The D-Day commemorations in Britain and France were emotive for so many watching around the world. What was happening in Hong Kong at the same time, 75 years ago?
The colony was prostrate under the boot of the Imperial Japanese. The population was declining from 1.6 million before the war to 600,000 after it as the Japanese slaughtered people in the streets and deported the unemployed and homeless. Lieutenant General Isogai Rensuke ruled Hong Kong from the Peninsula Hotel and in 1944 was about to hand-over to General Hisakazu Tanaka, who had directed the landing of Japanese forces in Guangdong. The Japanese were well on their way to 10,000 executions of Hong Kong people and countless rapes, tortures and mutilations. People lived in fear of the 3am knock on the door when armed soldiers would burst in, bent on rape. The most brutal of the Japanese, the Kempeitai, routinely executed people in King’s Park by beheading. They used the Chinese for shooting or bayonet practice. One Japanese corporal dubbed “The Killer”personally beheaded 12 civilians in a few minutes.
Seven thousand British and Commonwealth soldiers and civilians were in prisoner of war camps at Sham Shui Po and Stanley, many dying of disease and malnutrition. The Japanese had set up puppet bodies to manage the population, Chinese Representative Council and Chinese Cooperative Council. They were made up of Chinese and Eurasians, most of whom collaborated “with reluctance and misgiving, and as a matter of physical survival”. Food was scarce across the territory as the Japanese blockaded Victoria Harbour and controlled warehouses. Anything of value was confiscated and sent to Japan. Many residents starved to death. Hundreds of corpses — some with parts of thighs and buttocks removed for food — littered the street. Some residents survived by eating rats.
The only serious resistance against the occupiers came from the East River Column operating in the rural New Territories. They killed traitors and collaborators, marauded with guerilla harassment tactics, rescued American airmen and carried out bombings. The Hong Kong – Kowloon Brigade was also operating locally.
It had emerged from the Guangdong Anti-Japanese Force. The Brigade’s men, numbering around 400, were armed with machine guns and rifles left by the defeated British. They also rescued prisoners of war such as Sir Lindsay Ride and Sir Douglas Clague, later to found Hutchison.
The Brigade, based at Sai Kung, was to merge with the East River guerillas. Now free Sir Lindsay, a professor at the University of Hong Kong, led the British Army Aid Group, helping residents escape from Hong Kong, gathering intelligence and rescuing airmen. The U.S. Army Air Force was incessantly bombing Hong Kong with small groups of aircraft in 1944, targeting Japanese cargo ships in the harbour. Beth Woo, a former Hong Kong resident, passed through telling friends, “Hong Kong is dead and so they will be too.”
There were few public hospitals, most taken over by the military occupiers. The Tung Wah and Kwong Wah hospitals did what they could for the people with minimal supplies, so to the Po Leung Kuk, financed by Tiger Balm magnate Aw Boon Haw. Queen’s Road Central had been renamed Meiji-dori and Des Voeux Road Showa-dori. The Peninsula Hotel was known as Matsumoto. St John’s Cathedral was a social club for the Yamato-kai. A newspaper called Hong Kong News had been revived as a Japanese propaganda tool and staffed by Eurasians, Portuguese and Indians who before the occupation had worked for the South China Morning Post.
Seichi Fujimara, the architect, was adding his Japanese-style tower to Government House. It still stands today. In 1944 the people of Hong Kong were aware the progress of the war no longer favoured the Japanese. They stopped collaborating and Hong Kong was sliding into anarchy. In February that year Surgeon Li Shu-fan, who had made his way to London, assured the Colonial Office and the Foreign Office that most Chinese would prefer British rule to Chinese rule after the war. Winston Churchill declared Hong Kong would be removed from the British Empire “over my dead body”.
Imagining we are in Hong Kong in June 1944, relief was to come 14 months later. The American A-bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima brought Japan to its knees. The Russians had launched a major offensive in Manchuria. The Americans were fighting across the islands of the Pacific. Imperial Japan surrendered. Frank Gimson, who had arrived the day before the invasion to be Colonial Secretary, heard about the surrender in prison camp. He left the camp and declared himself acting Governor. Rear Admiral Sir Cecil Harcourt steamed with a fleet from Sydney sailing into Victoria Harbour on the cruiser HMS Swiftsure. He accepted the surrender of General Umekichi Okada and Vice Admiral Ruitaro Fujita at Government House.
Hong Kong recovered with astonishing speed. Immigrants flooded in. The economy took off. The colonial power realised that the former racial polices — Chinese forbidden to go to some beaches or live on the Peak — had to go. The great city that we know today was to rise from the ruins of war.
This article is a mere snapshot, an attempt, doubtlessly flawed and incomplete, to paint a picture of what Hong Kong was like 75 years ago. It is based on Wikipedia, John Carroll’s A Concise History of Hong Kong and Philip Snow’s the Fall of Hong Kong. In the age of interactive journalism, any historian who would like to write an original piece on Hong Kong in 1944 is welcome.
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