Download or read book Battle For Hong Kong written by Oliver Lindsay and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2016-09-14 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this remarkable study of the Far Eastern War, Oliver Lindsay and John R Harris have provided the most thorough and searching enquiry into the debacle which led to over 12,000 British, Canadian, Indian and Chinese defenders surrendering Hong Kong on Christmas Day 1941. The authors have made use of a mass of unpublished material - part of it drawn from the original war diaries which have never before been in the public domain.Although it is over 60 years since Hong Kong was liberated from the Japanese, numerous important questions regarding the war in the East and occupation of the Colony from 1941 to 1945 have not been explored until now. To what extent, for example, were Churchill and the successive Chiefs of the Imperial General Staff responsible for abandoning this outpost, which could not be reinforced when attacked or defended adequately? Is it true that fine leadership prolonged the fighting, inflicting serious casualties on the highly experienced Japanese when they struck in 1941? How useful was Britain's spying organization in China, which led to catastrophic repercussions for the POWs and Internees? What form did the Japanese atrocities take upon the helpless captives?This detailed and authoritative account of the campaign will provide a particularly compelling read for those interested in the Second World War or the history of the Far East.

Download or read book Battle for Hong Kong December 1941 written by Philip Cracknell and published by Amberley Publishing Limited. This book was released on 2019-07-15 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 25 December 1941 is known to this day by the people of Hong Kong as ‘Black Christmas’. The battle for Hong Kong is a story that deserves to be better known.

Download or read book Hong Kong 1941 45 written by Benjamin Lai and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-06-20 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The invasion and conquest of Hong Kong formed part of the staggering series of Japanese conquests across the Far East in late 1941 and early 1942. On 8th December 1941, as part of the simultaneous combined attack against Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) invaded the Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia and the British colony of Hong Kong. After only 18 days of battle the defenders, a weak, undermanned brigade, were overwhelmed by a superior force of two battle-hardened IJA divisions. What defines the battle of Hong Kong was not the scale - just 14,000 defended the colony - but the intensity of this battle, fought not only by the British Army, Navy and Air Force but also Canadians, Hong Kong's own defence force, the Indian Army and many civilians. The campaign itself is characterized by a fierce land battle, with long artillery duals and as well as fast naval actions with intense actions at the Gin Drinkers Line as well as the battle of Wong Nai Chung Gap where a handful of defenders took on an entire Japanese regiment. Less known but equally important are individual acts valour such as CSM John Robert Osborne winning a posthumous VC, throwing himself over a Japanese grenade to save fellow combatants.

Download or read book The Fall of Hong Kong written by Philip Snow and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive account of the wartime history of Hong Kong On Christmas Day 1941 the Japanese captured Hong Kong, and Britain lost control of its Chinese colony for almost four years, a turning point in the process by which the British were to be expelled from the colony and from East Asia. This book unravels for the first time the dramatic story of the Japanese occupation and reinterprets the subsequent evolution of Hong Kong. "Magnificent. . . . The clarity of mind Snow brings to his labor of storytelling and contextualizing is] amazing."--John Lanchester, Daily Telegraph "Beautifully written, with many telling anecdotes."--Lawrence D. Freedman, Foreign Affairs "Very good. . . . Provides] a much more nuanced picture than has appeared before in English of life among Hong Kong's different communities before and during the Japanese occupation."--Economist

Download or read book The Occupation of Hong Kong 1941 45 written by Philip Cracknell and published by Amberley Publishing Limited. This book was released on 2022-09-15 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four years of fear: escapes, resistance, internment, occupation and finally - liberation. Philip Cracknell brings his unrivalled knowledge of Hong Kong during this time.

Download or read book The Damned written by Nathan M. Greenfield and published by HarperCollins Canada. This book was released on 2010-10-12 with total page 503 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Damned tells the largely unknown saga of Canada’s first land battle of the Second World War—fought in the hills and valleys of Hong Kong in December 1941—and the terrible years the survivors of the battle spent as slave labourers for the Empire of Japan. Their story begins in the fall of 1941, when almost 2,000 members of the Royal Rifles and the Winnipeg Grenadiers were sent to bolster the British garrison at Hong Kong. In the seventeen-day battle for the colony following the Japanese attack on December 8, the Canadians suffered grievous losses. The second part of their story—how the Canadians survived the horrid conditions of the Japanese POW camps—lasts three and a half years. Despite the circumstances, the surviving Canadians remained unbowed and unbroken. Theirs is a story of determination and valour, of resilience and faith.

