Hong Kong War Diary

My timing was good. This website was registered in either 1999 or 2000, and the first ten years of its existence truly were the golden age. Firstly, I benefitted hugely from the fact that there were no other websites at that time focusing on the broad experience of Hong Kong in WWII.* That meant that anyone typing “Hong Kong in World War Two” into the search engines of the time (Altavista was the main one then) would be taken to my site. They would contact me and ask for help, I would provide it but ask for information in return. It worked; it was almost a monopoly. Secondly, there were still many veterans around in those days, and a surprising number were computer literate. I had thousands of exchanges with (among many others) Barbara Anslow (civilian), Deedee Bak (civilian), Bunny Browne (HQ), Phil Doddridge (Royal Rifles of Canada), Jack Etiemble (RA), Arthur Gomes (HKVDC), Ross Lynneberg (RN), Dennis Morley (Royal Scots), David Parsons (HKVDC), Ed Shayler (Winnipeg Grenadiers), Ray Smith (Royal Rifles of Canada), and so forth. These and many more were people I’d only been able to write to before, and my efficiency was suddenly an order of magnitude higher. The point is that the site gave me an unfair (but very welcome) advantage, which led to me finding all sorts of information and so forth, ranging from letters and diaries to more substantial artefacts, one of which being the example I’ve used to illustrate this section: the original manuscript of Bowie’s book.

* Though Richard Hide’s site about the MTB escape of 1941, and the HKVCA’s site focusing on C Force, were already online at the time.

When I first moved to Hong Kong in the late 1980s, war detritus could be found on the surface all over the place. I have often told the story of reading Oliver Lindsay’s book ‘The Lasting Honour’ and next day visiting Wong Nai Chung Gap – which he correctly described as an area of severe fighting – to see if I could find anything. Within minutes I found an expended Japanese 6.5mm rifle cartridge hanging out of an earthen bank. And that’s how it started. Later, the metal detector boys moved in. I did not encourage them, knowing how much dangerous material was out there, and some – Japanese ordnance in particular – gets less stable with age. Aside from that, there’s the archaeological aspect. Now, let’s be honest, most of this material has no historical or intrinsic value. I recall in around 1968, driving through northern France with my family when my father stopped to answer a call of nature. I dashed out of the car, through a hedge, into a ploughed field, picked up two well-preserved French Lebell 8mm rifle cartridges, retraced my steps, and was sitting in the car again before my father was finished. These things were made in the billions. And yet sometimes their positions, and the things found with them, can tell us a great deal. ‘Yes’, agree the detectorists, ‘but if we don’t find them now they will soon decay into nothing’. So I see both sides. I have never owned a detector myself, but have worked with ‘ethical’ detectorists who record and share their finds. One such was our late family friend Toby Brown, who appears in the photo above. He called me late one day saying he’d found a big hit and would like me to help extract it when no one was around. So we met at 06.00 on an extraordinarily hot and humid morning. We dug down to a metal dome until we’d uncovered enough that – with some trepidation – we lifted it. There was an instant fresh smell of woodsmoke. What we had found was a Japanese helmet in a cremation site. We both felt quite disturbed, but were too far in to stop. In the end Toby offered it to several local museums who showed no interest. As our researches pointed to it belonging to Lieutenant Umino of the 229^th Regiment from Nagoya, I believe the helmet ended up in their regimental museum. In recent years a number of live Japanese 240mm shells have been found, plus American bombs of 1,000 and even 2,000 pounds, so my advice is still to stay well clear.

I always loved writing, and my writing project for 1999 was a set of thirteen ghost stories, in the style of the most excellent M.R. James, set in the little North Norfolk village where I had been brought up, and where my parents still lived; it was to be their Christmas present. Then, in 2000 I looked at the voluminous notes I had made (over the preceding ten or more years) on the Battle of Hong Kong, and decided that a book on that topic would be my project for that year. And so it was. And 2001. And 2002. In 2003 I had both a decent draft and the good fortune to contact the then publisher at Hong Kong University Press. A British polymath who had spent most of his career working in the United States, was probably a good person to take this rather idiosyncratic (and naïve, unpolished…) project to, and he kindly took me on board. I owe Dr Colin Day quite a debt. This first book, Not The Slightest Chance, covered the Battle of Hong Kong and the resulting British casualties in excruciating detail. The name came from a communication from Winston Churchill to General Ismay on 7 January 1941. “This is all wrong. If Japan goes to war with us there is not the slightest chance of holding Hong Kong or relieving it. It is most unwise to increase the loss we shall suffer there. Instead of increasing the garrison it ought to be reduced to a symbolical scale. Any trouble arising there must be dealt with at the Peace Conference after the war. We must avoid frittering away our resources on untenable positions. Japan will think long before declaring war on the British Empire, and whether there are two or six battalions at Hong Kong will make no difference to her choice. I wish we had fewer troops there, but to move any would be noticeable and dangerous.”

