National Library of Australia - Home page
NLA News - home September 2005 Volume XV Number 12

‘We have come here as conquerors. You will do as we say’

click to enlarge
Lieutenant G. Albert meets a Japanese envoy on the quarterdeck of HMS Swiftsure in Hong Kong Harbour, 30 August 1945
Braga Collection, Pictures Collection

Stuart Braga tells the story of Hong Kong’s liberation in World  War II, and how his uncle Jack Braga, later brought his important collection documenting the European presence in East Asia from the sixteenth to twentieth century to Australia for inclusion in the National Library’s collection

By flickering candlelight in the early evening of Christmas Day 1941, in the darkened Peninsula Hotel, Kowloon, Sir Mark Young KCMG, Governor of HongKong, became the first British colonial governor to surrender to one of His Majesty’s enemies, the victorious Imperial Japanese Army. It had taken less than three weeks for the British garrison to be overwhelmed following the Japanese attack on 8 December.

There followed 44 months of severe hardship for the population, most of whom were Chinese, with a small elite of British administrators and business people. More fortunate were 3474 British women and children evacuated to Australia in July 1940 following the Japanese occupation of French Indo-China. Many, including the present writer, were to make their homes permanently here.

click to enlarge
St Stephen’s College, Stanley, Hong Kong. Reproduced from Hong Kong Fellowship Newsletter, No. 1, March 1943 Braga Collection Some 2300 civilian internees were crowded into this boys’ school and its surrounding buildings from 1942 to 1945
click to enlarge
Fausto Sampaio (d.1954)
[Portrait of Jack Braga], Macau, 1936 drawing; 51.7 x 38.0 cm
J.M. Braga Collection
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn3295039

There was another large group of people who escaped the prisoner-of-war and internment camps awaiting British soldiers and civilians: this was the sizeable Portuguese community. They, or their forebears, had earlier left the old Portuguese colony of Macau only 60 kilometres away for the greater opportunities offered by the stronger economy of the nearby British colony. In the early months of 1942, most of them returned to Macau, which remained precariously neutral throughout the war. In addition, there were almost 10 000 British subjects, 1000 American citizens, and smaller numbers of other Europeans there. Despite economic stagnation caused by the war, they were at least safe, even if hungry and underemployed. There were also several hundred thousand Chinese refugees whose sufferings were pitiful, and many starved to death. However, essential services never failed, and no-one suffered at the hands of a cruel invader.

Remaining in Hong Kong were 7000 British prisoners of war, crammed into an army barracks in Kowloon, while another 2300 British civilian internees were crowded uncomfortably into a boys’ school at Stanley on Hong Kong Island. Internees found three things hardest to bear: the lack of food, the lack of news and the lack of privacy.

Perhaps the unluckiest prisoner at Stanley was Hong Kong’s Colonial Secretary, Franklin Gimson, who had taken up office only the day before the Japanese attack. Gimson felt the wrath of other internees, who blamed the government for the many shortcomings in Hong Kong’s civil defence. No matter that he had not been there to prepare them: as head of the Civil Service, he had to take the blame for the ‘colonial lethargy’ that marked British behaviour in pre-war Hong Kong. It took Gimson much of the next three years to establish his authority as he and other senior officials began to plan for the day when the war ended. They did not doubt that Hong Kong would return to its pre-war status as a British colony, although they expected that there would be constitutional reforms giving the vast Chinese majority some role in public affairs.

click to enlarge
Renascimento, 11 August 1945. Japanese surrender was imminent
Newspapers Collection
X 1021, pkt no. 111

Meanwhile, in Macau, the administration of Commander Gabriel Teixeira trod a delicate path. As mentioned, Portugal was neutral in this war, though its other Far Eastern possession, East Timor, was occupied by the Japanese. In Macau, the British consul, J.P. Reeves, kept the flag flying. It was the only Union Jack between India and Hawaii, apart from that at the British Embassy at Chungking. Reeves gave tacit consent to a well-developed underground resistance movement, the British Army Aid Group, led by an Australian, Lindsay Ride, Professor of Physiology at Hong Kong University. He was supported by Anglophile members of the Portuguese community, prominent among them my uncle, J.M. (Jack) Braga, who had already begun to collect a significant library on the activities of the Portuguese in the Far East. The war put a stop to his acquisition of books, but instead he began to record the life of the large English-speaking community in its efforts to maintain a vibrant cultural life in these extraordinary conditions.

By mid-1945 it was obvious to local people that the war was finally coming to an end, as the growing number of air raids told of increasing American air supremacy. Braga began to collect newspapers, including the English edition of the Portuguese newspaper Renascimento, which by mid-1945 was able to give accurate information about the collapse of Nazi Germany. Now held in the National Library of Australia, these papers tell a dramatic story of rapidly growing excitement.

click to enlarge
Captain J.A.S. Eccles, RN, Military Governor of Kowloon, reads the terms of surrender to Japanese officers on 4 September 1945 in the Peninsula Hotel, where the British surrender had taken place nearly four years earlier. Eccles told them, ‘We have come here as conquerors. You will do as we say.’
Braga Collection, Pictures Collection

Nevertheless, the collapse of Japan, when it came, had bewildering suddenness. The Emperor’s rescript announcing the surrender was broadcast on 15 August 1945, and read to a stunned Japanese garrison in Hong Kong next day. At Stanley, the prisoners found an immediate and dramatic improvement in the attitude of the guards. Franklin Gimson sought an interview with the prison governor, who confirmed the news of the surrender, ending simply, ‘You’ve won; we’ve lost.’ The next question was: Who would control Hong Kong now?