Download or read book East River Column written by Sui-jeung Chan 陳瑞璋 and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-01 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hong Kong's story in the Second World War has been predominantly told as a story of the British forces and their defeat on Christmas Day 1941. But there is another story: the Chinese guerrilla forces who harassed the Japanese throughout the occupation played a crucial part in the escapes from Hong Kong's prisoner of war camps and in rescuing Allied airmen. This neglected part of Hong Kong's war is Chan Sui-jeung’s topic in this pioneering book informed by his many contacts with participants in the guerrilla warfare. The guerrilla group usually described as the East River Column gathered momentum in 1937 after China and Japan embarked on full-fledged war. Chan reports on its precursors and the formation of more formal structures that provided the basis for the guerrilla activities in Hong Kong between 1941 and 1945. Just as the guerrilla's story starts before the Second World War, so it goes on after 1945 and is entwined with the civil war and the establishment of the People's Republic of China. An important and valuable part of this book recounts how the leaders of the East River Column fared in the period up to and after the Communist victory. The book also sheds new light on the struggle between the Guangdong party members and the cadres from the north and "the problem of Guangdong" as it was characterized by Mao Zedong. This book thus finally gives due prominence to the role of the Chinese guerrillas in Hong Kong during the war, while at the same time setting that struggle into the broader contexts of Guangdong province, the long war between China and Japan, and the victory of the Communists and the early years of their rule in the South.

Download or read book Three Years Eight Months written by Derek Pua and published by . This book was released on 2017-08-25 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The occupational period by the Imperial Japanese Army in WWII is Hong Kong¿s darkest chapter in history, colloquially known as the ¿Three Years and Eight Months¿ period amongst veterans and survivors. However, the lack of contemporary interests towards this subject by historians has led to a limited amount of academic works on the subject being published. This lack of written works, coupled with the declining population of veterans and survivors, has already resulted in the memory of the war to be neglected amongst Hong Kong¿s youth, almost forgotten.

Download or read book Long Night s Journey into Day written by Charles G. Roland and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2010-10-30 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sickness, starvation, brutality, and forced labour plagued the existence of tens of thousands of Allied POWs in World War II. More than a quarter of these POWs died in captivity. Long Night’s Journey into Day centres on the lives of Canadian, British, Indian, and Hong Kong POWs captured at Hong Kong in December 1941 and incarcerated in camps in Hong Kong and the Japanese Home Islands. Experiences of American POWs in the Philippines, and British and Australians POWs in Singapore, are interwoven throughout the book. Starvation and diseases such as diphtheria, beriberi, dysentery, and tuberculosis afflicted all these unfortunate men, affecting their lives not only in the camps during the war but after they returned home. Yet despite the dispiriting circumstances of their captivity, these men found ways to improve their existence, keeping up their morale with such events as musical concerts and entertainments created entirely within the various camps. Based largely on hundreds of interviews with former POWs, as well as material culled from archives around the world, Professor Roland details the extremes the prisoners endured — from having to eat fattened maggots in order to live to choosing starvation by trading away their skimpy rations for cigarettes. No previous book has shown the essential relationship between almost universal ill health and POW life and death, or provides such a complete and unbiased account of POW life in the Far East in the 1940s.

Download or read book Hong Kong 1941 45 written by Benjamin Lai and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-06-20 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The invasion and conquest of Hong Kong formed part of the staggering series of Japanese conquests across the Far East in late 1941 and early 1942. On 8th December 1941, as part of the simultaneous combined attack against Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) invaded the Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia and the British colony of Hong Kong. After only 18 days of battle the defenders, a weak, undermanned brigade, were overwhelmed by a superior force of two battle-hardened IJA divisions. What defines the battle of Hong Kong was not the scale - just 14,000 defended the colony - but the intensity of this battle, fought not only by the British Army, Navy and Air Force but also Canadians, Hong Kong's own defence force, the Indian Army and many civilians. The campaign itself is characterized by a fierce land battle, with long artillery duals and as well as fast naval actions with intense actions at the Gin Drinkers Line as well as the battle of Wong Nai Chung Gap where a handful of defenders took on an entire Japanese regiment. Less known but equally important are individual acts valour such as CSM John Robert Osborne winning a posthumous VC, throwing himself over a Japanese grenade to save fellow combatants.

Download or read book Clash of Empires in South China written by Franco David Macri and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2015-06-05 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan's invasion of China in 1937 saw most major campaigns north of the Yangtze River, where Chinese industry was concentrated. The southern theater proved a more difficult challenge for Japan because of its enormous size, diverse terrain, and poor infrastructure, but Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek made a formidable stand that produced a veritable quagmire for a superior opponent--a stalemate much desired by the Allied nations. In the first book to cover this southern theater in detail, David Macri closely examines strategic decisions, campaigns, and operations and shows how they affected Allied grand strategy. Drawing on documents of U.S. and British officials, he reveals for the first time how the Sino-Japanese War served as a "proxy war" for the Allies: by keeping Japan's military resources focused on southern China, they hoped to keep the enemy bogged down in a war of attrition that would prevent them from breaching British and Soviet territory. While the most immediate concern was preserving Siberia and its vast resources from invasion, Macri identifies Hong Kong as the keystone in that proxy war-vital in sustaining Chinese resistance against Japan as it provided the logistical interface between the outside world and battles in Hunan and Kwangtung provinces; a situation that emerged because of its vital rail connection to the city of Changsha. He describes the development of Anglo-Japanese low-intensity conflict at Hong Kong; he then explains the geopolitical significance of Hong Kong and southern China for the period following the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Opening a new window on this rarely studied theater, Macri underscores China's symbolic importance for the Allies, depicting them as unequal partners who fought the Japanese for entirely different reasons-China for restoration of its national sovereignty, the Allies to keep the Japanese preoccupied. And by aiding China's wartime efforts, the Allies further hoped to undermine Japanese propaganda designed to expel Western powers from its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. As Macri shows, Hong Kong was not just a sleepy British Colonial outpost on the fringes of the empire but an essential logistical component of the war, and to fully understand broader events Hong Kong must be viewed together with southern China as a single military zone. His account of that forgotten fight is a pioneering work that provides new insight into the origins of the Pacific War.

