Desperate Siege; The Battle of Hong Kong
Ann Ball (Maps) Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1980. Book Club Edition. Hardcover. viii, [4], 252, [2] pages. Pencil erasure residue noted on fep. Includes Author's Note, 19 chapters, bibliography and index. DJ worn. For eighteen days, the heavily outnumbered soldiers of Canada surpassed all expectations, winning lasting honor on the battlefield before being marched off to spend four and a half years in Japanese prison camps. They had endured constant air strikes, artillery barrages, vicious assaults, and hand-to-hand combat. Their heroic sacrifice was made all the more tragic when one realizes that, from the start, they were considered expendable. Based on interviews with survivors of the battle and the POW cages, this book is a powerful tale of human courage in the face of impossible odds. The Hong Kong expedition was a shameful tragedy. Nearly two thousand Canadian soldiers, poorly trained and badly equipped, were sent to help defend an outpost that Winston Churchill had already written off as expendable. After only seventeen days' fighting, the British colony collapsed on Christmas Day 1941, and the survivors spent the remainder of the war in barbarous POW camps. Over three decades later, the Hong Kong veterans had impaired physical health, recurring nightmares, and a high rate of alcoholism. For ten years, Ted Ferguson worked as a newspaper reporter, television critic, sports columnist, and magazine writer, before becoming a full-time freelance writer. He has published eight books, including the Alberta Non-Fiction Book Award winner, Desperate Siege. His book Blue Cuban Nights was published in 2006. His memoir, Back Roads, was published by NeWest in 2008. Derived from a Kirkus review: In 1941 the British had held Hong Kong for a hundred years and it was called "the Gibraltar of the Orient." Even so, Churchill and others thought it indefensible and were reluctant to "waste" first-rate troops in its defense. So the Royal Rifles of Canada and the Winnipeg Grenadiers were secretly dispatched to the colony--the worst-trained, raggedy-ass misfits bearing arms in Canada. This is the story of how these misfits sustained the siege of Hong Kong from December 8, 1941 to Christmas Day, a period of resistance nearly double that envisioned by the Japanese. From interviews with the survivors, Ferguson presents eyewitness reports of the fighting. There were 12,000 British troops holding the area, but "malaria and Hong Kong's fairyland atmosphere had softened the core of all the units," according to Major General Maltby, commander Of the Hong Kong garrison. All the garrison's big guns were trained outward to repel invasion by sea, but the 60,000-man enemy strike force descended in mobile semi-guerrilla fashion from the mainland border with China. A rumor that Chiang Kai-shek had massed 60,000 troops to bring in against the Japanese proved false. Kowloon, on the mainland, fell. The battle on Hong Kong island itself became a block-by-block British retreat--punctuated, one quiet Sunday morning, by the haunting voice of Vera Lynn singing "We'll Meet Again": a musical propaganda broadcast by the Japanese. Chinese shopowners tried to ignore the noise of battle and keep up business as usual. And despite the ferocious Canadian resistance, despite the rape, murder, and massacre that accompanied the Japanese, when the captured British were transferred from Hong Kong, "crowds gathered on Kowloon streets, jeering, spitting, and throwing rocks at the 'foreign devils' who had risked their lives defending them." Some memorably ghastly highpoints, but mostly a straightforward account, steadily interesting and ironic. Condition: Very good / Good.
Keywords: Hong Kong, Atrocities, Charles Boxes, Royal Rifles of Canada, Winnipeg Grenadiers, John Lawson, Kowloon, Christopher Maltby, POWs, Prisoners of War, 2nd Royal Scots, First Regiment of Foot, Takashi Sakai. 2/14 Punjab, Mark Young, Ann Ball
[Book #82323]
Price: $20.00