The Battle for Hong Kong, 1941–1945: Hostage to Fortune

Gary Watson is a former lecturer in Chinese studies at Queen’s University and is now a multimedia developer in Mississauga.

July 2007 marks the 60th anniversary of a small skirmish between Chinese
and Japanese troops just west of Beijing. The Japanese attack that the
Chinese turned back at Lugouqiao—better known as the “Marco Polo
Bridge Incident”—turned out to be the first battle of World War II.
Throughout the summer and fall of 1937, Japanese forces savaged
China’s north and, particularly, central regions culminating in the
horrific December 1937 Nanjing atrocities in which thousands of Chinese
were murdered, raped, and tortured in an unparalleled storm of violence
and cruelty.

It was against this backdrop that the British and Hong Kong governments
considered not so much how to defend Hong Kong, but rather how to lose
it with minimal losses. The arguments and conflicting policies serve as
the introduction to Lindsay’s detailed, meandering, and sometimes
disjointed study of the former Crown Colony’s conquest by Japanese
forces in late December 1941. Remarkably, the chiefs of staff in London,
who never really believed Hong Kong could be defended and actually began
withdrawing resources from the colony in the late 1930s, still expected
the small garrison to “hold” and defend British Imperial prestige
and offer an example to the embattled Chinese. As Lindsay argues, the
game was up when the Japanese captured Canton in 1938, thereby severing
Hong Kong’s link to Nationalist China and the possibility of relief
and rescue by Chiang Kai-shek’s armies.

Hong Kong was ill-equipped to repel the well-trained modern army Japan
fielded against the colony. Despite delusional views of Japanese
ineptitude and disorganization, the British quickly lost control of the
seas and air around Hong Kong once the attack began on December 8. After
17 days of intense fighting over the colony’s hilly terrain, the
combined British, Canadian, and Indian forces surrendered on December
26, 1941.

By far the strongest chapters of Lindsay’s account cover the
harrowing years of imprisonment for the defenders who endured disease,
betrayal, torture, and deportation to slave labour camps in Japan.
Although other accounts, such as Philip Snow’s The Fall of Hong Kong
are better documented, Lindsay’s book is a personal record of a
survivor.