I’ve written elsewhere that the real indictment of Japanese rule in Hong Kong was not the treatment of the British and other ‘Europeans’ but of the Chinese, who made up almost 99% of the population at the start of the occupation. The defeated colonialists, although no-one could call their treatment generous or humane, were handled far better in almost every way. In fact, for all the talk of a ‘race war’ between Europeans and Asians – Japanese propaganda that has sometimes been taken too seriously by ‘western’ historians – the key to understanding the racial dynamics of the war in Hong Kong (and I suspect in the rest of East Asia) is this: the Japanese thought of the British and Americans as rival imperialists, while they thought of the other Asian nations as ‘natives’ to be colonised. This is not to say that all of the ‘Asia for the Asians’ propaganda should be written off as hypocritical, or that the Japanese did nothing to improve the situation of the Hong Kong Chinese; it’s probable that most Japanese believed and acted on anti-racist ideology to an extent, and a few made it the guiding principle of their wartime activity, but, by and large, far more respect was shown to rival imperialists than to the colonised peoples – especially when those people were ungrateful enough to resist ‘liberation’ by the Japanese armies.
In today’s post I want to look at an often misunderstood aspect of this subject, the way the Kempeitai handled British civilians.
The Kempeitai were the Military Police, also known as ‘the Gendarmes’ and often called the ‘Japanese Gestapo’, which is reasonable enough. There’s ample evidence that they were feared even by their fellow Japanese – they were trained to be brutal to all those who entered their prisons. A fair-minded and knowledgeable Allied observer, the New Zealand journalist James Bertram said that he and his fellow POWs didn’t want the War Crimes Tribunals to waste time chasing the Japanese military but to focus on the Kempeitai, who were responsible for most of the criminal acts during the occupations.1
Anyone who was arrested by them could expect to be held in insanitary and over-crowded conditions and given rations so low that prisoners who spent more than a month or two in their hands had two ‘choices’ – get extra food sent in or die of one or another of the diseases of malnutrition. As to torture, well, we’ll see it wasn’t universal, but another reasonable expectation was that interrogation would feature violence – anything from a mild beating to a panoply of horrors I have no intention of discussing in detail.
So far I don’t think anyone reading this blog is likely to be surprised by what I’ve written. But there’s another aspect of the way the Kempeitai treated British civilians that isn’t often commented on. In Hong Kong at least they acted according to rather strict standards of procedural legality. I’m pretty sure my father would have been astonished; most ‘Europeans’ probably agreed with James Anderson, who knew the ways of the Gendarmes at first hand. His friend Les Fisher writes:
According to Andy (James Anderson) the Japanese method was simple. When they wish to discover anything which they do not allow, such as contacts with outside, radios, etc., they simply picked up a likely person and tortured him until he gave others away.2
The leader of the Stanley internees, Franklin Gimson, even suggested they’d kill you for what you were thinking,3 and some sources call them ‘the thought police’.4 So I’ll need to provide plenty of evidence to support my contention. But first I should make it clear how I’m delimiting my subject. I am discussing only the treatment of ‘white’ British civilians, those in Stanley and outside. The handling of Eurasians, Chinese and so on with British passports is another matter, one I’ll deal with in the future. As far as I know ‘white’ nationals of other nations were treated pretty much the same, although I’m not aware of many cases so can’t be sure. The treatment of British military personnel was generally tougher and might well have been worse as regards procedural regularity too– anecdotal evidence in my possession certainly indicates so – but there are differing accounts of the most significant case, so I can’t be certain at the moment. Finally, the little I know about the Kempeitai in other places suggests that they acted differently enough for each location to need separate treatment. So let’s be clear: I‘m writing only about ‘white’ British civilians in Hong Kong. Let’s begin with a personally resonant ‘case study’.