While writing that book, veterans and families who helped me constantly referred to the sinking of the Lisbon Maru, and that became the inescapable focus of my second book. Not long after it was published I explained the story to a well-known Hollywood scriptwriter, What caught his attention was the funnel: into it were poured the Hong Kong Garrison of 1941. Many were killed in the fighting, then hundreds died of disease as POWs in 1942. That September 1,816 were squeezed into the Lisbon Maru, and 828 died in the sinking. A further 200 exhausted and malnourished men died as POWs in the next two months, and yet more in the ensuing years of captivity. And some even died, liberated, as the American aircraft taking them home ran into typhoons and crashed. Their lives were ‘frittered away’ he said, and ever since I have kicked myself for not using that name for the book. The third book, covering the remainder if the POW experience, became We Shall Suffer There. And the fourth (based on my PhD thesis) was published as Reduced To A Symbolical Scale. I still have another book in me, about those who evaded and escaped from Hong Kong and continued the fight elsewhere, which one day (I hope) will be published as Noticeable and Dangerous. And The Big For? That was a light-hearted children’s book that I privately published – as light relief while struggling to finish my PhD.

Every now and then, ever since the founding of this site, I receive emails of the type: “My father disappeared in Hong Kong during the Second World War. Can you please tell me what happened to him, and where he was buried?” I keep files of all of these. These are not the neat cases of clearly recorded deaths and commemorations, but those that somehow fell through the cracks. Interestingly, the first I came across (some 30 years ago), was someone named in primary sources. Jessie Holland - together with another nurse, Mrs Sando - had volunteered to serve on a launch in the evacuation of Kowloon on 12 December 1941, and had been shot and mortally wounded. I found four mutually supporting accounts of this in primary sources, but she was not recorded by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Eventually, with help from many people, I found her unmarked grave, and was able (thanks to In From The Cold) to get her name formally added into CWGC records.

Theodore Leslie Bell is now my oldest unsolved file. He was a locally-hired man at HSBC, whose wife died shortly before the evacuation, leaving him alone with a small daughter. And then he was killed when the Japanese came, leaving the little girl orphaned. She – at the time she contacted me, quite elderly – was desperate to know what had happened to her father, who didn’t even have a death certificate let alone a CWGC entry or a grave. Eventually I found two primary sources stating that he was in Essential Services and was helping out at the refugee centre near Woodside. There he was carrying a colleague wounded by shell fire when Japanese  troops appeared, and he was too slow to drop his comrade and put his hands up, so they shot him. I was able to provide the daughter with a full report before she passed away, but have still not managed to get CWGC to accept his name.

There are others. George William Cooper, of Kowloon Riding School, another Essential Services man, has now been accepted by CWGC. Alfred Rough Fullerton of the Hong Kong Club was killed in action helping civilians into an air raid shelter, has not; I have his death certificate, but it is unsigned. Francis Edward Litton Dobbs worked with the China Salt Gabelle. Just before the invasion, Dobbs and his wife visited Hong Kong to see the dentist and do some Christmas shopping. They were trapped by the attack, and Dobbs volunteered. He was killed when a boiler exploded in the Kwong Sang Hong premises 192 Hennessy Road Hong Kong on 22 December 1941. His body was identified, his death has been commemorated by CWGC, but I’m still looking for his grave – if it exists.

