Gerald Horne’s Race War! is a vigorously written and stimulating account of the racism that characterised British and American society in the period leading up to WW11 and the manifold ways in which the Japanese attempted to exploit this both before and after Pearl Harbour. His description of the impact of Japanese propaganda on ‘non-white’ people in the USA is, to the best of my knowledge, original, and extremely interesting.
Much of Horne’s material relates to Hong Kong and the book brings out the pernicious racial discrimination that marked almost all aspects of the life of the Colony in the period that ended with the Japanese attack of December 1941.
Sadly, Horne’s use of Hong Kong sources is marred by selectivity, distortion and over-simplification. In a series of posts I’ll explain that Horne’s project – the kind of book he wanted to write – was dead in the water from the start and the evidence required heavy ‘spinning’ and the development of the argument needed all of Horne’s undoubted rhetorical power to provide the illusion of steady progress through the waves. As I’m Eurasian, I’ll begin with his account of this grouping.
First there’s a need for clarification. The word ‘Eurasian’ covers a wide variety of ethnic mixes: one commentator has even suggested that it should be defined as exclusion from all the main ‘one race’ communities – Eurasians were not accepted by either the Chinese or the British but were not, for example, seen as Indian.[1] However, until such time as we can do without the word completely it’s probably best used to refer to a person whose parents were of two different races, one of them Asian. To stay in touch with the older sources we need to be as vague as that: one of the people discussed below, Sir Robert Hormus Kotewall, is almost always referred to as Eurasian even though his mother was Chinese and his father Parsee.[2]
Horne brings out well many aspects of the general situation of Eurasians in pre-war Hong Kong, where they were generally mistrusted, discriminated against and even despised. To marry a Eurasian (a fortiori a Chinese of course) meant an immediate fall in social status.[3] ‘White’ reaction could be extreme:
Eurasians in a European social gathering created a climate of unease and psychological tension…Even highly educated Europeans reacted strongly against mixed marriages.[4]
Not surprising then that there was little socialising between ‘whites’ and Eurasians. After their victory, the Japanese published a newspaper the Hong Kong News – a propaganda sheet, but one that sometimes told the truth:
(The) Eurasian when he seeks employment is classified as a ‘native’ and is required to accept ‘native’ pay.[5]
My mother knew this for herself: she’d come to Hong Kong to work, and before the war she had various jobs in sales with the usual inferior conditions. Eventually she rebelled and asked her current boss to pay her the same rates as the European staff – to his credit, he agreed, but it didn’t change the system.
However, there’s more to the situation of Eurasians than this. There was, for example, a complex relationship with the Chinese, who made up the vast majority of the Colony’s population. On the one hand, Governor Stubbs reported in 1920 that ‘pure-bred Chinese referred to Eurasians as bastards’.[6] On the other, some Eurasians, preferred to live as Chinese rather than tolerate the racism of the ‘whites’.[7]
In spite of this double-sided weight of prejudice, a few wealthy Eurasians had a great deal of influence in the Colony and in their case it can be said that economic factors outweighed racial ones, as a Marxist like Horne might expect. Sir Robert Ho-tung, for example, the only non-white allowed to live legally on the Peak, was one of the most important men in Hong Kong. Sir Robert Kotewall, who I’ll discuss in more detail later, was another figure of importance on old Hong Kong. Paradoxically, given the kind of view referred to by Governor Stubbs, these men managed to become representatives of the Chinese community, Kotewall serving as ‘Unofficial Member’ of the Executive Council, Colony’s Governing body, while Ho-tung declined an offer of a seat but still played a wide-ranging role in the life of the Colony.
It’s been suggested that the Eurasians as a whole had prestige in old Hong Kong because of their association with the ‘European’ community – most of them were at least part white after all! One writer has stated that the Japanese occupation, with its deliberate policy of humiliating ‘whites’, led to the end of a ‘privileged and gracious era’ for the Hong Kong Eurasians.[8] Edith Hansom might have agreed; waiting in Kowloon Hospital for the arrival of the Japanese as they take over the mainland during the fighting, she realises that the old order is on the way out:
My only certainty was that the privileged existence we’d always known would be no more.[9]
Her description of that existence would surprise those who rely on Race War! for their picture of Eurasians in old Hong Kong:
(M)y life in Hong Kong was wonderful in every way….‘Life could not be more perfect,’ I’d say to Arthur on these family picnic days, and we’d take time to give thanks to God for our privileged lives. In the colony of Hong Kong, we felt safe {from the European war}…Our lives of affluence and freedom changed little, though we felt concerned for the people of Europe.[10]
Of course, this life is described like this so as to provide a contrast with what was to come, and we mustn’t take this as an objective and generally applicable summary of Eurasian existence before the war. Still, it’s not surprising that although Edith Hansom was well aware of white arrogance, she and her half-Japanese mother don’t seem to have given a moment’s thought to throwing in their lot with the conquerors. I’ll return to this point later.
Jean Gittins’ family was much more socially elevated than the Hansoms – her father was Sir Robert Ho-tung himself. Her description of ‘ten completely happy years’[11] married to another Eurasian suggests that pre-war racism didn’t always spoil the lives of its victims. It seems that in her working life Ms. Gittins was lucky enough to find a niche in University circles that were relatively free of racial discrimination and arrogance. There were, by the way, more such enclaves than the reader of Race War! might think: in this post I describe an amiable group in which some whites worked for world peace under the leadership first of a remarkable Eurasian (or at least and Indian of Armenian extraction) and later of a Chinese doctor:
http://brianedgar.wordpress.com/2012/11/09/herbert-edward-lanepart-1-theosophy-in-old-hong-kong/
Another relatively race-free area of activity was sport,[12] and Edith’s husband, Arthur, played alongside at least two other Eurasians in my father’s company bowls team.
