Chaps v. Japs

Does anyone do derring-do anymore? Here’s the real thing. On Christmas Day 1941, despite Churchill’s call to fight to the last man, Hong Kong fell to the Japanese, the first British possession to surrender since the American War of Independence. Within a few hours, Chiang Kai-shek’s main official in the colony, the one-legged Admiral Chan Chak, together with three of his staff, several senior British officials and a few others, fled the colony under heavy
Japanese fire and managed to reach a little flotilla of motor torpedo boats manned by 50 British sailors. Thus began a journey by boat, foot, truck and train across China, with most of the party reaching Burma — also about to fall — then India; and, after five months in all, some of them arrived home in Britain.

The book contains many photographs — and a good thing, too, for credibility. A suspicious reader might groan that too many people are swimming under fire, being shot and wounded while speeding along in torpedo boats, bombed by Japanese planes and hiding while Japanese cavalry ride past. One of the escapers recalled that both sides of a river down which they were fleeing ‘were occupied by Japanese soldiers in great numbers, making it a thoroughly nerve-racking five-day journey.’ He summarised it like this: ‘To think that 50-60 British Naval officers and men and our own party of three army officers, together with our beloved admiral and his escort of armed guerrillas, were, for the most part of a week right in their [the Japanese] midst without their knowing it was almost unbelievable’.

The dangers were unpredictable. A Danish merchant service cadet rushing to alert the sailors on the motorboats that the main party is right behind him, shouts, ‘There’s a lot of chaps behind me coming this minute.’ This came across to the British as ‘There’s lots of Japs behind me.’