On May 2, 1943 my parents, alongside about a dozen other Allied civilians and many more Asians, were cowering in fear somewhere in the French Hospital and its surrounding compound. A dawn raid, conducted by the Gendarmes (Kempeitai) and the Navy, had led to the taking away of Dr Selwyn-Clarke, the leader of the Allied contingent in the Hospital, the Eurasian Dr Frederick Bunje,5 several Chinese staff members, and an uncertain number of other Europeans – sources differ considerably as to else was arrested.6 I’m pretty sure that everyone arrested had played a role in the illegal activity, as had those who weren’t. Dr Court, who was possibly the first person the BAAG contacted at the Hospital,7 does not seem to have been suspected. The other senior uninterned British figure, HKSBC head Sir Vandeleur Grayburn, was already under arrest for his role in smuggling money into Stanley Camp, and it’s hard to imagine a worse development than Selwyn-Clarke’s arrest for the small number of ‘stay-outs’ who’d been allowed, for one reason or another, to live outside Stanley Camp. And now, after the first wave of arrests the Japanese were still in the French Hospital, searching it again (they’d already done so in February or March in the period leading up to Grayburn’s arrest).8 According to one report, Alexander Sinton was taken away from there at about noon – there’s some doubt about this, as a Captured Enemy Document9 which provides a summary of the trial at which he was sentenced gives an address in town.10
This was a black, black day for everyone in St. Paul’s Hospital. My father never mentioned to me the lengthy period of time he spent there – February 1942 to May 1943 – although he did write about the technicalities of his work during this period in a 1946 article for his trade paper, The British Baker. My mother too was silent about the time she’d spent there before returning after the war to give birth to me . Quite understandable that they should both prefer not to think too much about those days, and in particular about May 2, 1943, the worst day of all.
It must surely have occurred to the small number of British people waiting in terror as the search went on that at any moment a Japanese officer would order their mass arrest. They all knew that Selwyn-Clarke had been conducting a wide-ranging campaign of illegal relief for the Camps and for the destitute of all races in occupied Hong Kong. I’m pretty sure everyone there had broken Japanese law to help him. In addition my father had played a minor role in the escape of a British soldier, and a number of others in the Hospital that day had also done things the Japanese would regard as acts of war. If they knew that the Japanese suspected (wrongly) that Selwyn-Clarke was the leading British spy master, they would have been even more terrified. I think it highly likely that the men at least must have expected the Japanese to get fed up with the painstaking search – as far as I know, nothing was found – and just haul them all in for a brutal interrogation.
But they didn’t. To the best of my knowledge, there is no definite proof that any British civilian was ever arrested without a good reason of one sort or another. Even though the Gendarmes were wrong in thinking that Selwyn-Clarke was the British spy chief in Hong Kong, he was operating an illegal relief network, and, although he was careful to avoid military activity, he had in fact been in contact with the British Army Aid Group (about such things as smuggling medicines) and had also sent a warning to Macao that the Lisbon Maru was carrying British POWs – a failed attempt to avoid what actually happened, its sinking by an American submarine, but the Japanese would still have regarded this message as passing on military information. It still surprises me that the Kempeitai didn’t just haul in at all the men at least and demand they tell them all they knew about Selwyn-Clarke’s activities.
But not only the men had reason to be afraid. One of the grimmest passages in Selwyn-Clarke’s autobiography tells of a Chinese colleague whose teenage daughter was threatened with violence in front of him to make him confess that he (Selwyn-Clarke) had got him involved in spying.11 Selwyn-Clarke’s only daughter was younger, and the Japanese are generally reported as having been kind to children, so he probably had no fears there, but how he must have worried about his wife, who had indeed been heavily involved in his illegal relief work.12 In fact, Hilda seems never to have even been questioned!13 She was allowed to go into Stanley five days later, alongside my parents and 14 others, and to live there until December 7 1944, when her husband, who had heroically resisted the most brutal attempts to get him to incriminate himself and others, was amnestied and allowed to rejoin his family on the next day in Ma Tau-wai Camp in Kowloon. The only plausible reason I can think of for not arresting and questioning Mrs Selwyn-Clarke is that the Kempeitai didn’t have any evidence pointing to her ‘guilt’, so left her alone.