But it was often not that ‘simple’. I was naïve, and learned the hard way that the phrase ‘daddy was killed in the war’ could be used euphemistically by mothers and other relatives. The war was enormously hard on families. Some husbands were so traumatised by the POW experience that after September 1945 they never looked back, and simply made new lives for themselves. Some women, evacuated from Hong Kong to Australia in 1940 – often with children in tow – not only survived the experience, but thrived in their new independence; independence that sometimes they didn’t want to lose. And of course in Stanley Internment Camp the two sexes were thrown together, close together, in frightening circumstances for nearly four years. It's no wonder that so many pre-war families disintegrated. And like a bull in a China shop, here I was (sometimes accidentally) putting them back together again. Mostly it went well. Twice it really did not. It reached a stage when if I received one of these emails, I asked the sender if they were sure they wanted my help, and warned them that they may not like what they learned. But I put families back together, reintroduced friends, in one case reunited a famous gentleman with the young lady who saved his life, and so forth. I won’t name names, for obvious reasons, in this section. It was the most satisfying and pleasing part of my work, but also one of the most stressful.

At time of writing there are only two known veterans of the Hong Kong Garrison still with us, Hormidas Fredette of C Force and Robert Lapsley of the HKVDC. Both are over 100 years old. Of course it is always possible one or two might still be around somewhere, having never made contact, but if so it must be vanishingly few. Children of the conflict are still around, but not adults. But I was lucky enough to meet many, either when they visited Hong Kong or when I made trips abroad. For example: Barbara Anslow, Flash Clayton, James Dignan, Phil Doddridge, Jack Etiemble, Taffy Evans, Gerry Gerrard, Arthur Gomes, James Hart, Charles Jordan, George MacDonell, Dennis Morley, Alan Nichols, Doug Rees, Wally Scragg, Ed Shayler, Maynard Skinner, Jim Wakefield, and Arthur White. One way or another I must have met, spoken to, written to, or communicated in some way, with a few hundred. And what a privilege that was. It’s still a privilege today to work with their families instead, but somehow it’s not quite the same.

Dear reader, I was born in an asbestos hut. The year was 1959, and the location, Morley, England. The hut in question was a prefabricated building erected as part of an United States Army Air Force Hospital in the county of Norfolk, England, in the Second World War. It had a design life of five years. After peace came, the site was converted to a school. My father arrived to teach French, and became Deputy Head Master. He (we) were given accommodation there in said hut – which had originally been erected for an American surgeon charged with repairing wounded USAAF aircrew returning from raids on Germany and occupied Europe. So… we weren’t exactly posh. On the other hand, I spent much of my professional career dealing with CEOs, CFOs, and CIOs of some of the world’s major corporations and (through no fault of my own, I assure you) ended that career reporting directly to the world’s seventh richest man. But it gave me great pleasure that my ‘hobby’ opened so many doors. When the great economist Larry Summers visited Hong Kong and his handlers wanted him to see an unexpected aspect of the place, they invited me to take him on a battlefield tour. When a huge surgical conference came here, I was invited to give local colour by presenting on the topic of POW medical issues. And when Canadian prime ministers came calling, from Paul Martin, through Stephen Harper, to Justin Trudeau, they dusted me off to greet them. Trudeau was the most interesting as the weather changed constantly during his visit, and he ended up with a 15 minute vacant slot which I was asked to fill by taking him on a one-on-one tour of Sai Wan Cemetery. (By the way, that photo of me and Paul Martin: I’d like to make it crystal clear that I am the light-haired, possibly balding, middle-aged and somewhat overweight man in the gray suit, wearing a poppy. Paul Martin is obviously the other chap).

It’s probably fair to say that of all the actions that British Forces were committed to in the Second World War, Hong Kong resulted in the greatest percentage of deaths due to massacres and murders. Even today I occasionally take people on a walk I call ‘The Travelling Massacre’ which follows these deaths from the north coast of HK Island, through Wong Nai Chung Gap, to Stanley: the Salesian Mission, the Pillboxes on Jardine’s Lookout, the houses from Postbridge to The Ridge, and south to Overbays, and Eucliffe. In almost all cases I have been able to identify who was lost at each point, except Stanley. I’m still working on it. This most infamous of massacres is hard to pin down, partly (I think) because when the bodies of the victims were cremated - on Japanese orders – many ‘legitimate’ bodies from the surrounding fighting were burned too. But there is no doubt that Eileen Begg (whose photo is above) was raped and murdered here, with a number of other nurses. Her family are understandably bitter about the circumstances to this day. Years later I learned that someone had salvaged buttons and decorations and watches from that cremation site, and I finally tracked them down to a museum in New Zealand. They very kindly photographed those artefacts for me.