It is, therefore, important to bear in mind the fact that the Eurasians weren’t the most ‘despised’ and disadvantaged group in old Hong Kong, that some Eurasians played an important role in the Colony’s affairs, that the community was the victim of Chinese as well as British racism, and that nevertheless some members managed to carve out decent lives for themselves and even felt ‘privileged’. Further, there were divisions and racisms within the Eurasian community too – Horne quotes a passage from Emily Hahn that hints at this[13], but he never discusses this issue in his own voice, or gives proper weight to the hauteur with which some ‘European-Asians’ looked down on ‘Macanese’ like my mother.[14] I’ve not come across evidence that Eurasians resisted bitterly any attempts to elevate them above the Chinese because of their European blood, but my guess is that this did sometimes happen! Of course, as the ‘white’ British were the dominant ethnic group in Hong Kong they bear some responsibility for the whole sorry mess of racial bigotry, but it is happily no longer fashionable to argue that the only racism that matters is the one that accompanies structural power, and theorists, some inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, are now aware of the complex nets of dominance (and of course resistance) that exist in even the most apparently monolithic societies.
Still, all this being said, I think Horne gets to the essence of the matter with his emphasis on pre-war ‘white’ racism against the Eurasians. The fact that many Eurasians learnt to live with this doesn’t make it any the less shocking. But where Race War! goes badly wrong is in its representation of what happened to the Eurasian communities after the Japanese attack. The sobering fact is that, contrary to the impression given by the book’s rhetoric, Horne does not provide the name of a single Hong Kong Eurasian who was not part Japanese who we can be certain went over to the conquerors after the surrender on Christmas Day 1941. I’ll discuss all of the people Horne offers as apparently in that category.
While discussing pre-war economic injustice, Horne writes:
This discrimination was deeply resented and made a number of Eurasians prime candidates for defection to the Japanese at the time of the invasion.[15]
He cites no cases at this point, but he’s at least correct in implying that the conquerors considered them as likely ‘candidates’ for winning over: the best-known example is the efforts made by the Kempeitai officer ‘Chick’ Nakazawa to ‘convert’ two sisters from the Gittins family, Phyllis Bliss and Irene Fincher,[16] but this was such a failure that, after the sisters, escaped from Hong Kong, Irene became first the secretary and then the wife[17] of British policeman ‘Tommy’ Thompson, who’d broken off his own escape journey to work with the Chinese resistance.[18]
Horne returns to the theme after discussing a passage from the Hong Kong Eurasian Jean Gittins:
The result of this prejudice was predictable: some of the staunchest opponents of white supremacy in Asia – and helpmates to the invading Japanese – were Eurasians.[19]
This time he does give an example: Laurence Klindt-Kentwell. Mr. Klindt-Kentwell was born on a boat in Hong Kong harbour to a sea-captain and a Chinese mother. Although protected at first by his relatively elevated social position – he was educated at Oxford – and ‘white’ appearance, he eventually fell foul of America’s racist Chinese Exclusion laws.[20] It seems that his hatred of specifically British imperialism stemmed from his experiences at Oxford, and in Singapore[21] and, in particular, Shanghai. In that city he was debarred as a barrister in 1926. He was alleged to have registered a Chinese man as a Spanish citizen for money, and defrauded another Chinese of a large sum,[22] but he claimed the debarring was really for his political views.[23] He was eventually written off by the British authorities as crazy because of his stream of denunciatory and accusatory letters.[24] In one report he’s said to have renounced his British nationality because of ‘the snobs and proud people’ who shamed Britain and were bringing its downfall. It seems that the Shanghai Club was a particular object of his animus,[25] and he recommended that it either be pulled down, burnt or turned into a club for rickshaw coolies.[26]
In spite of his claim to be a Chinese citizen, and to be ‘in agreement with Chinese civilisation’[27] he began to assist the Japanese when their only military activity involved attacking China. His son, though, later volunteered to fight with the British and had a distinguished war.[28]
His is indeed a sad story, and it’s hard not to feel that racism played an important role in creating what was at the very least a bitter and unbalanced state of mind. It ‘turned’ him politically too: he’d acted as secretary to Chinese nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen in 1905-1906,[29] and in general had a long association with Chinese nationalism, but he ended up supporting one of the most violent aggressions in modern history, the Japanese attempt to conquer China. He even became a member of the Wang Ching-wei puppet government. One 1942 issue of his journal carried a picture of Adolf Hitler on the cover.[30]
His own account of his experiences of racism, given when he was in Hong Kong after having been prevented from disembarking at Singapore, does not mention the Colony.[31] In fact, when he went to the China Mail offices to correct an inaccuracy in their story, he said that he preferred Hong Kong to Singapore and in any case had no intention of stirring up trouble in the Colony. The article about him continued:
Here {in Hong Kong}, he thought, the foreigners and Chinese mixed together more freely and there was not that obvious feeling of superiority amongst the former in regard to the latter.[32]
That should be taken with a pinch of salt.
His pre-war activities are documented in Shanghai, but, basing himself on a 1942 document in the Australian National Archive, Horne claims:
(H)e accepted the post of ‘Governor’ of the British troops interned in Kowloon….[33]
But at the time he’s meant to be accepting this post, historian Bernard Wasserstein has him in Nanjing, playing a role in the Chinese puppet government. According to Wasserstein, he went to Shanghai in the spring of 1942 and stayed there for rest of the war.[34] My guess is that the idea he was some kind of POW overseer was a wartime misunderstanding, perhaps of an ‘appointment’ made by Klindt-Kentwell himself – it wouldn’t have been the first[35] – and that he never went anywhere near Kowloon; at least no such link has been reliably established on the evidence presented, and I’ve not seen him mentioned in any account of POW life in Shamshuipo or Argyle Street.
