Anyone who thinks that the horrors of the Japanese invasion and occupation of Hong Kong in World War Two have been adequately chronicled should read two impressively researched and highly readable new books on this traumatic episode. Their authors, Tony Banham and Philip Snow, came separately to the FCC to talk about their work. Jonathan Sharp reports.

Tony Banham’s day job is as a marketing executive with a software company. But in his spare time over the past 14-odd years he has zealously researched the battle for Hong Kong, which ended with British humiliation when Governor Sir Mark Young signed the surrender in a candle-lit Peninsula Hotel room on Christmas night, 1941. Banham has not only walked the battlefields – discovering, by the way, that quantities of ammunition still litter the territory – but pored through records and interviewed hundreds of veterans or their relatives. The resulting enormous amount of data has been packaged in his book Not The Slightest Chance, the title taken from Winston Churchill’s estimation of Hong Kong’s chances in the event of a Japanese attack.

Banham said his initial quest was to fill in gaps in existing accounts of the battle, in particular to track down the fate of every casualty, at least on the alliesd side. One achievement has been to correct over 200 records for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Banham’s researches also led him into some odd corners: a Hong Kong veteran’s grandson that he contacted disclosed that he was the manager of the biggest lap-dancing club in Glasgow.

The book has an hour-by-hour diary of the battle and voluminous appendices that include such minutiae as the names of residents at the Repulse Bay hotel during the fighting. Banham said many people he had contacted felt cheated that the battle for Hong Kong had been forgotten or ignored. People were still very emotionally concerned, he said. “I can now tell when somebody is crying while writing an e-mail.”

Philip Snow’s book The Fall of Hong Kong, despite the overlap with Banham’s work, is to a considerable extent complementary as it covers a much broader canvas. While many books on wartime Hong Kong focus on the plight of the British and their allies during the fighting and incarceration, Snow looks at the occupation from the standpoint of all major players: Hong Kong Chinese, the British, the Japanese and the mainland Chinese. He chronicles the savagery inflicted on the Hong Kong population following the Japanese victory, but also subsequent attempts made by the Japanese to win people over. These included local community leaders, a few of whom welcomed the Japanese arrival, initially at least.

Amid the sufferings and privations of the occupation, as the Japanese displayed their unmatched genius for alienating potential allies, there were moments of farce. As the book recounts: “In April 1945, when the bulk of the starving Japanese ponies at Happy Valley had died and been eaten, the authorities substituted miniature wooden horses which were trundled round the racecourse on wires in a frantic attempt to keep up the general jollity. But the punters weren’t interested.”

A central theme of Snow’s book is that the Japanese occupation represented a turning-point in Hong Kong’s history that has not been recognised. While the British resumed control of Hong Kong after the Japanese defeat, they never recovered the same sort of dominance they enjoyed before. “…the Japanese occupation was not in my view an insignificant episode in Hong Kong’s history,” Snow, the son of English author C.P. Snow, told the FCC lunch. “It was a chapter in the decline and fall of European power in East Asia. It did mark the end of true British supremacy in Hong Kong.”

Not the Slightest Chance. The Defence of Hong Kong, 1941.
By Tony Banham
Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9622096158
HB; 450 pp
HK$295

The Fall of Hong Kong. Britain, China and the Japanese Occupation
By Philip Snow
Yale University Press
ISBN: 0-300-09352-7
HB; 477 pp
HK$295