When I first told people, 35 or so years ago (and a bit arrogantly in retrospect), that I was going to write new histories of Hong Kong’s Second World War experience using primary sources, they were instantly dismissive. “Impossible”, they said, “all the paperwork was lost or destroyed or simply burned to boil rice in the occupation”. And of course not only were they generally correct, but the world’s museums and archives were also relatively bare of such material. But the Internet changed everything. When families of the Hong Kong Garrison of 1941 reached out to me for help, I would always do everything that I could. And in return I would always ask them: “and did your brother / husband / father / uncle / grandfather / great uncle leave any documents from the period?” And time after time I was amazed to receive the reply, “No, just the letters… and the diary”. Now, ‘diary’ is a strong word. What was being referred to was everything from a few scraps of paper listing the odd days when Red Cross parcels were delivered to POW camps, to volumes of 1,000 or so pages of detailed information. Most, though, were more like scrapbooks of drawings, ditties, signatures, poems, and so forth. I have perhaps 50 or 100 in my collection now. Some are published, others in public archives, but the majority are unique. I have promised to write a proper scholarly article about them at some point, to get them the visibility they deserve. Meanwhile my favourite is that of Fred ‘Dingy’ Bell, which I placed on long term loan at Crown Wine Cellars in Hong Kong in 2009. Dingy was born on 3 September 1897 in London and served in 12 Company Royal Army Service Corps. I have been unable to determine what happened to him after Liberation, but a schoolboy found his diary in about 1958, in amongst a pile of rubbish left outside a house in Goole, East Yorkshire that had been vacated by the occupants. Eventually he passed it to me. It’s long and full of amazing artwork, by Dingy and others, and has plenty of coverage of their in-camp entertainment.

As a youngster I was a typical computer guy. I was quite happy spending all day programming and interacting as little as possible with other people. In my late twenties my job changed to the point where I had to stand up and speak to people, and I found the experience terrifying. No one could have been more surprised than I, when in later years I discovered a penchant for public speaking and PR. That led to me doing such activities professionally, and taking all sorts of Corporate training – including doing Hostile Media Training with Channel 9 in Australia. Later still I repurposed those skills for history, and have conducted many interviews with newspapers, radio shows, and TV channels / documentaries. The photo above is from My Grandfather’s War with Oscar-winning actor Sir Mark Rylance. I did most of the research for the Hong Kong segment (his grandfather being Osmund Skinner of the HKVDC), as well as interviewing him on camera at the Peninsula Hotel. I enjoyed his company, and the following day we walked together (without cameras) through the heart of Hong Kong Island. But there have been numerous other examples, from many interviews with Annemarie Evans on RTHK (here's an old one, about that helmet again), to working with many newspapers and Canadian and British TV channels. But by far my favourite examples was this, shot on a horrendously wet day in 2019 (there was a typhoon: I was soaked getting to the studio, and soaked again leaving), by film-maker Craig McCourry.

My greatest weakness in this subject is that I speak neither Chinese nor Japanese. That puts many primary sources off limits to me, to the point where I often have to explicitly state that I haven’t studied the Japanese point of view at all (and only the Chinese where sources are bilingual). Fortunately others have far better language skills! Tim Ko really pioneered this, with his epic effort to get copies of the Mainichi Shimbun’s photo archives of wartime Hong Kong, which he kindly shared with many of us. More recently, Kwong Chi Man and team have been finding the most incredible (and apparently privately taken) photo albums belonging to ordinary Japanese soldiers. And there is also a very interesting official Japanese history of the Battle of Hong Kong, but unfortunately I don’t believe anyone has translated it yet. On top of this, there is a growing co-operation with Japanese researchers. One example: no one knew the name of the Japanese ship that transported the first British POWs from Hong Kong to Japan. Some families told me it was the Maru Shih (or Shi), others the Shih (or Shi) Maru, and James Ford, MC, of the Royal Scots told me the men called it the Fukyu Maru – but he thought they were joking. But it turned out to be pretty close to the right answer. I quickly discovered that the name Maru Shih had been invented by an American author writing an (otherwise good) book about the hellships. It was the fourth that he couldn’t identify so he simply named it ‘fourth ship’ in Japanese – and families reading the book thought it was the real name. In 2021 Yoshiko Tamura in Yokohama kindly went through the records and definitively identified it as the Fukken Maru. The mystery was solved. And the photo at the top was taken by the Japanese during the great bombardment of Pinewood Battery on 15 December 1941. If you look very closely, you can clearly see one of the British guns.