A similar situation existed with regard to the bankers at the Sun Wah Hotel after the arrest of Charles Hyde in late April 1943. Mr. Hyde was a wide-ranging resistance worker, who was active in both humanitarian relief and military espionage.14 He’d written a letter in connection with an attempt to free an Indian POW, Captain Mateen Ansari, and it had fallen into Japanese hands, probably as the result of a mistake by another BAAG agent. We know from Andrew Leiper’s memoir of his time in occupied Hong Kong (see below) that there was no mass arrest of the bankers and it doesn’t seem that Mrs Hyde (or Lady Grayburn and the wives of the bankers arrested later) was ever interrogated. The second most senior banker, David Edmondston, was arrested in May, probably for his role in the plot. He’d also been a BAAG agent.15
I don’t know of a single definite case in which a ‘white’ British civilian, either inside Stanley or in town, was arrested without plausible evidence. It seems that Frederick Tyndall was taken in wrongly on charges of being involved with the BAAG.16 Mr Tyndall was one of the British engineers kept out to help with the utilities, and he’d been falsely accused by Indians sympathetic to the Japanese, and he was eventually released (although not without experiencing brutality that he later described to at a war crime’s trial).
Cyril Munro Faure was also falsely accused of being a spy. He was one of a small group of employees of the South China Morning Post who, with management approval, agreed to stay at their posts in the early days of the occupation to help preserve the company’s assets and be ready for what was widely believed to be a speedy British re-conquest.17 In early 1943 he was arrested alongside one of his fellow workers of Indian origin and former SCMP editor Harry Ching (an Australian born Eurasian), who’d declined to continue working. The reason for the arrest was on suspicion of spying. Mr Faure was also accused of having ‘persecuted’ a pro-Japanese Indian journalist who’d committed suicide. He was threatened with execution but was released into Stanley after about six months.
I think that his Japanese accuser genuinely believed that he had broken up a spy ring consisting of former SCMP journalists, and in Faure’s case it seems possible that the dead Indian journalist had also given evidence against him.18 He probably wasn’t a spy, as, when his brother, an officer, asked the BAAG about him, they didn’t know he was. In any case, Mr Faure’s arrest might well be an exception to the rule that the Japanese only took ‘white’ British into custody on the basis of specific information – or at least well-grounded suspicion- as it’s possible that it was the result of a general suspicion of the uninterned British. I should mention for the sake of completeness that the BAAG documents that make up the Ride Papers mention the arrest of Mickie Williams, an American and the former manager of American Express; he was eventually released and died of heart failure during the occupation. I know nothing of this case, and I’m not even sure of Mr. Williams’ ethnicity.
In summary: those Allied civilians who were allowed to remain outside Stanley were more likely than those inside the Camp to be accused of spying and other offences, but with the possible exception of Cyril Faure no-one was ever arrested without specific information as to their ‘illegal’ activity, and only in one case (Frederick Trevelyan) was this completely wrong, although with regard to Selwyn-Clarke only a little of it was accurate (although genuinely believed by his interrogators).
Similarly, it’s hard to account for the pattern of arrests inside Stanley Camp without positing a large degree of procedural scrupulosity on the part of the Kempeitai.
