‘We have come here as conquerors. You will do as we say’
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 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
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.
Meanwhile, in Macau, the administration of Commander Gabriel Teixeira trod a delicate path. As mentioned, 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. Nevertheless, the collapse of 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 President Roosevelt, who had died in April 1945, believed that Hong Kong should revert to
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 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.
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 |
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