In short, it seems that it’s only his first appearance on a boat in the harbour that enables us to reliably link Klindt-Kentwell to Hong Kong at all. The reader of Race War! might easily miss the fact that his case has no relevance to Hong Kong, as although Horne introduces it with the claim that Eurasians were amongst the strongest supporters of Japanese power ‘in Asia’, it follows a discussion of racism in Hong Kong and begins with Klindt-Kentwell’s birth in the harbour and his apparent return to rule over the POWs in Kowloon. I’m not of course suggesting that racism is any less deplorable in Shanghai than in Hong Kong; I’m trying to assess Horne’s evidence as to the response of Hong Kong’s Eurasians to their treatment by the British when the Japanese occupation gave them new options.
His most extended discussion of this subject comes under this rubric:
Then there were the much despised Eurasians, who contributed their share to Tokyo’s war effort and were punished afterward.[36]
This claim is supported by an account of a number of particular Eurasians. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, only one of these was ‘punished’ after the war, in the legal sense at least, and, except in this one case, it’s extremely doubtful that any of them can be said to have helped the Japanese war effort. I’ll consider each man in turn, although not in the same order as Horne.
First, let’s take Frankie Zung. I have shown in a previous post that Emily Hahn’s account of this man is a composite:
http://brianedgar.wordpress.com/2012/12/25/emily-hahn-as-source-1-walking-with-frankie-zung/
To briefly recapitulate: Hong Kong Holiday, the only source for Zung, is a highly fictionalised work, and there’s reason to believe, comparing the story in which Zung is described with passages in Hahn’s more ‘historical’ China To Me, that he’s not based on a single person but is created by combining the traits of a number of individuals. Therefore no conclusions can currently be drawn from this figure as a corresponding ‘real life’ pro-Japanese Eurasian may or may not have existed. Similarly, Horne mentions in passing a Eurasian man known as ‘John’, who’s second in command of a gang of looters in the early days of the occupation. His source is once again an Emily Hahn story, and this one too is probably fictionalised. There is at the moment no reliable evidence that such a figure existed. In addition, it should be noted that ‘John’ is represented as showing no animus against the ‘whites’, and in fact protects Hahn from the persecution of his ‘boss’ who is also ‘white’, albeit of a nationality (Russian) rather low in Hong Kong’s pernicious pecking order of ‘Europeans’. In other words, if ‘John’ is taken as a real figure all that he proves is that’s some Eurasians looted when they had the chance, as did almost all nationalities, but didn’t attempt to justify their actions on racial grounds.
Also on Horne’s list is a man I prefer to keep anonymous[37]: ‘Mr. X, a Eurasian clerk was said to be ‘the first Government servant to offer his services to the Japanese’.[38] Sadly Horne fails to give the reader unfamiliar with the literature of the Hong Kong war any context in which to understand this. His brief comment tells us effectively nothing.
The Japanese Government – like the British one before it – employed people in a wide range of professions and only the most determined advocate of non-collaboration would have thought that all of them were wrong to serve the new masters.[39] In any case, I doubt that Mr. X was the first ‘Government servant’ to start working for the new administration. Three days after the British gave in, the most important ‘servant’ of all, the Colonial Secretary, Franklin Gimson, was writing to the Japanese offering useful hints for locating and utilising petrol supplies, [40] and at this early stage he seems to have envisaged something like what seems to have been full—scale co-operation.[41] But even Gimson was slow off the mark compared to Dr. Selwyn-Clarke, the Colony’s former Director of Medical Services, who, as his enemies pointed out, began working with the Japanese almost from the first moment of surrender. Dr. Selwyn-Clarke carried on in his pre-war position for the first 16 months of the occupation with the permission of the Governor Sir Mark Young,[42] and he and Gimson were both eventually to be decorated for their conduct in the Hong Kong war. On any reasonable interpretation, the permission the former was given by Sir Mark applied to the public health officials (including bakers like my father who were making bread for the hospitals) who worked under him. In fact, apart from Gimson’s order to George Kennedy-Skipton to desist co-operation,[43] the exact circumstances of which are unknown, I’m aware of no case where permission was sought from a higher authority and denied – the British bankers took the advice of the Financial Secretary, and the Europeans their consular representatives before agreeing to keep their banks open after the surrender.[44]
Given this context, Horne provides no evidence that Mr. X’s activity represented anything impermissible, let alone that it was motivated by racial factors. There’s a man with the same name as Mr. X – and judging from his photo he might be Eurasian – who became the head of an important (and extremely unsubversive) youth organisation in the 1950s, which suggests that any breach wasn’t long-lasting on either side.
In any case, Horne should be constantly reminding his readers that non-whites were under physical pressure to work for the Japanese[45] and that in any case people were starving to death from the start (probably from even before the Japanese took over, as the rice distribution system broke down because of transport difficulties during the fighting) and that not working meant not having a ration card:
Ultimately, except for farmers and hawkers, all residents were forced to work for the Japanese public or private bodies or to starve, unless they were fortunate enough to have a sufficient supply of gold ornaments.[46]
Many people who had no love for the Japanese were forced to work for them simply to feed themselves and their families. This is one reason why Horne’s whole project is moribund: his basic method is to outline ‘white’ racism against a community, offer examples of Japanese sympathisers from that community, some of whom claimed that they were motivated by anti-racist or anti-imperialist considerations, and then leave the reader to assume this played a role in all or at least the majority of the cases. In fact, support for the Japanese in occupied Hong Kong requires no special explanation: if you wanted to avoid arrest and torture, or simply starvation for yourself and your family, you had little choice but to play along. This is not, of course, to deny that resentment of pre-war racism played a part, simply to assert that it was far from being the only factor, and that it’s impossible to assess just how important it was. But consider the particular case of the Hong Kong Eurasians. The Japanese were interested in them as potential intelligence operatives and as ‘Asianised’ advertisements for the ‘new order’:
In Hong Kong, many prominent Eurasians were under great pressure to declare their political loyalty to Japan, which meant the necessity to identify themselves as ‘Chinese’.[47]
Jean Gittins’ brother-in-law M. K. Lo, one of the most pro-British of the elite, was kept in solitary confinement until he agreed to join the new regime.[48] Evidence of co-operation with the Japanese or pro-Japanese statements are, given these circumstances, close to worthless.