In 1943, the radio engineers Stanley Rees and Douglas Waterton (June 28 and July 7 respectively) were arrested in Stanley Camp; they’d been sharing radio listening duties with their room-mates T. W. S. Addingley and J. S. Logan,19 who were never, as far as I know, arrested or questioned. The information leading to these two arrests probably came from informers amongst the internees, and these people had acquired knowledge of the work of some radio operators but not others. It’s strange that the Kempeitai don’t seem to have taken in the room-mates for questioning, but the sources for these arrests are good enough to make me fairly confident they didn’t. The Japanese found out that an internee nicknamed ‘New Moon’ Moss had helped Mr. Waterton bury a radio; they sent some one to arrest him, but Mr Moss vigorously asserted that he’d thought he was helping bury the family silver for safe-keeping. Amazingly, the Japanese believed him, and the attempt to arrest him was abandoned.20
The other arrestees on those two dreadful days – June 28 and July 7, 1943 – were also ‘guilty’: John Fraser, the Defence Secretary, was probably the man who had responsibility under Franklin Gimson for most of the camp’s resistance activities; Police Sergeant Frank Roberts and the two (unrelated) Andersons, James and William, were involved in different ways with radios; Frederick Bradley and Frederick Hall had operated a secret message system through the ration lorry drivers, while Assistant Police Superintendent Walter Scott had received some of the messages. The BAAG had used this route to communicate with the Camp, so the Japanese treated it as a military matter although Mr Hall and Mr Bradley had mainly been in receipt of messages about humanitarian issues. (Alexander Sinton, one of the French Hospital arrestees, was the ‘town’ end of the network). Gimson himself was amazingly never arrested, nor was University Vice-Chancellor Duncan Sloss, who also received messages from the BAAG, George Wright-Nooth, who helped smuggle in vitaminised chocolate to Vandeleur Grayburn, M16 men Alex Summers and George Merriman, who listened to radio news almost every night…and so on. This was partly due to the fortitude of those who were arrested – some people gave no names at all, and no-one gave all those they knew – but the large number of people who were never arrested also suggests that the Kempeitai did not, by and large, just take people who they thought might well have been guilty of crimes. The radio operators and M16 men were obvious targets, for example, and the Japanese rightly suspected Sloss and Gimson and the only reason I can think of to explain the fact that these men were never arrested is that the Kempeitai were unwilling to take them into custody without specific plausible evidence.
Finally, other policemen were arrested in June/July 1943, Louis Whant and John Pennefather-Evans, were released after questioning. Pennefather-Evans, who was the Chief of Police, at least knew of some of the illegal activities,21 and I’d be surprised if Inspector Whant was ‘innocent’.
I should add that some MI6 men, others involved in British intelligence, and the colourful ‘Two Gun Cohen’, a general in the Chinese Army with known links to Nationalist sources, had been taken by the Kempeitai soon after being sent to Stanley and given tough interrogations.22 These men were arrested because the Japanese believed that because of their positions they had information that would have helped them impose their rule on Hong Kong not out of general suspicion. Further, as far as I know such actions were confined to the first stage of the occupation and British operatives were not arrested thereafter.
I’m not, I say again, trying to whitewash the Gendarmes or to argue that their actions were humane or decent – except in the rare cases of officers like one Mr. Kawata, who risked his life to help the prisoners.23 I’m simply trying to establish how the Kempeitai operated with regard to British civilians.
Women were treated differently to men, at least in the case of the British – it seems to have been very different when the Chinese were concerned.
It’s striking that Ellen Field was never arrested even though the Japanese seem to have had enough evidence to at least bring her in for questioning; not only was she involved in illegal relief activities, she helped in the escape of a number of British soldiers. When she was warned that she was in danger, she moved to the relative tranquillity of the Red Cross Rosary Hill home, and eventually, after a further warning, escaped to Macao.24
Unfortunately, as is all too well-known, the Kempeitai’s concept of procedural correctness included the use of torture in interrogation. Their justification was simple: much of their work involved questioning possible spies, and the penalty for espionage was typically death, so no-one would admit to their crimes without a fair degree of pain being applied. Of course, leaving aside the immorality of torture and the disgrace it brings on any nation claiming to be civilised, there is no reason to believe that the innocent are any more able to resist the temptation to confess to bring their suffering to an end than the guilty, and there’s no robust evidence that it’s any more useful in getting information than more humane methods. Whatever local successes they may have enjoyed in wringing information from the poor wretches who fell into their hands, the widespread brutality of the interrogation rooms was an important factor in turning Asia against Japanese rule. Sadly these lessons were learnt neither by the British nor the Americans.25
In the case of British civilians torture was not inflicted routinely but according to the perceived seriousness of the offence. Historian Philip Snow suggests it was usually only used if espionage was suspected. I have anecdotal evidence of torture used on someone engaged purely in relief work, and there are stories of brutality occasionally meted out to black-marketeers in Stanley, largely by way of punishment. But in general I believe Snow to be correct (for the case of Selwyn-Clarke, see above), although, as we shall see, there is at least one case that perhaps shows that not all integrators were totally scrupulous in this regard.
