The Battle of Hong Kong begins

On Monday 8 December 1941, at about eight in the morning, a dozen or so Japanese bombers escorted by fighters appeared over Kai Tak airfield in Hong Kong. Within minutes they had destroyed almost the entire air strength of the colony: two of the three obsolete Vickers Vildebeest torpedo-bomber biplanes, both Supermarine Walrus amphibians, most of the civilian aircraft and those of the volunteer air unit, and the Hong Kong Clipper flying boat of the American airline Pan American. At roughly the same time units of the Japanese 38th Division crossed the Sham Chun border river and entered the colony’s territory. In Hawaii, on the other side of the date line, it was still Sunday 7 December, and a few hours had passed since the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The attack on Hong Kong was part of the great offensive that Japan had resolved upon at the Imperial Conference of 5 November, and finally on 1 December. The signal “Niitakayama nobore”, sent on 2 December, set all the forces in motion simultaneously: the carriers off Hawaii, the convoys sailing for Malaya, the troops in Indochina and on Formosa, and the army in southern China. A few hours later Japanese aircraft fell upon the American airfields in the Philippines, including Clark Field. Hong Kong, a British colony surrounded since 1938 by the Japanese-occupied province of Guangdong, was the nearest objective and, so Tokyo believed, the easiest.

An untenable outpost

The British knew that defending Hong Kong in a war with Japan would be almost hopeless. Since the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937 the Japanese had been waging full-scale war in China, and in October 1938 they had taken Canton, cutting the colony off from its hinterland. Hong Kong lay more than 2,500 kilometres from Singapore, without air cover and with only a handful of warships. In January 1941 Winston Churchill wrote to his military adviser that if Japan went to war “there is not the slightest chance of holding Hong Kong or relieving it”, and that the garrison ought rather to be reduced to a symbolic scale than reinforced.

In the autumn of 1941, however, London changed its mind. The outgoing commander of British troops in China, the Canadian-born General Arthur Grasett, argued that two additional battalions would raise the defenders’ morale and show the Japanese that Britain would not give up the colony without a fight. The Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, believed that reinforcing the garrison would act as a deterrent on Tokyo and be a gesture towards Chiang Kai-shek, whom Britain wanted to keep in the war. On 19 September 1941 London asked Canada for two battalions. The government of William Lyon Mackenzie King agreed. The choice fell on the Winnipeg Grenadiers from Manitoba, who had previously done garrison duty in Jamaica, and the Royal Rifles of Canada from Quebec, who had previously guarded Newfoundland. Both battalions were considered not ready for combat, and their task was to be chiefly garrison duty. “C Force”, 1,975 men including a brigade headquarters under Brigadier John K. Lawson, sailed from Vancouver on 27 October and landed in Hong Kong on 16 November. The ship carrying its vehicles did not arrive in time and after the outbreak of war was diverted to Manila.

The garrison was commanded by Major General Christopher Maltby, an Indian Army officer who had arrived in the colony in the summer of 1941. The governor since September had been Mark Aitchison Young, formerly governor of Barbados and Tanganyika. Besides the Canadians, Maltby had two British battalions (the 2nd Battalion, Royal Scots, and the 1st Battalion, Middlesex Regiment), two Indian ones (the 5th Battalion, 7th Rajput Regiment, and the 2nd Battalion, 14th Punjab Regiment), British artillery and the Hong Kong and Singapore Royal Artillery with men recruited in India, and the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps, in which Britons, Chinese, Portuguese and Eurasians served, many of them middle-aged. By various reckonings the garrison numbered between about 11,000 and 14,500 men. Naval forces were limited to three destroyers dating from the First World War, a few gunboats and a flotilla of motor torpedo boats (PL); the air force amounted to five aircraft, not one of them a fighter.

On the Japanese side stood Lieutenant General Takashi Sakai’s 23rd Army, headquartered in Canton. For the attack it assigned Lieutenant General Tadayoshi Sano’s 38th Division with three infantry regiments (the 228th, 229th and 230th), reinforced with heavy artillery, engineers and aircraft – in all, according to the historian Tony Banham, nearly 27,000 men. Sakai’s chief of staff was Major General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, later the defender of Iwo Jima. Sakai was given ten days to take the colony.

The defence plan

Maltby’s plan assumed that only part of his forces would fight on the mainland, in the New Territories and on the Kowloon peninsula. Three battalions – the Royal Scots in the west, the Punjabis in the centre and the Rajputs in the east – were to hold the Gin Drinkers’ Line, a fortified line some 18 kilometres long running across the hills from Gin Drinkers Bay in the west to Port Shelter in the east. The line, built from the mid-1930s and later partly neglected, was to hold for at least a week, and according to some plans as long as three, giving time to blow up bridges, depots and harbour installations. The troops were then to cross to Hong Kong Island and hold it until relief arrived, which in practice could not come. The Canadians, newly arrived and unfamiliar with the ground, remained on the island.

The first days on the mainland

At dawn on 8 December, when the first radio reports of the outbreak of war came in from Tokyo, British engineers blew the bridges on the roads leading from the border. The Japanese regiments crossed the river in three columns: the 230th in the west, towards Yuen Long and Castle Peak, the 229th in the centre and the 228th in the east, through Lo Wu and Lok Ma Chau towards Tai Po. Forward detachments of the Punjabis, with a few Bren carriers and the volunteers’ armoured cars, delayed the advance on the road to Tai Po, inflicting the first casualties on the Japanese, but in the evening, threatened with being outflanked, they fell back. During the night of 8–9 December all units returned to the Gin Drinkers’ Line. The same night brought the first crimes against civilians: at an orphanage in Fanling passing Japanese troops looted and raped the women who looked after the children.