The ‘despised Eurasians’ list also includes a man called ‘William Chang, alias Khan Mohammed’ (and also known as Cheng and Chan). Horne, on the basis of an undated document in the Indian National Archive, claims he worked for the Japanese. I’ve not seen Horne’s document, but there is a mass of evidence that he did no such thing. Mr. Chang was in fact Agent 21 of the British Army Aid Group, a resistance organisation, and is mentioned in over 50 of their documents.[49] If he was a double agent this fact was unknown to Paul Tsui, another BAAG operative, who mentions him in his post-war Memoirs:
We also had Cheng Wai Lim… nicknamed KHAN, a Jamaican born, half negro and half Hakka, who organized his team of “Rescuers and Intelligence collectors” as if it were an independent guerrilla unit….[50]
Again:
( )[51] who claimed to be a native of Lung Kong, was in fact half Black and half Hakka. He came back from Jamaica, when his father brought him back as a small child. He joined the locally enlisted ranks, and was assigned to the 5th A.A. Regiment, where he was promoted a Sergeant. He was short, but stout, and his mind as well as movements were very fast. He was tri lingual, he was quite at home in English and Cantonese as well as Hakka.[52]
He was one of the first BAAG agents to be recruited, joining in July 1942, and it seems he was even helping Allied escapers before the BAAG was set up. Frank Lee (aka Leeson/Lessan), another name on Horne’s list of pro-Japanese Eurasians, was his sub-agent.[53] Both Khan and Lee(son) gave evidence at war crimes trials,[54] and at one of these it was declared in open court that Mr. Khan/Chan was a loyal agent of the BAAG (China Mail, February 28, 1946, page 2). In any case, Mr. Leeson should have no place on the Race War! list of ‘despised Eurasians’ as he was black and therefore not Eurasian by any definition, something Horne himself hints at; his presence suggests that Horne is aware how little evidence he has that significant elements of the Eurasian community supported the Japanese.
Personally I don’t think there’s any doubt about the loyalty to the British (and the courageous achievements) of these two men; even if we exercise great caution and say that the Indian document means there’s some kind of doubt, they still can’t count on Horne’s list of Eurasians who supported the Japanese without further investigation and some rather remarkable new findings about the duping of the British authorities over several years post-war in spite of apparent documentary evidence of their activities.
The best-known name on Horne’s list is Sir Robert Kotewall, a senior member of the Eurasian community who was regarded as a traitor by many British people during and by some after the war. In Horne’s account, he was indeed pro-Japanese but escaped later prosecution because of his social eminence and because of his earlier services as a strike-buster. This does not give a fair picture of the facts, and it’s sad that Horne’s relied on a wartime source with imperfect information at its disposal without checking post-war historians – a clear account of the case is given by Endacott and Birch in their 1978 book,[55] for example.
Firstly, soon after the surrender, Kotewall had been asked by three senior British officials to co-operate with the Japanese for the sake of the Chinese masses;[56] as this shows the British in a good light, Horne had an additional reason for mentioning it, as it would have provided some evidence of British concern for the Chinese to balance what is generally a crude depiction of British malignity or indifference. According to one of those officials, R. A. C. North, he asked Kotewall and Sir Shouson Chow (an eminent Chinese citizen) ‘to take upon themselves what should have been my duty of working with the Japanese’. North went on to explain that, as a result of complying with his request, the two men had been ‘misrepresented and abused’.[57]
Secondly, Kotewall didn’t actually do anything other than ‘hedge’[58] in occupied Hong Kong. He shouted ‘Banzai’ at public meetings but never betrayed anyone to the Kempeitai or helped the Japanese war effort directly, which were more or less the only reasons for post-war prosecution. In fact, he was careful to make his speeches as little anti-British as possible under the circumstances.[59] Moreover, he did his best to help the mass of Chinese poor, just as North and his colleagues had requested.[60]
In other words, Sir Robert’s behaviour came nowhere near the kind of collaboration suggested by Horne. And it’s worth repeating that in a ‘captured territory’ in which the justly-feared secret police had more power than anywhere else in the Japanese Empire and ran rampant amongst the Chinese population[61] even those lucky enough to avoid arrest and torture had to worry about starvation. In addition Sir Robert had to keep his nine daughters safe from Japanese attentions,[62] and had his house placed under Japanese military jurisdiction for much of the occupation.[63]
As to the reasons for his immunity from prosecution – this is what Hong Kong escaper Brigadier (and Colonial Secretary) MacDougall wrote after liberation:
The Kotewall business is a mess. So far as I can see no one has a scrap of real evidence, and all I have seen so far would not stand up in court for two seconds.[64]
Tony Banham, probably the leading currently active historian of the Hong Kong war, considers Kotewall’s behaviour during the occupation as ‘selfless’ and the charges of collaboration ‘unfounded’.[65]
In other words, Horne’s claim that Kotewall was pro-Japanese is baseless, and his suggestion that he avoided prosecution as a bourgeois and a strike-breaker (in 1925!) is no more than Marxist theology. Ironically, he misses the real significance of Sir Robert’s story for his theme: he was unjustly branded collaborator or even traitor during the war, and carried the stigma after it. He was not allowed back into public life after the liberation, and he died in 1949. He was said to be ‘cut to the quick’ by his unjust treatment.[66] One could at least make out a case that his ‘race’ had something to do with what happened to him.