No-one in either Hong Kong or Macau knew that the world had been divided into separate combat theatres by the Allies. The South-West Pacific Area was commanded by an American, General Douglas MacArthur, and extended from Australia to the coast of China. The China Command was held by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, and included Hong Kong. Naturally, the Chinese government wanted Hong Kong back. Just as naturally the British, ingloriously defeated and humiliated in 1941, wanted to return with a show of as much strength as they could muster. That required the consent of America, because the British Pacific Fleet, stationed in Sydney, came under MacArthur’s command. The Hong Kong issue had to be resolved at top level, and went to the desk of the new United States President, Harry S. Truman.

President Roosevelt, who had died in April 1945, believed that Hong Kong should revert to China, but by August 1945 Truman had lost confidence in Chiang. Busy with the occupation of Germany and Japan, Truman left the matter for the British and Chinese to work out themselves. With a large British fleet under Rear Admiral Cyril Harcourt now steaming north from Sydney, Chiang backed down. He too had higher priorities: the reoccupation of Manchuria and the cities of Peking, Shanghai, Nanking and Canton. Hong Kong would have to wait—but to save Chinese ‘face’ it was arranged that Harcourt would accept the Japanese surrender on behalf of both Britain and China. Meanwhile the Colonial Secretary, Franklin Gimson, had taken matters into his own hands. He told the Japanese authorities to give him a bus, drove into the city with senior officers, and had the Chief Justice, also an internee, swear him in as Hong Kong’s Acting Governor. He set up a token administration in a building near the headquarters of the Japanese, who were in the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank building, the largest and most prestigious in the colony. The Japanese officials, still the de facto rulers of Hong Kong, had to walk up a pathway to see Gimson, a symbolic humiliation—though Gimson’s was literally a skeleton government, with a handful of emaciated and ragged British officials in bare offices trying to restore a semblance of the old colonial government.

click to enlarge
Vice Admiral Ruitako Fujita, Commander of the Japanese South China Fleet, arrives at Government House, Hong Kong, for the surrender ceremony, 12 September 1945
Braga Collection, Pictures Collection

On 28 August 1945, Gimson announced on Radio Hong Kong that an interim British administration had been installed. Two days later the British fleet sailed slowly into the harbour, preceded by eight Australian minesweepers (which had been in the Philippines, and joined Harcourt’s fleet). Harcourt wanted no repetition of the Dardanelles debacle in 1915, when a combined British and French fleet was forced to retreat after steaming into a minefield with the loss of several battleships. Over the next days and weeks, British military administrators took command, and business slowly resumed. Among the first was the republishing of the South China Morning Post, the major English-language newspaper in the region. Jack Braga, still in Macau, collected a copy of each issue of this newspaper. Together these tell a remarkable story of how power was transferred to British control.

It was two weeks before British forces could take over from the Japanese regime. Admiral Harcourt took the Japanese surrender on 12 September, at Government House on Hong Kong Island. Some days later, Captain J. Eccles of HMS Indomitable sat in the Peninsula Hotel, Kowloon, where Sir Mark Young had surrendered in 1941, to accept the Japanese surrender on the mainland—but the Japanese officers were late, and the ceremony was postponed. Next day they were punctual, but an annoyed Eccles told them firmly, ‘We have come here as conquerors. You will do as we say.’ The evacuation of Stanley camp also took several weeks. The South China Morning Post, initially printed in a very small edition, and still paid for in Japanese military yen, was produced chiefly for this community. They had been ordered to remain at the camp because there was nowhere else for them to go. The newspaper recorded the frustration of people who were desperate to get away. In Macau too, the British refugee population, much larger than that of Stanley camp, was told to stay put by the British Consul, through announcements in Renascimento. Not until the troopship Empress of Australia arrived with 3000 troops in mid-September could most of them get away.

click to enlarge
Notice reproduced from Renascimento, 22 August 1945
Newspapers Collection,
X 1021 pkt no. 111

In the next few months, a new set of colonial administrators came to replace those whose vitality never returned following their long internment. Political and constitutional reform of Hong Kong, much spoken of during the war, never eventuated. Eccles’ admonition to the Japanese, ‘You will do as we say’, was applied to the Chinese population as well. Yet within 40 years—in 1984—the British Government was obliged to reach agreement with the Chinese Government to return Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty. Although Franklin Gimson had won the race to fill the immediate power vacuum in 1945, in the long run the Chinese claim for legitimacy was to prevail.

In the meantime, in 1966 Jack Braga came to Australia, just as the British refugees had done a quarter of a century earlier—bringing with him his outstanding record of four centuries of European presence in the Far East, and his unique documentation of the crisis in World War II which saw the beginning of its end there.

STUART BRAGA has written several books and articles on Australian military history, in addition to this article touching on the way in which Word War II affected his family

Back to NLA News Index Back to September Issue Back to NLA Home Page
NLA News - home

To order a particular issue of the NLA News e-mail nlasales@nla.gov.au
or join the Friends of the National Library of Australia and receive a copy each month by mail.