I got one of those calls from the Hong Kong Police: “We’ve found a body. We want you to identify it”. I joined their search team one April morning, scraping about under an old pumping station on Argyle Street. They had recovered a British-style helmet (what they now call a Brody, though I never heard that name from anyone who served in the war), some bones, a tooth, and what might or might not have been shrapnel. There was a long deep dent in the helmet. The name John Gray (of Langruth, Manitoba) immediately came to mind. There weren’t many men missing in the urban part of Kowloon, and Gray was the obvious candidate as he and Private Shatford had become separated from the company of Winnipeg Grenadiers sent over to Kowloon just before the mainland was evacuated. They reappeared at the Star Ferry terminal, where Lieutenant Forsyth was in command of the final evacuation. He ordered them to remove cars that were blocking the road nearby, which could otherwise give cover to both the Japanese and looters. As the final ferry left the docks, Shatford reappeared with his Thompson submachine gun and jumped on board. But Gray was never seen again. I was sure it must be him; even the damage to the helmet looked consistent with being attacked by looters. I pestered people until DNA tests were done. Now, in those days DNA tests were very expensive, and they had to try several times before they got a sample that could be tested against Gray’s family. And it wasn’t him. I felt awful for the hope of identification that I must have given his family, but the test was clearly negative. What’s more, the helmet turned out to have been manufactured in Hong Kong, probably for use by local uniformed units. I saw the confidential reports, and have an idea of who it might really be, but I am far from certain. If that family ever contacts me, perhaps I’ll reopen the case. Meanwhile, there’s always the possibility this was simply an unrecorded fatality from the ARP or similar. Anyway, whoever it was, he was buried with due ceremony at Stanley Military Cemetery some years later with many of us in attendance.

As you might imagine after nearly four decades of research, I have heard some pretty bizarre stories relating to the war: ghosts and mysterious coincidences, surprising appearances and disappearances, luck both unbelievably good and bad. But perhaps the oddest is that of Herbert Edgar Baptiste. According to the authorities, this Winnipeg Grenadier was lost in the fighting of 19 December 1941 and his body was never identified. And so we all thought until in 2007 an H. Edgar Baptiste published a book called The War Bonnet, telling how he was born on the Red Pheasant Reserve in Saskatchewan in 1919, was injured during the fighting in Hong Kong, and lost his memory. He had been a POW at Sham Shui Po, and at the end of the war, not knowing his true identity he made a new life for himself in England. He wrote that gradually his memories started to come back, and in 1994 he returned to the Red Pheasant Reserve where he says he was recognised by old friends and relations (including his first wife) and because he had knowledge of the Reserve and past events which only he could have known, he was welcomed ‘home’ by his people. But… the Shamshuipo POW list doesn’t mention him. Had he survived, even if he had lost his memory, wouldn’t his comrades have recognised him? And even if not, there’s no record of a John Doe or anyone under an assumed name. Neither he nor any unknown POWs are mentioned in hospital records, and no one is recorded with amnesia. Nor was he identified at Liberation, and neither is his name on any repatriation list I have seen. But then again, why would anyone make up such a story, and if this H. Edgar Baptiste isn’t ‘our’ H. Edgar Baptiste, then who is he? It’s quite a story.

In around 2003 I received an introduction to Duncan Pescod of the Hong Kong Government. He kindly agreed to a meeting, where I sat opposite him at his desk and proudly told him that I had designed a historical trail taking in the World War Two remains at Wong Nai Chung Gap. Silently he reached into a drawer in front of him and extracted a very similar plan (written, I believe, by Bill Greaves). As I recall, it was pretty much the same as mine, but went up hill where mine went down! Either way, I ended up working with six or seven government departments for around two years before we had the trail and its associated signboards up and running in time for a 2005 visit from a Canadian delegation (there were also three separate plaques dedicated at the same time). My colleagues Tim Ko and Tan worked on the signboard photos and plans respectively, while I concentrated on the text. The bad news is that we were all so burned out by the experience (I was told that the signboard text even had to be signed off by Beijing) that we never did another. The good news is that in 2023 the aging signage was modernised and replaced, and other similar signs are now being erected elsewhere across the HKSAR.

