The British return to Hong Kong

At noon on 30 August 1945 the British cruiser HMS Swiftsure, with Rear Admiral Cecil Harcourt aboard, entered Victoria Harbour between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon. Other ships of the British force followed her in, while carrier aircraft circled over the harbour. The Japanese garrison offered no resistance: two weeks earlier Emperor Hirohito had announced on the radio that Japan accepted the Allied terms. For the British it was a return to the colony they had lost on Christmas Day 1941; for the people of Hong Kong it was the end of an occupation later referred to simply as “the three years and eight months”.

It is often written that the British squadron “liberated” Hong Kong. The term was entrenched by the tradition of the colony, where 30 August was celebrated as Liberation Day right up to 1997. It should be borne in mind, however, that there was no fighting for the city on 30 August: the British took it over from the Japanese, who had already surrendered, and the formal instrument of surrender of the Japanese forces in Hong Kong was signed only on 16 September.

The colony under occupation

The occupation began after the eighteen-day Battle of Hong Kong, which the Japanese had opened on 8 December 1941. Hong Kong became an occupied territory ruled by a Japanese governor-general; from February 1945 this was Lieutenant General Hisakazu Tanaka, who was at the same time commander of the 23rd Army in Canton. The Hong Kong dollar was replaced by the military yen, which by the end of the war was almost worthless. The Kempeitai military police arrested, tortured and shot those suspected of working with the Allies.

Food was short, so the occupiers deported the unemployed and “surplus” inhabitants to mainland China. According to generally accepted estimates, the colony’s population fell from about 1.6 million in 1941 to about 600,000 in 1945. The number of civilians killed by the Japanese is disputed; the figure most often given is about 10,000 victims of executions, not counting those who died of hunger and disease. Some 2,500 civilians from Allied countries were held at the Stanley internment camp in the south of the island, and prisoners of war in the camps at Sham Shui Po and Argyle Street. Many of them died of malnutrition and disease.

Resistance came mainly from two quarters. The British Army Aid Group, operating from Free China, organised escapes of prisoners and gathered intelligence. In the New Territories, Communist guerrillas of the East River (Dongjiang) Column operated, rescuing among others downed American airmen. From 1942 Hong Kong was also a target of American air raids; the largest, carried out by carrier aircraft on 16 January 1945, also hit residential districts and Stanley camp.

The dispute over who would accept the surrender

The future of Hong Kong was a matter of dispute among the Allies. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was an opponent of colonialism and during the war suggested that the colony should go back to China. Chiang Kai-shek’s government counted on the Japanese in Hong Kong surrendering to the Chinese. Under General Order No. 1, which laid down to whom Japanese units in the various regions were to surrender, Hong Kong lay in the Chinese zone, where the surrender was to be accepted by Chiang as Supreme Commander of Allied forces in the China theatre. The British, however, regarded it as their own territory rather than part of China.

Clement Attlee’s government, which had been in office in London for a few weeks, took the matter up with President Harry Truman. According to American and British documents, in the second half of August Truman backed London’s position, expecting in return that the port would be open to Chinese and American forces heading into the interior of China. Chiang protested but eventually accepted a compromise: Harcourt would accept the surrender both on behalf of the British government and as Chiang Kai-shek’s representative. Historians agree in stressing that the British wanted to get into the colony as quickly as possible, before Chinese troops appeared there.

Gimson leaves the camp

The first representative of British authority to assert its claims after Japan’s surrender was the Colonial Secretary, Franklin Gimson. He had arrived in Hong Kong on 7 December 1941, the day before the Japanese attack, and from 1942 was the most senior Briton in Stanley camp; the Governor, Mark Young, had been taken by the Japanese to Taiwan and then to Manchuria. When news of Japan’s surrender reached the camp after 15 August, Gimson began preparing an interim administration. On 23 August he received instructions from the British ambassador in Chongqing, Horace Seymour, to assume authority on behalf of the Crown. He left the camp, was sworn in as acting governor and set up an office in the former French Mission building in Victoria. In the last days of August (sources give either 27 or 28 August) he announced on the radio the formation of a provisional government.

Gimson’s authority was largely symbolic. The British had no soldiers or police in the colony, and order still had to be kept by the Japanese. There was looting in the city, and in the New Territories guerrillas attacked Japanese posts. Even so, Gimson’s gesture had political significance: by the time Harcourt’s squadron appeared, a British administration was already functioning in Hong Kong.

Harcourt’s squadron

To recover the colony the British assigned part of Admiral Bruce Fraser’s British Pacific Fleet. Task Group 111.2 under Harcourt, commander of the 11th Aircraft Carrier Squadron, assembled in Subic Bay in the Philippines. It comprised aircraft carriers, among them HMS Indomitable, in which Harcourt initially flew his flag, and HMS Venerable; the cruisers Swiftsure and Euryalus; the Canadian armed merchant cruiser HMCS Prince Robert; and destroyers, minesweepers, submarines and a hospital ship. On 29 August it was joined by a group with the battleship HMS Anson and the carrier Vengeance. That day the British established radio contact with the Japanese command in Hong Kong and dropped instructions concerning the surrender over the city.

British intelligence warned that on Lamma Island, south-west of Hong Kong, there was a base of Japanese Shin’yō explosive motor boats, intended for suicide attacks on ships. On 30 August, therefore, Harcourt shifted his flag to the cruiser Swiftsure and led the force into harbour at full battle readiness, behind minesweepers clearing the channel. When one of the boats put out from the quay, carrier aircraft attacked the base; according to Japanese navy records one boat was sunk and another driven ashore, and several Japanese were killed. According to Japanese accounts, the boat that had caused the alarm was merely carrying a report that the explosive charges had already been removed from the boats. Details of the incident vary from source to source.

Once in harbour, sailors and Royal Marines went ashore and occupied the naval dockyard and key points in the city. Harcourt visited Stanley camp with Gimson, where the internees gave him a rapturous welcome. In his report he wrote that a former sailor had kept a British flag hidden in his bedding throughout the occupation, and that despite the effects of malnutrition visible on every face, morale was remarkably high. The prisoners of war at Sham Shui Po were also freed. On 1 September Harcourt established a military administration with himself at its head; Gimson, exhausted by internment, left for Britain a few weeks later. In mid-September the British 3rd Commando Brigade arrived and took over responsibility for keeping order from the sailors.

The surrender of 16 September and after

The formal instrument of surrender was signed on 16 September 1945 at Government House, the governors’ residence. It was signed for the Japanese by Major General Umekichi Okada and Vice Admiral Ruitarō Fujita, who handed their swords to Harcourt. Harcourt accepted the surrender on behalf of the British government and of Chiang Kai-shek, and representatives of China and the United States witnessed the ceremony. General Tanaka, the former governor, was later tried by the Americans in Shanghai and then by a Chinese tribunal, and was shot in Canton in 1947.

Harcourt’s military administration governed the colony until May 1946, when Governor Young returned from captivity and civil government was restored. The population flowed back rapidly from China: by early 1946 the colony was estimated to have about a million inhabitants once more. Britain kept Hong Kong for more than another half-century, until 1997.

The British return to Hong Kong was one of the first tests of what the Allies intended to do with the colonies taken back from Japan. While in Indochina and the Dutch East Indies national movements were proclaiming independence, London – thanks to a swift decision and American support – managed to recover its most important port on the China coast without the involvement of Chinese troops. The dispute with Chiang Kai-shek nevertheless left its mark on Anglo-Chinese relations, and before long the fate of Hong Kong began to be shaped by the civil war in China, whose refugees swelled the colony’s population in the years that followed.