Battle of Hong Kong (1941): The Black Christmas Surrender

The Battle of Hong Kong was fought between 8 and 25 December 1941, when the Imperial Japanese Army invaded the British colony on the south China coast only hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor. A garrison of about 14,000 British, Indian, Canadian and locally raised troops held out for 18 days before the governor surrendered on Christmas Day. The defeat began a harsh occupation that lasted almost four years.

Background

Hong Kong lay deep inside the zone controlled by Japan, which had been at war with China since 1937 and had occupied the neighbouring province of Guangdong in 1938. British planners privately judged the colony impossible to hold or relieve and regarded it as an outpost to be defended for as long as possible.

Late in 1941 the British government nevertheless accepted a Canadian offer of reinforcements, hoping to signal resolve. Two battalions, the Winnipeg Grenadiers and the Royal Rifles of Canada, arrived in November 1941. Many of their men had limited training and their vehicles never arrived. The garrison was commanded by Major-General Christopher Maltby, while Governor Sir Mark Young held overall civil authority.

What happened

On the morning of 8 December 1941 Japanese aircraft destroyed the few RAF planes at Kai Tak airfield, and the 38th Division of the Japanese 23rd Army, under Lieutenant-General Takashi Sakai, crossed the border. The main defensive position on the mainland, the Gin Drinkers’ Line, was meant to hold for weeks. But the key Shing Mun Redoubt fell on the night of 9–10 December, and by 13 December Maltby had withdrawn all forces from Kowloon to Hong Kong Island.

Young twice rejected Japanese demands to surrender. On the night of 18 December Japanese troops crossed the harbour and landed on the north-east of the island around North Point and Shau Kei Wan. They pushed inland to the central gap at Wong Nai Chung, splitting the defenders into an East and a West Brigade. On 19 December the Canadian Brigadier John K. Lawson, commander of the West Brigade, was killed at his headquarters at the gap.

Bitter fighting followed across the hills and reservoirs of the island. At Jardine’s Lookout, Company Sergeant-Major John Osborn of the Winnipeg Grenadiers threw himself on a grenade to save his comrades, and was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. By 25 December the defenders had lost their water supply and most of their ammunition, and Maltby advised that further resistance was useless. That afternoon Young crossed to the Peninsula Hotel in Kowloon and surrendered the colony.

Atrocities

The fighting was marked by killings of prisoners and wounded men. Captured soldiers were murdered at several points on the island, and on the morning of 25 December Japanese troops entered St Stephen’s College at Stanley, then used as a military hospital, and killed wounded soldiers and medical staff, also assaulting nurses. Several of these crimes were examined at war crimes trials after 1945, and Sakai was tried by a Chinese military tribunal and executed in 1946.

By the numbers

Occupation and aftermath

About 10,000 servicemen became prisoners of war, held in camps at Sham Shui Po, North Point and Argyle Street, and later in Japan, where many worked as forced labourers. Civilian internees were held at Stanley. Disease, hunger and brutality killed many; the Canadians alone lost about 260 men in captivity, in addition to some 290 killed in battle.

For Hong Kong’s Chinese population the occupation brought hunger, curfews, a worthless military currency and forced deportations. The population fell from about 1.6 million in 1941 to around 600,000 by 1945. A small resistance network, including the British Army Aid Group and the East River guerrillas, helped prisoners escape and gathered intelligence. After the surrender of Japan, a Royal Navy squadron under Rear-Admiral Cecil Harcourt reached Hong Kong on 30 August 1945, and British rule resumed.

Legacy

In Canada the battle prompted a royal commission in 1942 and long debate about why poorly prepared troops were sent to an indefensible post. In Hong Kong, the Cenotaph, the Sai Wan War Cemetery and memorial trails at Wong Nai Chung Gap commemorate the defenders. The memory of the occupation shaped the colony’s later history up to the handover of Hong Kong in 1997.

Timeline

• 1941, 16 November: Canadian battalions arrive in Hong Kong.
• 1941, 8 December: Japanese bombing of Kai Tak and invasion across the border.
• 1941, 9–10 December: Shing Mun Redoubt falls, breaking the Gin Drinkers’ Line.
• 1941, 13 December: Last defenders withdraw from Kowloon to the island.
• 1941, 18–19 December: Japanese land on Hong Kong Island; Brigadier Lawson killed.
• 1941, 25 December: Governor Sir Mark Young surrenders the colony.
• 1945, 30 August: British naval forces arrive to end the occupation.

Why it matters

The fall of Hong Kong was the first British colony lost in the Pacific War and an early sign of how quickly Japan could overrun European possessions in Asia. It left a lasting mark on Hong Kong’s people and on Canada, whose soldiers fought their first battle of the Second World War there.