Forces With History #223--Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

This festive wish is going your way on December 24^th, 2024. My thoughts are on reasons to celebrate and are concentrated on family, friends, and all of you receiving this message.

Have a great holiday and all the best for 2025.

(I’m holding off on the continuing storyline about “C” Force, the Winnipeg Grenadiers and Royal Rifles of Canada, that landed in Hong Kong in November 1941. Days later the Japanese declared war and invaded. The Grenadiers’ and Rifles’ fighting war was over when Hong Kong surrendered on a terrible Christmas Day. I’ve copied post #222, from two weeks ago, below; I’ll follow up with more about the tragic battle in 2025.)

This edition of Forces With History is coming to you a couple of days early because I want to publish it on December 8^th, a date that marks the grim events that befell the Winnipeg Grenadiers and the Royal Rifles of Canada in 1941.

Every American schoolchild would be able to tell you that December 7^th was the Day of Infamy, when Japan attacked the US fleet in Pearl Harbor. But across the international date line in Hong Kong it was December 8^th.

Just arrived in Hong Kong some three weeks earlier were the Grenadiers and the Royal Rifles, sent from Canada to reinforce the British, Indian, and Hong Kong troops already present. They comprised a force of about 14,000 in all.

Without warning, Japanese infantry and artillery poured across the boundary separating the British New Territories from occupied China. Within a matter of hours the few British aircraft at Kai Tak Airfield were destroyed by Japanese planes.

From December 8^th until Christmas Day, the defenders were battered by hugely superior numbers of battle-hardened Japanese troops backstopped by artillery and aircraft. The Grenadiers, Royal Rifles, and their compatriots “fought like tigers,” as one commentator noted to me. But on the 25^th, the Union Jack was hauled down. The surviving Allied soldiers, sailors, and airmen faced a bleak future as prisoners of war.

Looking back now, it’s hard to imagine how disastrous things looked for Britain and her allies. Most of continental Europe flew the swastika. Hong Kong was gone. Singapore fell in short order, accompanied by the nearby sinking of His Majesty’s Ships Prince of Wales and Repulse. The American Pacific Fleet was gone.

The Pacific Ocean was a Japanese lake.