Which brings me to the only reasonably reliable discussion in this section of Race War!, that of Joseph James Richards (although Richards was not charged with High Treason, as Horne claims, but with breach of the Defence Regulations – the original charge was reduced ‘through the clemency of the Crown’[67] and this probably saved his life). Mr. Richards was considered a likely collaborator form the start; he was probably the alcoholic ‘wasteaway’ of war nursed by Hungarian Francis Braun in their brief internment by the British during the hostilities in December 1941.[68] During the occupation he worked for or at least with the Kempeitai (‘the Japanese Gestapo’) and was alleged to have boasted that he was responsible for the arrest of many Portuguese residents; he claimed, for example, to have played a leading role in the investigation of Charles Henry Basto, who was executed in 1943 for spying.[69] He seems to have specialised in pro-Japanese work in Macao,[70] admitting at his trial that he’d asked questions about the security arrangements of the embattled British Consul John Reeves, whose kidnapping was a real possibility. He was probably one of the people who scared my father most, as he was a Japanese agent living, for part of the war at least, at the French Hospital, and one BAAG source even suggested it was his intelligence that led to the arrest of Dr. Selwyn-Clarke and the others taken from the Hospital on May 2, 1943.[71] In August 1946 it took the jury a mere 80 minutes to find him guilty on 7 out of 8 charges and he was sentenced to 15 years in prison.[72]
It already weakens Horne’s case that Richards was part Japanese (on his mother’s side) so throwing in his lot with Japan doesn’t require so much explanation. He was, moreover being paid by the Japanese for his work, which makes his allegiance even less impressive. Horne implies, in line with the theme of his book, that it was the way that the British treated people of mixed race that led to his choice: his father was British, but it was only the Japanese who ‘appreciated his services’. However, there is something that further weakens, although it does not completely destroy, Horne’s case: Richards had been arrested as a spy by the Chinese in 1937.[73] He admitted this at his trial, and when asked what services he supplied the Japanese consul he stated that (as well as Chinese language lessons) he obtained Chinese news reports that were not available to the Japanese.[74] In other words, four years before the British became involved in the war, just like Lawrence Klindt-Kentwell, Mr. Richards was helping the Japanese (albeit in very minor ways) in their aggression against China – his detention occurred after the outbreak of full-scale fighting in July 1937 and at the height of the Nanjing Massacre. He was said to be born in the Colony and it’s possible he saw the Japanese as the future liberators of its people from British imperialism, so supported them even when all they were doing was launching a violent aggression against another Asian people. It’s certain that he experienced racial discrimination in Hong Kong, so Horne’s case doesn’t collapse completely, but it’s left looking extremely weak.
This is all that Horne offers, and, with two exceptions, I’m not aware of much else; anonymous Eurasians working for the Japanese sometimes flash into sight in the sources,[75] but, as I earlier indicated, if there are detailed accounts of genuinely pro-Japanese Hong Kong Eurasians without Japanese blood, I’ve not been able to find them yet. But there is one man lacking from Horne’s book, someone who, although he did have Japanese ancestry, provides a much more powerful indictment of British racism and its effects than any of the cases he discusses. Mr. Y – once again I prefer to withhold the name – did not subscribe to the Japanese cause before their attack on the European empires. During the hostilities he served bravely with the Volunteers and his knowledge of the invaders’ language was put to good effect and possibly saved lives. His resentment against the British was well-founded, as he had been the victim of racism in both Shanghai and Hong Kong, in the former case with the most serious consequences for his life and happiness. He was a fine humanitarian, who, while giving political and perhaps economic support to the Japanese, carried out works of relief for the defeated. This was of course risky, and he ended up in a Japanese prison, although probably for a ‘crime’ he didn’t commit. Ironically Horne’s indictment ignores this man focusing instead on people who probably didn’t exist or weren’t supporters of the Japanese.
My second additional example shows how careful one must be about jumping to conclusions. Jerome Law acted as an interpreter for the Kempeitai – he probably was forced to do so by financial necessity or through threats, as he obviously remained sympathetic to the British. This courageous man, who knew better than anyone the risks involved, translated the words of a prisoner under interrogation as favourably as possible, gave him information as to what the Japanese already knew, and made a suggestion as to what he should tell his interrogator. (Ralph Goodwin, Passport to Eternity, 1956, 172-174). It’s hard to believe that this was the only case in which Mr. Law risked his own liberty and even life to aid a British prisoner; after the war he appeared as a witness in two war crimes trials (http://hkwctc.lib.hku.hk/exhibits/show/hkwctc/documents/item/79).
Horne never suggests that the fact that most Hong Kong Eurasians were part Chinese might have made them more, not less, loyal to the British. I’ll deal in a future post with the unconvincing manoeuvre with which he tries to justify his refusal to discuss Japanese racism and to provide any detailed account of their violent rule in Hong Kong and elsewhere. But the reason that most Chinese supported the British was that Japanese imperialism had taken Formosa (Taiwan) in 1895, Korea, formerly a Chinese tributary, in 1910, and Manchuria in 1931, and then launched all-out war against China in 1937. This assault was accompanied by atrocities that matched the worst of the British Empire elsewhere – for example, the extermination of the indigenous Tasmanians in the nineteenth century– and in the eyes of most Chinese far out-weighed anything the British and other Europeans had done in China. All communities in Hong Kong were aware of what had happened after the fall of Nanking (Nanjing) and the colony was flooded with Chinese refugees from the fighting who knew first-hand the brutality that could be expected. Edith Wood’s father, married to a Japanese woman, wrote to his family about events in Swatow, where he stayed to try to protect his property, describing the bombings and the rapes.[76] Most Eurasians were part Chinese and so had good reason to fear and distrust the Japanese armies.
In fact, the big picture is simply not available: the evidence to conclude that the Eurasians were more or less loyal than the ‘pure bred’ Europeans simply doesn’t exist. But there’s evidence of Eurasian support for the old order that far outweighs Horne’s chronicle of the pro-Japanese. Horne’s technique is to allow a little of this evidence to emerge in the statements of those he quotes while focusing his own narrative almost entirely on those Eurasians who supported Japan – although, as we’ve seen, without providing largely dubious examples.