The treatment of Sir Vandeleur Grayburn and his assistant E. P. Streatfield are good examples of the ways this ‘guideline’ worked. Grayburn, although not Streatfield, was an agent of the BAAG (code name – ‘Night’) but his interrogators never found that out, although they seem to have had their suspicions. He was charged not with spying but with trying to smuggle money for relief into Stanley, and his questioning did not involve physical brutality except at one moment when a chair he was standing on was kicked away and he had to hang by his arms; this was probably meant as a hint as to what might be done to him if he didn’t co-operate. Streatfield’s interrogation seems to have been completely without violence.26 The two were sentenced to three months in prison, the shortest possible sentence. Sadly, the three months did not include time spent waiting for trial, and this procedural point cost Grayburn his life: he died of malnutrition and medical neglect on August 21, 1943.
On April 8, 1942 three policemen (Harold Bidmead, Brian Fay, Vincent Morrison) and Victor Randall, an employee of China Light and Power got out of Stanley Camp but were caught two days later. Some of those who saw them on their way to prison and at their release believed they bore marks of torture, but an internee doctor examined them on May 19 and said that they showed signs of undernourishment and having been held in filthy conditions but not of violence.27 There is evidence the doctor was right, as George Wright-Nooth, who generally emphasises Japanese cruelty, quotes from Mr Morrison’s own deposition, and none of the extracts mention torture. They were sentenced to two years in prison, which the Japanese regarded as generous – it was, in the sense that they were male escapers of military age; further, the police had been designated a militia in the early stages of the fighting, and, although their status had been changed, they were lucky to be in a civilian camp in the first place. The real problem was the inhumane conditions they were subjected to in Stanley Prison. When they were released on June 20, 1944, they seem to have been very weak indeed, particularly Mr Morrison, even though like other British prisoners they received food parcels and smuggled rations as well.28 I doubt that anyone who didn’t get such help lasted anything like two years.
In January/February 1943 Andrew Leiper and two other employees of the Chartered Bank were arrested in Stanley. The Japanese had found a copy of secret accounts they’d kept while uninterned, and they rightly suspected that the bankers were keeping track of their activities in anticipation of a British return. The three men were also questioned about the destruction of banknotes – to keep them out of the hands of the invader – during the hostilities. It was reasonable enough to treat the keeping of secret accounts as a crime, but the destruction of things to prevent them falling into the hands of the enemy, is, as far as I know, perfectly legal as long as it’s done before the surrender.
Now for the case I mentioned above which puts Snow’s theory to the test. HKSBC employee Hugo Foy was arrested on January 10, 1944. He was subjected to over a dozen interrogations, most or all of which involved some rough handling and was given the ‘water treatment’ once although the Japanese had no evidence linking him to espionage only to financial ‘crimes’ – Foy had been active in the banker’s efforts to raise money for both overt and secret relief work. However, Foy realised that the pattern of questions suggested that the Japanese believed that the banker’s money had been used to finance an espionage ring. They asked many questions about (the already executed) Charles Hyde, who was undoubtedly engaged in resistance activities, and about Selwyn-Clarke, who they wrongly beloved was the British spy master. Looked at from the Japanese point of view, Foy’s case was ambiguous: there was no evidence he was personally involved in spying, but he might have been helping finance it. I think Foy’s case shows the way the Kempeitai applied the ‘guideline’ for ‘water treatment’ in practice and doesn’t disprove Snow’s suggestion. (For an account of fellow banker Andrew Leiper’s experiences see 30.)
