by Joseph George Caldwell. Copyright 1999 © Joseph George Caldwell. All rights reserved.
The following piece was originally published as Appendix K to the book, Can America Survive? posted at Internet website http://www.foundationwebsite.org.
Two of my uncles fought the Japanese in World War II. They were captured by the Japanese, and served as prisoners of war for nearly four hard years. Their experiences shed light on the Japanese mentality and capability to wage war. The experience of my uncles provides an insight into this capability, and for that reason it is summarized here.
My uncles were part of a force of 1,975 that had been sent by Canada to present a “show of force” to the Japanese. The British had already decided that Hong Kong could not be defended, and had started to withdraw their forces. They decided it would look good, however, if the Empire put up a token show of force, instead of simply abandoning Hong Kong without a fight.
As a result, Churchill asked Canada to send troops to Hong Kong. The troops were never told that the position there was considered untenable by the British, and that they were in fact evacuating for that very reason. They were sent to their deaths by Canada, out of a perverted sense of patriotism for the British Empire. While it is common practice to sacrifice a unit in combat for the sake of winning a battle, this move made no sense whatsoever. The British had written Hong Kong off. It was lost. Sending 1,975 Canadians to their doom accomplished nothing. Indeed, even today it engenders contempt and disgust for the Canadian leaders who would knowingly sacrifice the lives of brave young Canadian soldiers for no good reason at all.
Two regiments, the Royal Rifles of Canada and the Winnipeg Grenadiers, were sent to Hong Kong. Uncle Bob and Uncle Frank had volunteered for the Royal Rifles. These were volunteer units of citizen soldiers. They were poorly trained and ill-equipped for battle.
They arrived in Hong Kong on November 16, 1941. On December 8, the Japanese moved against Hong Kong, just as they did against the US in Pearl Harbor (still December 7 there). The battle lasted for seventeen days. Canadian losses were 276 killed, died of wounds, or murdered.
Uncle Bob told me of the last day – Christmas Day, 1941. It was horrible. Accounts of the battle are presented in The Royal Rifles of Canada in Hong Kong (Hong Kong Veterans’ Association of Canada, now out of print), in Canada’s Glory by Arthur Bishop and in Hell on Earth by Dave McIntosh (both still in print).
(In what follows I talk mainly of Uncle Bob and not of Uncle Frank. Uncle Bob is very much alive, and the knowledge I have of the battle of Hong Kong is from him. Unfortunately, Uncle Frank died before I was able to talk with him about his wartime experiences, and so I don’t know details of his time there. I believe that Uncle Frank was in C Company.)
The Japanese were brutal. On December 25, soldiers entered the emergency hospital at St. Stephen’s College. There were about 100 patients and seven nurses. The Japanese bayoneted about seventy of the wounded patients in their beds. They shot and bayoneted the two doctors who tried to prevent the massacre. They raped all of the nurses and killed five of them.
The Royal Rifles served with highest distinction. They fought without rest for the five days before Christmas, and were collapsing from exhaustion by Christmas Eve. The Japanese forces overwhelmed the island, and at 3:15 p.m. on Christmas Day, Major General Charles Maltby, commander of the garrison, advised the governor of the island that further resistance was futile (the Japanese force numbered 30,000).
The regimental commander, British Brigadier Cedric Wallis was informed of the decision to surrender (by Lt. Col. R. G. Lamb), but because the order was not in writing, he refused to accept it. He was determined to hold out, regardless of how many Canadian lives it may cost. Further resistance was in fact futile. The men were outnumbered and exhausted, with little ammunition. There was no food or water, no artillery support, and no mortar ammunition. In front of the Royal Rifles was a massive Japanese army, well armed with artillery, mortars, and tanks, and behind them was the sea.
Despite the situation, at 10 o’clock in the morning of Christmas Day, Brigadier Wallis ordered Lt. Col. Home (commanding officer of the Royal Rifles regiment) to send a company to attack a group of bungalows on the ridge in Stanley Village. Lt. Col. Home protested that such an attack in daylight would most likely be unproductive of any results but additional Canadian casualties. Brigadier Wallis was unmoved, and D Company was ordered to proceed on this suicide mission. (Uncle Bob was in 16th Platoon, D Company.) They attacked in broad daylight (a hot, bright, clear day) without artillery support, and were virtually wiped out – of about 130-140 men, 26 were killed and 75 were wounded. The 17th and 18th Platoons took the brunt of the attack. Sgt. Macdonnel’s graphic description of this last assault is on pp. 84-91 of Royal Rifles of Canada in Hong Kong. A British officer fighting alongside also describes this “last glorious charge of the Canadian, up through the grave-yard and into the windows of the bungalows at the top…. Very few of the Canadians survived that gallant charge.”