Over many years I took the Hong Kong Club walkers out for guided strolls over the battlefields. These ranged from sedate tours around St Stephens’ College and Stanley Cemetery, to proper hikes encompassing the summits of Mount Nicholson and Mount Cameron. We covered Violet Hill, the Shing Mun Redoubt, Wong Nai Chung Gap, the Wanchai area, and pretty much everything else. And in those days when my children were young I had plenty of time sitting, waiting at football practice and games, writing the stories pretty much as I told them – and illustrating them with my own maps and photos taken on the walks, together with photos of the various artefacts I had found on the paths and hills over the years. I found a possible publisher, and his team prepared drafts of a few chapters, and I thought I might get the Hong Kong Club interested in some sort of joint publishing. I forget now where it all broke down, but the project was never finished and I’m just left with the manuscript and memories.

In my opinion the greatest untold story of World War Two is that of the liberation of Allied POWs in Japan. The Americans had assembled a monstrously powerful fleet offshore, ready for the predicted bloodbath of invasion of the Japanese homeland. The Marines and others on board had honed their vicious and effective methods of attack down to a fine art; they were the most efficient killers on Earth. Suddenly – with no warning at all – the atomic bombs ended the war and this murderous killing machine was instantly tasked with saving the tens of thousands of Allied POWs there instead. And with no warning or preparation whatsoever, they performed this task with utterly astonishing levels of confidence, competence, and compassion. No POW rescued by these men ever had a bad thing to say about America (even when sorely tempted in their latter years!) I’ll write that book one day, but, dear reader, imagine my astonishment when the British post office suddenly, in May 2020, released a set of eight stamps to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the end of World War Two, based on archive photographs, and one of them used a colourised version of a photo of the liberation of Omori camp. And there, sandwiched at knee-hight between a gentleman waving the Stars and Stripes and another waving the Union Jack, was the unmistakeable face of ex-Hong Kong POW Tom Middleton, Royal Navy! I alerted the family, and last I heard they were applying to the post office for the original art work.

One shouldn’t have favourites, but I’ve always liked the Middlesex. I’m sure they weren’t quite the bunch of lovable rogues that their stories described, but they certainly had some characters amongst their ranks. There was one (an ex-convict) who – they say - while a POW in Japan was caught stealing a Red Cross parcel, and put in solitary confinement. While there, he stole another 14. He was said to have made an invisible compartment in the cell’s wall in which he stored food for the next inhabitant. Then there was John Frelford, who came across a wounded Japanese soldier early on Christmas morning when trying to link up from Stanley to Deepwater Bay. Separated from his colleagues, he bound the soldier’s wounds with a shell dressing. When the Japanese found them, an officer interrogated him. In Frelford’s own words: “He seemed to be puzzled by such behaviour. I explained that I thought the man was dying and did for him what I hope he would have done for me if the situation was reversed. But I also told him that if he had not been wounded I would have tried to kill him. The officer’s face brightened. ‘For that answer,’ he said, ‘your life is saved’.” Frelford ended up in Stanley rather than Shamshuipo, and the British even considered him for a medal post-war. (To be fair to the Royal Scots, it was Corporal Laird from their ranks who as a POW in Japan received a Japanese medal for jumping into the sea to save the daughter of the harbourmaster from drowning). And then there was Charlie Heather of 247 Ladbroke Grove, London W10. He was the commander of PB63, the pillbox which destroyed the lighter Jeanette on 11 December 1941. He was found wandering about near the Helena May Institute after the explosion; probably dazed, he thought the Japanese were invading. Somehow he survived the sinking of Lisbon Maru despite being so sick he was detained at Shanghai. Known to his friends as Charlie ‘Ever, he was always in the centre of things, and on Liberation is said to have persuaded the Americans to fly him to Calcutta, where he jumped on a Sunderland flying boat which landed him at Poole on 19 September 1945. This marvelous photograph is of him in hospital in London the following day with his parents visiting. There, rightly or wrongly, he was proclaimed the first British ex-FEPOW to return to the city.