Download or read book Making Hong Kong written by Pui-yin Ho and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2018-09-28 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This insightful book provides a comprehensive survey of urban development in Hong Kong since 1841. Pui-yin Ho explores the ways in which the social, economic and political environments of different eras have influenced the city's development. From colonial governance, wartime experiences, high density development and adjustments before and after 1997 through contemporary challenges, this book explores forward-looking ideas that urban planning can offer to lead the city in the future. Evaluating the relationship between town planning and social change, this book looks at how a local Hong Kong identity emerged in the face of conflict and compromise between Chinese and European cultures. In doing so, it brings a fresh perspective to urban research, providing historical context and direction for the future development of the city. Hong Kong's urban development experience offers not only a model for other Chinese cities but also a better understanding of Asian cities more broadly. Urban studies scholars will find this an exemplary case study of a developing urban landscape. Town planners and architects will also benefit from reading this comprehensive book as it shows how Hong Kong can be taken to the next stage of urban development and modernisation.

Download or read book Hong Kong Internment 1942 1945 written by Geoffrey Charles Emerson and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hong Kong Internment, 1942-1945: Life in the Japanese Civilian Camp at Stanley tells the story of the more than three thousand non-Chinese civilians: British, American, Dutch and others, who were trapped in the British colony and interned behind barbed wire in Stanley Internment Camp from 1942 to 1945. From 1970 to 1972, while researching for his MA thesis, the author interviewed twenty-three former Stanley internees. During these meetings, the internees talked about their lives in the Stanley Camp during the Japanese occupation. Long regarded as an invaluable reference and frequently consulted as a primary source on Stanley since its completion in 1973, the study is now republished with a new introduction and fresh discussions that recognize later work and information released since the original thesis was written. Additional illustrations, including a new map and photographs, as well as an up-to-date bibliography, have also been included in the book.

Download or read book The Internment of Western Civilians under the Japanese 1941 1945 written by Bernice Archer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-08-02 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bernice Archer's comparative study of the experiences of the Western civilians interned by the Japanese in mixed family camps and sexually segregated camps in the Far East, combines a wide variety of conventional and unconventional source material. This includes contemporary War, Foreign and Colonial Office papers, diaries, letters, camp newspapers and artefacts, post-war medical, engineering and educational reports, biographies, autobiographies, memoirs and over fifty oral interviews with ex-internees. Using contemporary personal accounts, the shock of the Japanese victories and the devastating experience of capture are highlighted. This book also covers wider issues such as the role of women in war, gender and war, children and war, colonial culture, oral history, and war and memory.

Download or read book We Shall Suffer There written by Tony Banham and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-01 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tony Banham documents the experiences of Hong Kong's prisoners of war and civilian internees from their capture by the Japanese in December 1941 to liberation, rescue and repatriation.

Download or read book The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru written by Tony Banham and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2006-04-01 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although never previously studied in any depth, the sinking of the Lisbon Maru was the most costly American on British ‘Friendly Fire’ incident of the Second World War. Of the 4,500 of Hong Kong’s garrison who perished during the war, 1,000 died directly or indirectly from this sinking. From American, British, Hong Kong and Japanese sources, this book reconstructs the fateful voyage of the Lisbon Maru, and the experiences of the captives, the captors, and those on board the submarine that sank her. The book will be of interest to anyone wishing to know more about the ‘Hellships’ that caused the deaths of almost 20,000 Allied Prisoners of War during the Second World War, or the experiences of Allied POWs in Japan. ‘a well-composed, far-ranging story, . . . a carefully researched book’ —International History Review ‘a Hong Kong historian eager to put a human face to the brutal history of World War II’ —China Daily ‘His thorough research enables one to learn about the “hellships” that caused the deaths of almost 20,000 allied POWs overall.’ —The Guards Magazine

Download or read book Sepoys against the Rising Sun written by Kaushik Roy and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-02-15 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Second World War, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) suffered one of its greatest defeats in Burma. Both in Malaya and Burma, the bulk of the British Commonwealth forces comprised Indian units. Few people know that by 1944, about 70 percent of the Allied ground personnel in Burma was composed of soldiers of the Indian Army. The Indian Army comprised British-led Indian units, British officered units of the Indian princely states and the British units attached to the Government of India. Based on the archival materials collected from India and the United Kingdom, Sepoys against the Rising Sun assesses the combat/military/battlefield effectiveness of the Indian Army against the IJA during World War II. The volume is focussed on the tactical innovations and organizational adaptations which enabled the sepoys to overcome the Japanese in the trying terrain of Burma.