What of other aspects of procedure? It’s true that in all cases I’ve encountered, the trial was to determine sentence only, as it was assumed that the Kempeitai investigation had established guilt, particularly if a confession had been obtained. This isn’t in accord with Western norms, but it should be remembered that the majority of people – 75% according to one BAAG estimate31 – arrested in the ‘sweep’ that followed the taking of Selwyn-Clarke were released in the next month or two. In other words, the Kempeitai, whose brutality I am in no way seeking to defend or minimise, even as regards British civilians, did make a genuine attempt to establish guilt or innocence. In fact, some, perhaps all, of those British nationals released were ‘guilty’ of helping in the campaign of illegal relief – Frank Angus, for example, played a documented role.32 As far as I can make out from the internet there’s still a difference between Japanese and Western practice: in the USA you’re more likely to have your case come to trial than in Japan, but less likely to be convicted, and your likelihood of ending up in prison after being arrested is roughly the same in spite of the different approaches. Obviously, Japan today is a democratic country under the rule of law, and there is at least some chance of acquittal in court, so things are very different, and although it’s worth remembering that alternative legal norms can produce the same level of justice, there would be little to be said for the Kempeitai system whereby the arresting body also makes decisions as to guilt and innocence, even if the investigation didn’t involve torture. My point in this post is not that the Kempeitai treated British civilians acceptably, but that they didn’t act in the way some, perhaps most, of those present at the time thought they did.
I almost suspect that there was something about the Japanese attitude specifically to the British – Snow points out that they had a ‘strange’ respect for their imperial rivals.33 Hong Kong’s Italians were mostly clergy and allowed to stay uninterned even when Italy surrendered and thus ceased to be an ally of Japan (September 1943). I don’t know if an incident reported by Father Nicholas Maestrini took place before or after this event: one of the Italian priests was arrested and held in solitary for 27 days because he’d talked to someone who was suspected of espionage (this man was later cleared and released).34 Even leaving aside Mrs Selwyn-Clarke and Mrs Bunje, everyone in the French Hospital on May 2, 1943 must have talked, in some cases frequently, to Selwyn-Clarke, Bunje, Sinton and the other arrestees: according to Staff-Sergeant Sheridan in the early days at least everyone including the doctors ate together and conversation was vigorous.35 As far as I know, none of the bankers living with Charles Hyde, perhaps the most wide-ranging British resistance agent of them all,36 was arrested after he was taken (and I’ve never seen any mention of Mrs Hyde being arrested). It seems that higher levels of preliminary evidence were necessary before the British were taken in, and broadly speaking, people were not arrested because of ‘guilt by association’, although everybody seems to have assumed that this was likely to happen – Emily Hahn was told by a sympathetic Japanese to stay away from Hilda Selwyn-Clarke after her husband’s arrest, and Ellen Field was warned by a nun to not even ask questions about the doctor’s fate.37 I’ll write about the Japanese treatment of the Chinese later, but there’s an obvious contrast with the Kempeitai response after the arrest of Dr Talbot, who was also involved in the Grayburn/Streatfield money-smuggling affair: according to Emily Hahn, even Talbot’s Chinese patients and friends were likely to be arrested and questioned.38
All this is another reason for not taking the thesis of Gerald Horne’s Race War!39 seriously, and even to be suspicious of one of Horne’s sources, the much better War Without Mercy by John Dower, which also uses the phrase ‘race war’,40 based mainly on evidence provided by Dower’s magnificent researches into the bitter struggle between the Japanese and the Americans in the Pacific. The war between the Japanese and the British in Hong Kong was not, on either side, a race war or a war without mercy. It should be amply clear that I’m not seeking to cover up nor make light of the Japanese treatment of British civilians. But it’s striking and surprising how bound this was by the norms of the then-prevailing Japanese conception of legality.
Or so it seems to me given my current knowledge. Emily Hahn41 claimed that the Kempeitai found an excuse to arrest ‘one after another’ of the people who’d been ‘guaranteed out’ of Stanley – released on the promise of a neutral that they wouldn’t be a financial burden on the authorities or engage in anti-Japanese actions. At the moment I know of only one documented case of such a person being arrested (Chester Bennett) and one other by anecdote. Hahn says that some of the arrestees were quickly released and it’s certainly possible that I’ve missed some 1943 arrests as well as some in 1944-45 when the BAAG’s operations in Kowloon had been reconstituted after the losses of 1943. It’s possible that in the future I shall learn of more people arrested in circumstances that will make me modify or completely change my conclusions.