During the hostilities the Eurasian company of the Volunteers fought with exceptional courage,[77] taking casualties far above the average of both their fellow Volunteers and the professional soldiers,[78] and providing a justified sense of pride to Veronica Needa, who’s written powerfully about the problems faced by Hong Kong’s Eurasians. [79] The exploits of the Eurasian unit takes up many pages of Philip Bruce’s book on the Volunteers, and the summary offered by their commander Lieutenant Field provides a neat glimpse into both the prejudices of pre-war Hong Kong and the way they began to be overturned after the Japanese attack:
I was particularly impressed by the fine spirit and steadiness shown by the Volunteers under my command. They were all Eurasians, most with a British father and a Chinese or Eurasian mother, a type which in Hong Kong had not been credited generally with the character these men showed.[80]
Horne quotes evidence as to the pride the Eurasians felt in their pre-war role in the Volunteers and allows witnesses to attest to their gallantry in combat[81] but fails to draw the obvious conclusion: these men did not find their pride in military service only because, as Horne’s witness suggests, they could find in military training an equality denied them in the rest of their lives. When it came to actual combat they fought with a tenacity and self-sacrifice that drew tributes from almost all commentators, including Hong Kong’s commanding officer Major-General Maltby. They were brave men whose courage was rooted in the sense that they had something to fight for:The Eurasians, the only community who had no other home, stood their ground against the invaders with conspicuous bravery….[82]
As we’ve seen, some Eurasians were satisfied with their life in that ‘home’, for all its defects. Franklin Gimson’s war-time diary recorded the thought that Hong Kong fell relatively easily because most of its population didn’t believe in what they were fighting for.[83] The Eurasians of 3 Company HKVDC fought like men who understood why they were fighting and were willing to die for what they were defending. Major-General Maltby pointed out that they were part of a defence of the Wongneichong Gap conducted by 250 men against 3,000 Japanese –‘ the Volunteers simply would not give ground and the casualties were appalling.’ The reader of Race War! might be forgiven for wondering why they didn’t just throw down their arms and run out to greet their liberators.
During the occupation Eurasians played a role in both relief and resistance work. It seems that one of the most dedicated and courageous relief workers of all was Eurasian: Selwyn-Clarke calls Helen Ho Chinese, but her mother was Ethel Zimmern, so she had German ancestry.[84] She was arrested three times for her work,[85] and when telephone engineer Les Fisher left Shamshuipo after liberation he discovered that ‘Helen Ho’s name is on everyone’s lips’.[86]
In Stanley Camp relief came from the part-Japanese Eurasian Emily Ritsu Wood, whose case shows that by no means as ahose with Japanese blood went over to the conquerors, much as it was in their interests to do so, or pretend to do so. Mrs. Wood accepted the hardships of internment with the rest of her family, and first used her knowledge of Japanese to get black market drugs for her son-in-law and then began to have them smuggled in for the camp hospital.[87]
Dangerous as relief work was, resistance was more perilous still. In Stanley Jean Gittins translated messages into Chinese for the resistance, even though she was warned that there were few Chinese speakers in camp and if the messages were discovered – which was highly possible given that the courier network had been penetrated – she would be executed.[88]
Even more heroic was the role played by Eurasians in the town resistance: Jimmy Kotewall joined the BAAG knowing he was a marked man after the execution of his brother George on October 29, 1943. A Japanese officer told his wife he was a brave man who’d met death like a true samurai.[89] And, as we’ve seen, it seems highly likely that two of those who Horne claims were pro-Japanese in fact worked for the British underground.
To further understand why many Eurasians fought and died for the British order that oppressed them, and why some later gave their lives to help bring that order back, we need only look at the experience of the head of the wartime Eurasian Welfare Association, Elias Davies Sykes. Mr. Sykes was believed by the British Army Aid Group to be on the Informal Welfare Committee established by Dr. Selwyn-Clarke to carry out ‘legal’ works of relief in occupied Hong Kong[90] – the document calls him an ex-convict, which is true but a little harsh. In 1940 he had judgement given against him when a solicitor sued him over an unpaid bill of HK$160.[91] The next year he was sent to prison for three months for obtaining a little money by an unlikely piece of mis-representation involving a claimed culinary relationship with two senior police officers.[92] He admitted a previous conviction, and it was said he appeared to be a ‘professional trickster’.[93]
On January 21, 1943 he was arrested by the Japanese.[94] He was questioned under torture – by water, electricity and hanging[95] – about Selwyn-Clarke: the Kempeitai had been looking for evidence that he was involved in espionage since September 1942, if not earlier. Presumably Sykes steadfastly refused to incriminate Selwyn-Clarke, who wasn’t arrested until May 2, but he did admit to scamming the Japanese authorities by claiming rations for 250 non-existent members of the League. There is no reason to doubt his claim that he sold the extra food for money to keep the Welfare League going.[96] On April 8 he was given ten years in gaol – effectively a death sentence, as no-one could survive Japanese prison conditions for anything like that period. He spent May 1943 to January 1944 in the Prison Hospital,[97] where rations were even lower. He survived to give evidence at two war crimes trials.[98]
Horne is right to note that prejudice against Eurasians continued in Stanley Camp, although he also notes that attitudes were changing, albeit far too slowly. One young girl found that while her father didn’t want her to play with Eurasians, her mother took a more pragmatic attitude and, in any case, the circumstances of camp life meant that it was relatively easy to choose her own friends without her father’s interference.[99] As late as November 1944 the Commissioner of Police (John Pennefather-Evans) ruled that an officer who planned to marry a woman thought to be Eurasian (she denied it) would have to leave the force. Camp Secretary Franklin Gimson was on the officer’s side, but felt he had to support the hierarchy.[100]
Nevertheless, it’s pleasing to provide a footnote to an episode Horne comments on: some ‘white’ women in camp complained that if the Eurasians (and no doubt the rest of the non-British contingent) weren’t there, there would be more food for everyone. The rationale for this was the fact that only ‘pure bred’ whites were absolutely forced into Stanley, but, as Horne points out, rations were sent into camp according to the numbers on the roll, and fewer people would simply have meant less food. And this point was not lost on some internees, as a story in a book that presumably appeared too late for Horne to use nicely illustrates:
One time when it was my turn to queue, I heard a pompous English voice from behind me announce, ‘If there weren’t so many Eurasians in camp, there would be enough food to go around.’ I saw red and was about to retaliate when another woman, also with Asian blood, called out, ‘If we weren’t here, the Japs wouldn’t send as much food to the camp as they do, you arrogant fool!’ This outburst was followed by cheers from the many prisoners standing in line.[101]
Some of those in line must have been British, and it’s a cheering story. However, it’s worth noting that objections from the ‘white’ internees to the Eurasian presence on the grounds of space were better founded, as there was no question of the Japanese adding or taking away accommodation as the numbers fluctuated. Nevertheless, the Camp Temporary Committee decided that the Eurasians could stay,[102] and, although Camp Secretary John Stericker reported this in rather mocking tones, it’s worth pointing out that this decision put the Eurasians in a better position than the ‘whites’: they could decide if the city or camp gave them better prospects, and I know from personal information of at least one family where members seem to have ‘split’ with perhaps both gaining from the dual location. I’m not suggesting that this was a wonderful choice or that it made up for the pre-war racism.
