The surrender of Hong Kong

On the afternoon of Thursday 25 December 1941 the Governor of Hong Kong, Sir Mark Aitchison Young, and the garrison commander, Major General Christopher Maltby, concluded that further resistance was pointless. White flags were raised over the remaining British positions on Hong Kong Island, and in the evening Young crossed the harbour to Kowloon and, at the Peninsula Hotel, where the Japanese headquarters was located, surrendered the colony to Lieutenant General Takashi Sakai, commander of the 23rd Army. For the first time in history a British crown colony had surrendered to an invader. The people of Hong Kong call the day “Black Christmas”.

The surrender ended an eighteen-day battle. The Japanese had attacked the colony on 8 December, taken the New Territories and Kowloon in five days, and on 13 and 17 December twice called on the defenders to surrender. Young refused both times. On the island, shelled from the mainland and bombed from the air, a garrison made up of British, Canadian and Indian troops and local volunteers waited for the landing.

The landing on the island (18 December)

On 18 December the Japanese artillery intensified its bombardment of the island’s north shore, setting oil tanks ablaze. In the evening the first wave of Lieutenant General Tadayoshi Sano’s 38th Division began crossing the harbour, narrow at that point, in boats and on pontoons. Searchlights lit up the boats, and the Rajputs of the 5th Battalion, 7th Rajput Regiment, manning the pillboxes along the shore, opened fire. Both commanders of the first-wave battalions were wounded, and command passed to Colonel Teihichi Doi, the same officer who on 10 December had taken the Shing Mun Redoubt. At around 9.45 p.m. the Japanese landed at North Point and around the Taikoo dockyard, and other units at Aldrich Bay and Sai Wan at the eastern end of the island. Before midnight six battalions were ashore. Maltby believed the landing was merely a diversion ahead of a main assault across the harbour on the city of Victoria, and sent only small reinforcements east.

West of the landing area, at the North Point power station, a mixed force held out: members of the volunteer corps from the so-called Hughes Group, made up of merchants and officials over the age of 55, a handful of Free French from Shanghai and a few soldiers of the Middlesex Regiment. They held on until dawn and then fought in the streets until all of them had been killed or captured. Crimes against prisoners began on the very first night. Soldiers of the 229th Regiment who took the Sai Wan anti-aircraft battery bayoneted some twenty volunteers and gunners who had surrendered. According to post-war tallies, 28 men died there in all, some probably in the fighting; two survived. On the morning of 19 December another unit of the same regiment entered the Salesian mission at Shau Kei Wan, which had been turned into a dressing station, and massacred the doctors, orderlies and wounded taken prisoner there. The Canadian Captain Stanley Banfill, medical officer of the Royal Rifles battalion, who survived, testified after the war that a Japanese officer had announced that “the order is that all prisoners are to die”.

The Wong Nai Chung Gap

The Japanese did not advance westwards along the shore but uphill, through the hills, towards the Wong Nai Chung Gap, which cuts across the island from north to south. There stood the headquarters of the West Brigade under the Canadian Brigadier John K. Lawson. On the morning of 19 December units of the 230th and 228th Regiments pushed the weak outposts of the Winnipeg Grenadiers off Jardine’s Lookout and Mount Butler and surrounded the command post. At around ten Lawson reported by radio that he was surrounded and was “going outside to fight it out”. He was killed, together with most of his staff, by machine-gun fire immediately after leaving the shelter. He was the highest-ranking officer to fall in the battle for Hong Kong. The same day, on Mount Butler, Company Sergeant Major John Robert Osborn of the Winnipeg Grenadiers threw himself on a Japanese grenade to shield his men. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross, the first won by a Canadian in the Second World War.

The counter-attacks that Maltby organised on 19 and 20 December with the Royal Scots battalion, the Canadians and the Punjabis broke down under fire from the surrounding hills. The capture of the gap cut the island in two. Brigadier Cedric Wallis’s East Brigade, with the Royal Rifles of Canada, withdrew to the Stanley peninsula in the south, while the remnants of the West Brigade held out in the western part of the island, around Victoria. Further attempts to break through to each other, among them a Canadian attack from Stanley on 21 December, failed. Japanese artillery and aircraft sank the gunboat HMS Cicala, which had been supporting the defenders with her guns.

On 21 December a message reached Hong Kong from Winston Churchill, who was then at sea on his way to Washington for the Arcadia Conference. The Prime Minister, who as late as January 1941 had written that the colony could not be held, now declared that there must be “no thought of surrender”, urged that every part of the island be defended with the utmost stubbornness, and reminded the garrison that every day of resistance helped the Allied cause throughout the world. The defenders fought on for four more days. The Japanese took the Repulse Bay Hotel on the south shore, where many civilians had taken refuge, and seized the reservoirs, and from 23 December the city began to run short of water. On the north shore their advance broke through the defences on Leighton Hill on 22 and 23 December and pushed through Wan Chai towards the centre.

The fighting was accompanied by further crimes. On 22 December soldiers of the 230th Regiment murdered about thirty civilians, Chinese and European, in houses on Blue Pool Road. On 23 December, in the Repulse Bay area, at the houses known as The Ridge, Overbays and Eucliffe, soldiers of the 229th Regiment killed several dozen British and Canadian soldiers who were surrendering or wounded, many of them from supply units and rear services. At a position above Deep Water Bay they beheaded prisoners from the Middlesex Regiment.