Between 8 and 10 December aircraft of the Chinese airline CNAC, flown by American and Chinese pilots, made a dozen or so night flights from Kai Tak to China, carrying out several hundred people, among them the widow of Sun Yat-sen, Soong Ching-ling. On the night of 9–10 December two old destroyers left the harbour and broke through to Singapore. Only one destroyer, HMS Thracian, remained in Hong Kong, together with the gunboats and the motor torpedo boats.

The fall of Shing Mun

The key point of the Gin Drinkers’ Line was the Shing Mun Redoubt, a system of trenches, tunnels and shelters on a hill above the reservoir of the same name. It was held by only about 40 men of A Company of the Royal Scots. On the afternoon of 9 December the commander of the Japanese 228th Regiment, Colonel Teihichi Doi, noticed while reconnoitring that the redoubt was weakly manned. Although it lay outside his regiment’s sector of attack, he decided to strike without waiting for orders. At about 11 p.m. his men, who had crossed the reservoir dam in the dark, launched the assault. The defenders held out in the artillery observation post and in the shelters, but Japanese engineers destroyed one position after another. By the morning of 10 December the redoubt was in the hands of the Japanese, who according to accounts lost only two men killed. The last nearby position held out until the afternoon.

The loss of Shing Mun wrecked the defence plan, because the Japanese had broken into the middle of a line that was supposed to hold for a week or longer. Maltby ordered the Royal Scots to counter-attack, but their commanding officer judged this impossible. On 10 December, however, the Japanese failed to exploit their success fully and confined themselves to consolidating the captured redoubt and sending out patrols. On the morning of 11 December the 228th Regiment attacked Golden Hill, held by the Royal Scots and the Rajputs, supported by the fire of the gunboat HMS Cicala. A company of the Royal Scots briefly retook the hill, but around noon Maltby concluded that the mainland could no longer be held and ordered the evacuation to the island.

The evacuation from Kowloon

The withdrawal was carried out behind a screen of demolitions: engineers blew up harbour installations, the power station and depots, and the guns on Stonecutters Island were disabled and the base abandoned on the night of 11–12 December. Looting broke out in Kowloon, and groups linked to the triads and Japanese agents fired on the withdrawing troops. Some of the Punjabis, who had lost their way in the dark, had to fight their way through the town on 12 December to the pier at Tsim Sha Tsui, where ferries took them off. The last to leave the mainland were the Rajputs, who covered the retreat on the Devil’s Peak peninsula above the Lei Yue Mun strait. By the morning of 13 December they had completed the crossing to the island. In five days the defenders had lost the entire mainland part of the colony.

The first demand for surrender

On the morning of 13 December a boat flying a white flag set out from Kowloon. The Japanese envoys brought a letter from General Sakai and Vice Admiral Masaichi Niimi, commander of the Japanese fleet off the coast of southern China, calling on the colony to surrender and threatening heavy bombardment if it refused. Governor Young rejected the ultimatum, replying that he had no intention of negotiating a surrender and would accept no further correspondence on the matter. That same day Japanese artillery in Kowloon began shelling the island: it damaged one of the 9.2-inch guns on Mount Davis and began systematically destroying the pillboxes along the shore. Air raids forced the abandonment of the Pinewood Battery. The reservoirs on the mainland were already in the attacker’s hands, and in the overcrowded city, where hundreds of thousands of refugees from China had taken shelter, water and food were beginning to run short.

Maltby divided the defence of the island between two brigades. West Brigade, with the Winnipeg Grenadiers, the Royal Scots and the Punjabis, was commanded by the Canadian Lawson, with his headquarters in the Wong Nai Chung Gap in the middle of the island. East Brigade, with the Royal Rifles of Canada and the Rajputs, was commanded by Brigadier Cedric Wallis. The Middlesex battalion manned 72 pillboxes along the shore. The defenders counted on Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese troops striking at Canton and forcing the Japanese to withdraw. Chiang promised such an offensive, but over the following days it achieved nothing. Resistance on the island was to last almost two more weeks.

Significance

The first five days of the Battle of Hong Kong showed how badly the British had underestimated their opponent. The line that was to stop the Japanese for a week or longer fell in less than two days, and the Japanese infantry, trained in night fighting in China, proved quite different from the picture drawn by pre-war British assessments. The loss of the mainland meant that the whole colony was now within range of Japanese artillery, and its defence became merely a question of time. The decision to send the Canadian battalions, taken in the hope of deterring Japan, meant that the Canadians went into action for the first time in this war precisely here, on the other side of the world, in a hopeless position. A few years later their fate became the subject of a bitter political dispute in Canada.

On 17 December the Japanese called on the defenders to surrender a second time and were again refused. On the night of 18–19 December they landed on Hong Kong Island, and on Christmas Day 1941 the colony capitulated. Hong Kong was the first of the British possessions in Asia to fall into Japanese hands in the months that followed, and its fall opened three years and eight months of occupation.