Sgt. Macdonnel ordered the men to fix bayonet and charge, and they did so “with fearful war-whoops.” In hand-to-hand combat, they drove the Japanese from their much superior position on high ground, and occupied the bungalows. The Japanese regrouped and proceeded to shell the houses. With ammunition running out and the houses being blown to pieces, Macdonnel received orders to pull back to the Stanley Prison Fortress. At about 5 p.m. in the afternoon, D Company collected its wounded and returned to Stanley Fort.
At six o’clock in the evening Brigadier Wallis ordered Lt. Col. Home to send another company down Stanley Village road. A Company was ordered to proceed, in full view of the Japanese. A heavy barrage of Japanese artillery killed six and wounded twelve.
A second time, verbal orders were relayed to Brigadier Wallis that the forces had surrendered at 3 p.m. Once more he refused to comply until a written order was received. Word was circulated, however, that all units would cease firing unless attacked. C Company received word of the surrender at 9 p.m. Brigadier Wallis did not fly the white flag of surrender until he received the written surrender order, at 2:30 p.m. the following day (Dec. 26). The gallant men of the Royal Rifles of Canada – a small band of volunteer citizen-soldiers against a large, battle-hardened army – had fought and died in bloody combat three hours longer than necessary.
The Royal Rifles of Canada in Hong Kong presents a scathing critique of the defense of Hong Kong, from the bad decision of Canada to send reinforcements to Hong Kong in the first place, to the unfortunate placing of the Regiment under the command of an inept British officer, to the faulty tactics that resulted in needless casualties. The critique also cites inadequate training, shortage of arms and ammunition, shortage of vehicles, inadequate time for acclimatization and rest from a long sea voyage. The Canadian forces were not briefed on their objectives or adequately trained for war (battle tactics). They were sent to fight a vastly larger, battle-hardened Japanese force that knew how to wage war. The Royal Rifles were repeatedly ordered to attack in broad daylight without benefit of mortar or artillery support against a fresh, well-equipped Japanese army that had both artillery and air support. “Hong Kong has come to be regarded as one of the major mistakes of the British and Canadian Governments during World War II.”
Several good books have been written about Hong Kong, and I will not present details here. These books include:
1. The Royal Rifles of Canada in Hong Kong 1941-1945, Hong Kong Veterans’ Association of Canada (many excerpts from Sgt. Lance Ross’s diary)
2. Seventeen Days Until Christmas, by Léo Paul Bérard
3. Hell on Earth, by Dave McIntosh
4. Canada’s Glory: Battles that Forged a Nation, by Arthur Bishop
A fascinating video on the topic is The Valour and the Horror, written by Terence and Brian McKenna and presented by History Presents (The History Channel, Canada). The first (of three) segment, Episode 1: Savage Christmas: Hong Kong 1941 is about Hong Kong.
The fall of Hong Kong was just the beginning of the war for Uncle Bob and Uncle Frank. Uncle Bob and Frank served as prisoners of war for a year in Hong Kong. After capture, they were marched north to North Point Camp (on Hong Kong Island), where they remained a few months under terrible conditions. They were then moved to Sham Shui Po on Kowloon (the Chinese mainland).
One hundred and thirty three prisoners died in North Point and Shamshuipo Camps. Most died from diphtheria, dysentery, and avitaminosis, others from malaria, beriberi, pneumonia, tuberculosis, pellagra, and other diseases. In September of 1942 diphtheria was epidemic. As many as seven men died in a single day. The epidemic continued until October 21; Uncle Bob’s friend Ted died on October 14.
On August 20, 1942, four members of the Winnipeg Grenadiers escaped from North Point Camp. They were captured, tortured for a week, and then executed. A Japanese Sergeant Yoshida later boasted about killing four Canadians with his sword. The word in Camp was that they had been beheaded; the bodies were never found.
On January 19, 1943, they and 664 other prisoners were marched to the docks and departed at seven o’clock in the morning on board the coastal freighter the Tatu Maru, for Japan.