In any case, many internees left Stanley with a determination to make things different in the future. How far they succeeded and failed is beyond the scope of this post, but Horne is right to note that, as memories of the camps, the shared suffering and the heroism displayed by many of Hong Kong’s subject populations in the anti-Japanese struggle, began to fade, some of the old racial arrogance returned. The classic novel of this period of Hong Kong is, as it happens, by an early champion of Eurasian identity, Han Suyin, and the passages on racial attitudes in A Many Splendoured Thing (1952, based on the author’s experiences in 1949-1950) make depressing reading.
New Year’s Eve 1947, in a Hong Kong in which racial barriers, although far from disappearing, are less sturdy than before the war: starting from the front left, we have Eurasian, Swiss, Chinese (probable), English, Eurasian, and Brazilian (probable)
But it’s worth considering the fact that, bad as the British treatment of Eurasians sometimes remained, it was soothing compared to the prejudice and violence meted out by some post-war Chinese leftists – one Eurasian man even reports his parents were constantly aware that parcels might be bombs.[103]
Nevertheless, in spite of all this and of the weakness of the evidence presented in Race War! it’s absolutely unthinkable that the appalling racism of pre-war Hong Kong played no part in turning Eurasians and other ethnicities against the British. The trouble is, it’s impossible to assess the extent to which this happened.
There are two possible routes to establishing that racism played a significant part in driving the Eurasians (or any other community) into the arms of the Japanese: the first is detailed case histories – I’ve shown in this post that those provided by Horne don’t stand up to examination. The second is statistical. Precise statistics as to the number of collaborators (by some reasonable definition) from each community don’t exist, and it’s hard to arrive at even a rough idea. The exception to this is the Indian community, where there were a fairly large number of Japanese sympathisers many of whom were motivated by political ideals (support for Indian independence) and/or resentment at British racial arrogance, and where historians have tried to estimate numbers involved. Even here things are not as simple as Horne makes out, and I’ll discuss Hong Kong’s Rajputs, Sikhs and Punjabis in a separate post. However, in the absence of precise statistics I’d be happy to accept the ‘sense’ of a historian who thoroughly knows the sources and shows no strong biases: I doubt that Bernard Wasserstein has evidence that would satisfy a statistician for his claim that in Shanghai a ‘disproportionate’ number of Eurasians collaborated,[104] but I see no reason to doubt it. None of the most reliable historians of Hong Kong’s wartime experience have made any such statement, and my guess is that this caution is justified.
Firstly, it’s not even clear how many Eurasians there were in occupied Hong Kong. One source, (cited in Snow, 2003, 391) gives a figure of 614 not in camps in early 1943, but this seems far too small, perhaps because of a very strict definition of ‘Eurasian’.
Another major problem for a statistical approach to the assessment of the effects of racism is that it’s impossible to establish a base line of ‘pure bred’ white collaborators. I’m aware of BAAG documents that name three pre-war Japanese sympathisers whose ethnicity is unknown but might have been ‘white’; all were in Hong Kong until the autumn of 1942, when they left for Shanghai or Macao. It’s hard to even guess as to how many ‘whites’ would have worked for the Kempeitai or given genuine political support to the Japanese if they’d been forced to make a living in occupied Hong Kong. Even in Stanley and Shamshuipo, where rations were provided, there were ‘stoolies’ and outright spies.[105] In Stanley suspicion fell on non-British people, but a US State Department report (cited in Greg Leck’s study) suggests that ‘at least one of the more vicious informers was a woman of British birth’ and that ‘the Americans also had their quota of informers’.[106] Franklin Gimson’s diary contains a long list of those in camp he suspected of conveying information to the Japanese[107] and diarist R. E. Jones suspected three fellow prison officers of being part of a ‘fifth column’.[108] Only one British prosecution eventuated, a Court-Martial and when the Shamshuipo officer was acquitted (in London) both ex-Pows and civilian internees were indignant.
The null hypothesis that in the case of Hong Kong’s Eurasians they acted no differently from the way the ‘whites’ would have if circumstances had been the same certainly can’t be ruled out on the evidence available to me. However, most likely is the situation that can only be summed up in the vague formula – of course racism played a part in alienating Eurasians from the British. Beyond that it’s not safe to go without more evidence.
If Race War’s thesis as to the deleterious effects of racism on the British resistance to Japan depended on its analysis of the Eurasians we’d have to conclude that at the very best it was ‘not proven’. But Horne is on sounder ground when he deals with the Indian community. Nevertheless, in this case, and in his handling of the Chinese majority and of the ‘whites’, there are huge problems which I’ll discuss in future posts.