Regular visitors to this site will be familiar with the names Ginny, Les Misérables, and Liquidator. At war’s end, America instantly switched from destruction to recovery. Realising that tens of thousands if freshly-liberated Allied POWs needed repatriation from camps in Japan, they quickly modified a large number of B24 bombers to carry men rather than explosives. Liberated POWs were concentrated in Okinawa, from where the USAAF would fly them to Manila. Unfortunately, in the middle of this operation a typhoon appeared, and the three named B24s – loaded with British, Dutch, and Australian ex-POWs – flew into it. Ginny simply disappeared. No trace of the aircraft or those on board has ever been found. Liquidator crashed on a remote peak in Taiwan – the incident and the dangerous recovery of bodies has been well documented, including on this site. The father of entertainer Clive James had been on Liquidator, and his remains – with the other Commonwealth ones – were eventually reinterred in Hong Kong. And Les Misérables stayed airborne long enough for crew and passengers to bail out into the sea by the British destroyer Ursa, but many of the passengers perished. Ten or fifteen years ago I tracked down and interviewed the captain of that plane, Bob Armacost, in the States. A nicer gentleman would be hard to find, but obviously the experience had been very traumatic. Many of those lost on Ginny and Les Mis were ex-Hong Kong, and some had even survived the Lisbon Maru. But that’s not all… Every now and then there have been clues to at least one more aircrash. Veteran Taffy Evans of the Middlesex himself told me of surviving such an accident and – I think, as I wasn’t focused on this story at the time – said that he swam ashore. And every now and then in CWGC records I find other deaths: Gunner William Henry Edward Hart, 3^rd officer Robert Millar Brown, and Gunner Ernest John Bampton, for example, all apparently died on 24 September 1945 in another aircraft that crashed taking off from Okinawa. Initially they were all buried there, before being reinterred in Yokohama; Hart was an ex-Hong Kong POW (which may explain why the card above incorrectly shows his location of death as Hong Kong). But I have yet to track down the plane and the story.

I’m not J.K. Rowling. I don’t have the imagination to come up with so much creative brilliance. Yet I know a good story when I come across one. The story of the sinking of the Lisbon Maru hit all the marks, and listening to the survivors’ stories, and hearing from the families of those who perished, had a huge impact on me. The book that resulted meant much more to me emotionally than Not The Slightest Chance. For years I tried to interest Hollywood, the British Government, anyone, in making a film about it. But I couldn’t have been more surprised when a Chinese entrepreneur and scientist, Fang Li, contacted me out of the blue saying that he wanted to make a major documentary on the topic. He was serious and professional and built a team – of which I am a small part as historical advisor. Covid interrupted development and made things much harder. Not long ago I even thought that the while project had been abandoned, then unexpectedly I received notice that a Special Screening of the current version would be conducted at the British Film Institute on the South Bank in London in mid-August. The timing was terrible from a personal point of view, as I was in the UK on holiday in July when I heard, returning at the end of the month. But it meant so much to me that I bought another ticket and flew back to London. And I was very glad I did. 450 members of the families of the men on board were there. It was in effect the biggest memorial to those lost in the Battle of Hong Kong and its aftermath since 1945. And I was very touched to see my book in so many shots. In fact in the still above, Ron Brooks (who lost his father, Master Gunner Charles Brooks, Royal Artillery, in the sinking) has both The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru and Reduced To A Symbolical Scale on his desk.

There has been a fine tradition in Hong Kong, of university academics doing useful work in recording our wartime history. Lawrence Lai springs to mind, and Stephen Davies and others, and before them Endacott and Birch. But it only gets better. Now we have Wallace Lai (at PolyU) and team leading in ground-breaking LiDAR and remote sensing research into battlefield remains, and Kwong Chi Man and team at Baptist University building their Spatial History system for the battle and the occupation. To me, the latter is a complete game changer in history. Up till now, historical data was available in books (like mine) or individual computer files (like mine), or piles of uncatalogued papers (like mine). But those books, once published, cannot be corrected or added to. And those computer files are simply inaccessible to others - half the time I struggle to find things myself. And my hardcopy files are a disaster. But the approach at Baptist University is based around a database of all the historical information available to them. And while most of the focus has been on the clever visual displays and user interfaces they have built around that database, it is the database itself which has changed the paradigm. From now on, as this database of Hong Kong Second World War information is maintained for the long term by an institution, the data included can be constantly refined, corrected, improved, and added to. There is no single ‘publication date’ at which all the data becomes fossilised and dead, it has the potential to live and evolve for generations. I can imagine all sorts of future individual research and group projects adding to it over decades to come. On the computer on which I am typing this, for example, I have files on every single member of the Hong Kong garrison of 1941. In some cases it is no more than their name and fate, in others pages of data. But if all that, plus photographs, relevant documents, and so forth can be added to that database then we start to build an entire multi-dimensional long-lived model of the conflict and everyone (and everything – pillboxes, equipment, buildings can follow the same model) involved. This changes everything.