The many and varied aspects of the Second World War still hold for us a fatal fascination even though the conflict came to and end over two generations ago. Men and women were called upon to perform extraordinary tasks that in other circumstances they would have thought totally beyond them. The lives of everybody at the time were deeply affected by their individual experiences – sometimes heroic, sometimes tragic, but in the vast majority of cases unrecorded and often unrecognised. It is perhaps for this reason that even though so much has been written already, there are still new angles...

For most people in the Western world, the Pacific War began with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941. The first steps towards the conflict, however, had already been taken as early as the late nineteenth century, when Japan embarked on its gradual expansion into Chinese territory. When a Japan-assisted rebellion broke out in Korea in September 1894 — Korea was a protectorate of China at this time — the Japanese not only captured Pyongyang but also crushed the entire northern Chinese fleet. The Chinese government then was forced to sign the Treaty of Shimonoseki. In addition, China was...

For quite a few years after the Japanese imposed the infamous “21 Demands” on China in 1915, students and workers all over China and Hong Kong waged a campaign to boycott the use and purchase of Japanese goods and Japanese shops. Overseas Chinese communities, particularly those in Southeast Asia, joined in enthusiastically. Such activities outside China had a definite effect on Japan, as Southeast Asia was the dumping ground of Japanese textile and light industrial goods.

In Singapore and Malaya alone, there were over 2.3 million overseas Chinese in 1941. Because of their relatively better income than their Chinese counterparts...

Hong Kong Island was the product of the first Opium War, and the British took full possession in 1842. Eighteen years later, they acquired the tip of the Kowloon Peninsula, opposite Hong Kong Island across from Victoria Harbour. The island covers an area of thirty-two square miles, with a chain of steep hilly ridges throughout its length of eleven miles. The distance from the northern coastal strip to the farthest point to the south of the island is only five miles. Up to this point, the role of the Hong Kong government, except for a few Indian and Chinese police...

By mid-1943, the Hong Kong and Kowloon Independent Brigade had nearly 5,000 full-time soldiers who were divided into six duis, or detachments, with from 100-odd to over 600 full-time soldiers. They were the Lantau zhong dui, Shataukok zhong dui, Sai Kung zhong dui, Marine zhong dui, Urban zhong dui and the Yuen Long zhong dui. As the name used by the Hong Kong and Kowloon Independent Brigade was da dui, i.e. a brigade, all detachments that came under the brigade were called zhong dui,medium-sized dui, irrespective of their size.

At the formation of the brigade, the strongest and best organized...

On 16 July 1945, US President Harry Truman, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin held a conference in Potsdam, Germany. The aim of the conference was to map out their various areas of interest in Europe and Asia. The Americans by then had successfully detonated the first nuclear device in New Mexico. They were still anxious, and urged the Russians to enter the war with Japan in Asia as a means of saving lives. On 26 July 1945, the US, Britain and China issued the Potsdam Declaration that demanded the Japanese government “unconditionally surrender or face prompt and utter...

After the surrender by the Japanese, both the KMT and the Chinese Communist armed forces raced to move into areas in north China, particularly Manchuria, which had been occupied by the Japanese during most of the war years.

With assistance from the US, KMT forces were airlifted to important cities in the north such as Shenyang and Qingdao. At the same time, there were intermittent local skirmishes between the KMT and the Communist forces, mainly in the northeast and Shandong, but also in Guangdong and Hainan Island.

Pressure came from independent political parties, such as the China Democratic Union and...

On 1 October 1949, when the People’s Republic of China was established after three years of civil war, Guangzhou had to wait for two more weeks before it was liberated. Shortly after the province’s liberation, some unusual difficulties not found in other provinces were encountered. People in Guangdong and, for that matter, Guangxi, spoke a totally different dialect from that of the rest of the country. In Guangdong, after the first and second Opium Wars, quite a few of the big cities had come under foreign influence.

In October 1949, Zeng Sheng and his comrades in the East River Column...