Note:
There’s some disagreement as to the ethnicity of Joseph (Horne calls him William) Carroll, a former stockbroker who was sentenced for collaboration after the war. He might have been Irish/Cuban, but Snow thinks he was Irish/Chinese (364). At his trial he denied suggestions he was part Japanese. There’s also some debate as to whether he did any more than trim his sails to survive. I shall discuss his case in a separate post, but he should mentioned here as a possible Eurasian Japanese sympathiser. Snow also mentions Charles Archer, aka Sidney Gidney, aka Jimmy Murphy, as a prewar ‘Eurasian malcontent’, but I’ve not been ale to find anything about his wartime activities.
[3] Gerald Horne, Race War!, 2004, Kindle Edition Location 602.
[4] Sociologist H. J. Lethbridge, cited in Horne, 2004, Location 830.
[5] Cited Horne, 2004 Location 752?
[6] Philip Snow, The Fall of Hong Kong, 2003, 356.
[7] Jean Gittins, Stanley: Behind Barbed-Wire, 1982, 8.
[9] Allana Corbin, Prisoners of the Japanese, 2002, 83.
[10] Corbin, 2002, 52-53.
[12] Paul Gillingham, At The Peak: Hong Kong Between The Wars, 1983, 68.
[13] Horne, 2004, Location763.
[14] Emily Hahn, China To Me, (1944) 1986 ed., 291.
[15] Horne, 2004, Location 834.
[16] Hahn, 1986, ed., 346 ff.
[17] Peter Hall, In The Web, 2012, 160.
[18] He escaped with Gwen Priestwood and the story is told in her Through Japanese Barbed-Wire (1943), where he is called Anthony Bathurst.
[19] Horne, 2004, Location 884.
[21] The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, April 10, 1925, page 6.
[22] Bernard Wasserstein, Secret War in Shanghai, 1998, 85.
[23] China Mail, November 25, 1926, page 12.
[25] Hong Kong Telegraph, February 7, 1927, page 1; page 12.
[26] Wasserstein, 1998, 187.
[27] Hongkong Daily Press, February 7, 1927, page 9.
[30] Wasserstein, 1998, 193.
[31] China Mail, September 6, 1927, page 1.
[32] China Mail, September 8, 1927, page 19
[33] Horne, 2004, Location, 895.
[34] Wasserstein, 1998, 192-93.
[35] Before the war he’d given himself the title Retrocession Commissioner for the International Settlement of Shanghai and for Hong Kong and Kowloon, and this position was made official by the Chinese puppet government in 1938 or 1939 – Wasserstein, 1998, 190.
[36] Horne, 2004, Location 6638.
[37] No criticism of Horne is implied: naming people on the internet is different to naming them in an academic book.
[38] Horne, 2004, Location 311.
[39] For an account of Charles Boxer’s guidelines for working for the Japanese, see Hahn, 1986 ed., 324. The version given in Hong Kong Holiday is simpler and amounts to ‘just keep out of politics’.
[40] Robert Ward, Hong Kong Under Japanese Occupation, 1943, 21.
[42] Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke, Footprints, 1975, 70.
[44] Andrew Leiper, A Yen For My Thoughts, 1982, 102-3.
[45] Ward, 1943 gives some striking examples.
[46] G. B. Endacott and Alan Birch, Hong Kong Eclipse, 1978, 153.
[47] Meiqi Lee, Being Eurasian,, 2004, 69.
[49] Information kindly supplied by Elizabeth Ride, email 10/13/12.
[51] Name absent in original, but geographical and ethnic details make the identification almost certain.
[53] Statement of William Cheng, 14/10/45, Ride Papers.
[54] China Mail, December 17, 1946, page 3.
[55] Endacott and Birch, 1978, 242-243.
[60] Snow, 2003, 222-225.
[63] Oliver Lindsay, At The Going Down of the Sun, 1982, 148.
[67] Hong Kong Sunday Herald, August 18, 1946, page 4.
[68] Francis Braun, The Banknote That Never Was, 1982, 8.
[69] China Mail, August 17, 1946, page 4.
[70] China Mail, August 16, 1946, page 4.
[72] Hong Kong Sunday Herald, August 18, 1946, page 4.
[73] Hongkong Telegraph, December 17, 1937, page 1.
[74] China Mail, August 16, 1946, page 4.
[80] Philip Bruce, Second To None, 1991, 250.
[81] Horne, 2004, Locations 1721 and 1789.
[83] Rhodes House (Oxford), Ms. Ind. Ocn. S222, F. C. Gimson, Internment in Hong-Kong (sic) March 1942 to August 1945, p. 32b.
[84] Hall, 2012, 118, 226.
[85] Bowie, Captive Surgeon in Hong Kong, 1975, 192-193.
[86] Les Fisher, I Will Remember, 1996, 229.
[87] Corbin, 2002, 174-175.
[90] Report by Major Douglas Clague, Waichow, 15.8.42, Ride Papers.
[91] Hongkong Telegraph, January 12, 1940, page 2.
[92] Hongkong Daily Press, September 22, 1941, page
[93] China Mail, September 26, 1941, page 6.
[94] Hong Kong Sunday Herald, January 5, 1947, page 2.
[95] Hongkong Sunday Herald, January 5, 1947, page 2
[96] Hongkong Sunday Herald, January 5, 1947, page 2.
[97] China Mail. April 4, 1947, page 2.
[99] Bernice Archer, The Internment of Western Civilians Under The Japanese, 2004, 190.
[100] Geoffrey Emerson, Hong Kong Internment, 1942-1945, Kindle Edition, Location 591.
[104] Wasserstein, 1998, 183.
[105]Tony Banham, We Shall Suffer There, 2009, 202-204. Two Canadian were also court-martialled.
[106] Greg Leck, Captives of Empire, 2006, 347.
[107] Rhodes House (Oxford), Ms. Ind. Ocn. S222, F. C. Gimson, Internment in Hong-Kong (sic) March 1942 to August 1945, p. 45, Tuesday 11.
[108] Diary of R. E. Jones, entry for February 14, 1942.