They landed in Nagasaki (on the island of Kyushu) at 8 p.m. on January 22. Uncle Bob and Uncle Frank were separated at that point. Uncle Bob was put on a train and sent to the Omine Camp (within a hundred miles of Nagasaki, and 40 miles from Fukuoka) to work in a Japanese coal mine. Uncle Frank was sent to work in a dockyard/shipyard near Tokyo.
The Japanese treated the Hong Kong prisoners of war horribly. They were forced to work as slave labor under the most barbaric treatment and conditions. They were underfed, underclothed, overworked, and denied medical treatment. A total of 267 of them perished from starvation, beriberi, and other disease.
Twelve Canadians died in Omine Camp from malnutrition and overwork.
Omine Camp was a square camp, with two enclosures. There was no heat in the wintertime, and was quite cold – a few degrees below zero. The only heat was in the steam room. The steam room was for drying clothing and off limits. If you, against the Japanese wishes, spent time in the steam room, you would get pneumonia and die. And then there were the sand fleas. Winter and summer, they would crawl into your clothing, and “bite like Hell,” particularly at night if you wore any clothes at all.
The POW commander in the Omine Camp was a British then-Major Robertson. Col. H. G. G. Robertson was a medical doctor, a member of the Royal Army Medical Corps. According to Uncle Bob, “he never bent an inch.” The Japanese had confiscated all jewelry and watches. Major Robertson made a sundial out of wood, bearing the inscription, “Yet nightly pitch my moving tent; a day’s march closer home.”
Uncle Bob told me that “Major Robertson gave us courage and Huey Lim gave us hope.” Huey Lim was a Eurasian who had been assigned to the unit after they were captured. His father was English, his mother Chinese. He could read Japanese, which he said was the same as Chinese except for affixes (prefixes, suffixes). Regularly, parts of newspapers were left in the mines – wrappings for food and the like. Huey Lim would read these newspapers to the prisoners. When you are totally cut off from everything, news becomes incredibly important. From the dates on the newspapers and the place names (Coral Sea, Guam), they learned how the war was progressing.
Huey Lim was in large measure responsible for the high morale in the camp. It was speculated that he was a plant. In any event, “he served our camp well.” Right after the two atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Huey Lim disappeared. He went out to find out what was taking place, and was never seen again.
Toward the end of the war, when it was clear that the Japanese were losing, the Japanese leadership decided that it would be a good idea to execute all of the prisoners of war – “dead men tell no tales.” But the war ended sooner than expected, before the plan could be carried out. Uncle Bob and Frank would have been executed had it not been for the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Uncle Bob kept a diary throughout the war. He told me that when the war ended he was on his last legs, and would not have lasted much longer.
The war was over for Uncle Bob on August 15, 1945. In September, he passed by Nagasaki. He said that where the bomb dropped there was nothing left of it – “it was like a wheat field.” How do I feel about Nagasaki and Hiroshima? They were a good start.
The Japanese are formidable enemies. Another good book on the subject is The Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang. The Comfort Women, by George Hicks discusses the history of the Japanese military comfort system.
Throughout the war, our family and many others waited anxiously for news about our soldiers, and prayed for their safe return. During the war, my great uncle Ernest Barter (Grandfather Leslie’s older brother), wrote a poem about the boys who served in Hong Kong. Until now, it has never been published.
Tribute to the Brave Boys in Hong Kong
by Ernest Barter (1871-1959)
When our empire was invaded,
And called for volunteers
They quickly joined the Royal Ranks
Though some were young in years.
Which caused some tender hearts to ache
And hoary heads to bow.
Where scarcely eighteen summers
Shone on some youthful brow.
They heeded not the ties of love
That bid them fondly stay.
But crossed the wide Pacific span
To the thickest of the fray.
Where cannons roar like thunder
And shrapnel swiftly flies
And drums and trumpets sounding
To drown all dismal cries.
‘Twas there they fell those gallant youths
As poets oft-times said
The brilliant sun that never sets
Where slumbers England’s dead.
Now let the palm tree and poppy flowers
Their leaves by soft winds fan,
The graves of those who slumber there
‘Neath Hong Kong’s bloody sand.
O loved ones sleep and take thy rest,
A calm and sweet repose
Where the summer winds blow soft and fair
Where blooms the tropic rose.
Till the Lord shall give that quickening shout
And set the captives free
When death shall lose its venom sting
The grave its victory.
FndID(3)
FndTitle(A Family Experience with the Japanese)
FndDescription(Harsh treatment of prisoners of war by the Japanese in World War II.)
FndKeywords(Japanese prisoners of war; fall of Hong Kong; Camp Omine)