-speaking, disembarked in Hong Kong on 16 November, without motor transport, to help defend the indefensible colony. They were officially categorized in Ottawa as ‘not recommended for operational consideration’. Just three weeks later, on 8 December, the Japanese, simultaneously attacking Pearl Harbor and
invading the Malay Peninsula, crossed the border out of China into Hong Kong. Savagely bombing Kai Tak, where the Royal Air Force was instantly put out of action, they swept through the British advance guards in the northern New Territories, and on the following evening reached the Shing-mun redoubt.

It hardly delayed them at all. Maltby had thought it could hold out for a week, but it fell in a few hours, never to be remanned from that day to this. Many of its garrison died within their pillboxes, the rest abandoned the position. The Japanese did not pause. Bombing and shelling Kowloon, strafing ships and roads, they drove British and Indian troops alike helter-skelter down the peninsula and into ferry-boats, sampans, warships and lighters for the crossing to Hong Kong Island. In four days they were in full control of the whole peninsula. The last Star Ferry retreated to Blake Pier. The last exhausted rearguards were brought back across the Lyemun Gap. The British on Hong Kong-side, terrified and aghast, could see the troops of the 38th Division massing on the Kowloon waterfront, and hear the eerie cries of their loudspeakers, interspersed with recordings of
Home Sweet Home
, booming across the familiar waterway – ‘Give up, and the Japanese will protect you! Trust in the kindness of the Japanese Army!’