Black Christmas

On the evening of 24 December the Japanese, supported by a few tankettes, broke through the outer line of defence on the Stanley peninsula. During the night, shortly after midnight on 25 December, soldiers of the 229th Regiment entered St Stephen’s College in Stanley, a school turned into a field hospital where nearly two hundred wounded lay. Two doctors, Lieutenant Colonel George Black and Captain Witney, who went out to meet them and tried to explain that this was a hospital, were killed and mutilated. The soldiers then burst into the wards and bayoneted the wounded in their beds: British, Canadian and Indian soldiers alike. According to survivors’ accounts, between fifty and sixty patients were killed in this way. The remaining wounded and the nurses were locked in two rooms upstairs. Over the following hours soldiers took people out of them, and raped the volunteer nurses. At least three British women were murdered, and their mutilated bodies were found later. The next day the Japanese had the bodies of the victims burned in front of the building, together with those killed in the fighting for Stanley. After the war Major General Takeo Itō, infantry commander of the 38th Division, whose troops had committed the massacre, was sentenced by a British military court to twelve years’ imprisonment.

The same day, at the field hospital at the Happy Valley racecourse, Japanese soldiers raped more than a dozen nurses. By morning the Japanese already controlled most of the island, and in its western part the defenders, pushed back to the line of hills above Victoria, had ammunition for a few days and almost no water. In the afternoon Maltby reported to the governor that further defence was impossible and would only lead to the slaughter of the civilian population in the city. Young, who had insisted throughout that the colony would fight on, accepted this assessment. The order to lay down arms went out to the units.

That same afternoon Rear Admiral Chan Chak, the one-legged head of the Chinese military mission in Hong Kong, escaped from the colony aboard the last five British motor torpedo boats (PL). With a group of 68 men, Chinese and British, he slipped through Japanese patrols to Mirs Bay, where they were taken in by Chinese guerrillas, and then made his way through occupied territory to Huizhou in Free China. For this feat the British made him an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

In the evening Young and Maltby were taken across the harbour to Kowloon. On the third floor of the Peninsula Hotel, by candlelight because the city had no electricity, the governor signed the surrender before General Sakai. Brigadier Wallis at Stanley, where fighting continued into the night, refused to surrender without a written order and laid down his arms only at 2.30 a.m. on 26 December. The last isolated groups of defenders, at the “Little Hong Kong” ammunition depot, surrendered on 27 December. From 25 to 28 December Japanese soldiers looted houses and raped women in the districts of Wan Chai and Causeway Bay. The Japanese military police were unable, and often unwilling, to stop them.

Losses

According to official Japanese figures, 675 Japanese soldiers were killed in the battle and 2,079 wounded. Some Western historians put Japanese losses much higher, at up to nearly 1,900 killed. The defenders’ losses are given variously: most often from about 1,500 to more than 2,200 killed and missing and some 1,400–2,300 wounded. The Canadian “C Force”, which had arrived in Hong Kong only five weeks before the battle, lost 290 killed and 493 wounded out of 1,975 men. Of the infantry battalions, the heaviest losses were suffered by the 5th Battalion, 7th Rajput Regiment, which took the first shock of the landing. According to the colony’s Director of Medical Services, Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke, about 4,000 civilians were killed during the fighting and 3,000 seriously wounded. According to Japanese figures, 10,947 servicemen were taken prisoner: 5,072 British, 1,689 Canadians, 3,829 Indians and 357 others.

Significance

The fall of Hong Kong was the first of the great British defeats in Asia. The garrison, which according to the plans was to hold out for at least several weeks, lasted eighteen days – longer than Sakai had expected, but too short to matter for the war in the Pacific. At the same time the Japanese sank the Prince of Wales and the Repulse off the coast of Malaya and were driving down the Malay Peninsula towards Singapore, which surrendered on 15 February 1942. The crimes committed against prisoners, the wounded and nurses, from the first night of the landing to St Stephen’s College, foreshadowed how the Japanese would treat prisoners and civilians throughout the territory they conquered.

The prisoners of war were held in camps at Sham Shui Po, North Point and Argyle Street, and Allied civilians, about 2,500 people, in the Stanley internment camp. Hunger, disease and forced labour killed many of them. Some of the prisoners were shipped to Japan to work in mines and shipyards. In October 1942 more than eight hundred British prisoners from Hong Kong died when the Lisbon Maru, which was carrying them, was sunk by an American submarine. Of the Canadians taken prisoner, 267 died in the camps. In Canada the dispatch of poorly trained battalions to a doomed outpost drew fierce criticism from the opposition, and in 1942 the government of William Lyon Mackenzie King set up a royal commission under Justice Lyman Duff, which cleared it of blame.

The Japanese occupation of Hong Kong lasted three years and eight months. In February 1942 General Rensuke Isogai became the first Japanese governor. The occupiers forced hundreds of thousands of inhabitants to leave for China, and the colony’s population fell, according to most estimates, from about 1.6 million to about 600,000. By some estimates the Japanese killed around 10,000 civilians during the occupation. Young, held in camps in Taiwan and Manchuria, returned to Hong Kong as governor in 1946. General Sakai was sentenced to death by a Chinese tribunal in Nanjing for war crimes committed in China and was shot in 1946. British forces returned to Hong Kong on 30 August 1945, and the formal surrender of the Japanese garrison took place on 16 September 1945.