1James Bertram, Beneath The Shadow, 1947, 105-106.
2Les Fisher, I Will Remember, 1996, 240.
3 Franklin Gimson, Internment in Hong-Kong (sic) March 1942 to August 1945, page 6 (held at Rhodes House, Oxford).
4 http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=GwBGAAAAIBAJ&sjid=hukMAAAAIBAJ&pg=1641,2176084&dq=chester+bennett&hl=en
5Dr Bunje was Eurasian, but he’s on the BAAG list of ‘Free Europeans’ with the other doctors. According to a BAAG source he’d been held for two days previously and mistreated after a disgruntled employee revealed that he planned to escape: https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/07/15/dr-frederick-bunje/
However, this is not mentioned in the form he filled in after the war detailing the crimes committed against him.
6https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/08/19/the-french-hospital-arrests-a-synthesis-of-sources/
7 Ride Papers.
8 Emily Hahn, China To Me (1944), 1986 ed., 389.
9 Ride Papers.
10https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/08/19/the-french-hospital-arrests-a-synthesis-of-sources/
11 Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke, Footprints, 1975, 88.
12 Selwyn-Clarke, 1975, 79.
13Hahn, 1986 ed., 407. Hahn states explicitly she was never questioned, and, although this suits Hahn’s agenda as it’s part of a picture of Hilda as excessively worried about her own safety, I know of no evidence to the contrary.
14https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/04/20/charles-hydes-resistance-work/
15https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2013/01/03/hahn-as-source-3-the-art-of-vendetta-david-charles-edmondston/
16Mr.TYndall”s case is discussed in a document in the Ride Papers, kindly sent to me by Elizabeth Ride. The BAAG official comments that the organisation had never heard of Tyndall, and cites Charles Hyde as denying his involvement in espionage.
17http://www.scmp.com/article/433573/through-war-years-bloodied-unbroken
18http://www.scmp.com/article/433573/through-war-years-bloodied-unbroken
19Wright-Nooth, 1994, 156.
20Wright-Nooth, 1994, 163.
21Wright-Nooth, 1994, 148.
22Charles Drage, The Life and Times of General Two-Gun Cohen, 1954, 291ff.
23Selwyn-Clarke, 1975, 106.
24Ellen Field tells her story in Twilight in Hong Kong, 1960.
25For a vigorous denunciation of the Bush administration’s attempt to redefine torture so as to exclude the practice of water-boarding, for which some Japanese were tried as war criminals, see http://www.scmp.com/article/731155/out-and-about
It’s incorrect to say Sir Vandeleur Grayburn died as a result of this heinous practice, but POW Norman Lloyd of the HKVDC did, his killer was executed for it, and Mr Wordie has put the case far more eloquently than I could. For the British, see Ian Cobain’s Cruel Britannia.
26Frank King, History of the HKSBC, Volume 3, 1986, 622.
27Geoffrey Emerson, Hong Kong Internment, 1973, 237.
28Wright-Nooth, 1994, 147.
29http://www.lidderdale.com/gen026.html
30Mr Leiper tells his story in A Yen For My Thoughts, 1982. His experiences in prison begin on page 190.
31Ride Papers.
32 King, 1986, 613.
33Philip Snow, The Fall of Hong Kong, 2003, 138.
34Nicolas Maestrini, My Twenty Years With The Chinese, 1990, 277-278.
35P. J. Sheridan, Memoir (unpublished and kindly sent to me Helen Dodd), 93.
36https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/04/20/charles-hydes-resistance-work/
37Hahn, 1986 ed, 407.
38Hahn, 1986 ed., 389.
39https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2013/02/05/gerald-hornes-race-war-1-the-eurasians/
40John Dower, War Without Mercy, 1986, 3.
41Hahn, 1986 ed, 388.
The Dark World's Fire: Hong Kong in World War Two 