1 Daniel Todman, Britain’s War: Into Battle, 1937–1941 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 385-386.
2 Robin Prior, When Britain Saved the West: The Story of 1940 (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press,
2015), 135.
3 Maury Klein, A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013), 284.
4 Samuel Eliot Morison. History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. Volume Three: The Rising Sun
in the Pacific, 1931-April 1942 (Edison, New Jersey: Castle Books, 2001), 209-210.
5 C.P. Stacey, Six Years of War: The Army in Canada, Britain and the Pacific (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1955), 488–
489.
6 Dieppe is the exception, but the historiography on this battle has undergone changes in the last ten years. The work
of David O’Keefe is one example of this shift in interpretations.
7 Tim Cook, The Fight for History: 75 Years of Forgetting, Remembering, and Remaking Canada’s Second World
War (Toronto: Allen Lane, 2020), 237.
8
Jonathan F. Vance, Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997),
10.
9 Cook, Fight for History, 79.
10 Ibid., 10, 436.
11 All war
diaries from the units that fought at Hong Kong were written after the
battle as the originals were purposefully destroyed during the fighting.
12 Gregory A. Johnson, “The Canadian experience of the Pacific War:
Betrayal and Forgotten Captivity,” in Forgotten Captives in
Japanese-Occupied Asia, eds. Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn (London:
Routledge, 2008), 128.
13 These phrases come from in order from,
Nathan M. Greenfield, The Damned: The Canadians at the Battle of Hong
Kong and the POW Experience, 1941–45 (Toronto: Harper Collins, 2010).
Terry Meagher, Betrayal: Canadian Soldiers Hong Kong 1941 (Kemptville:
Veterans Publications, 2015). Tony Banham, Not the Slightest Chance: The
Defence of Hong Kong, 1941 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003).
14
“Remembering the Battle of Hong Kong,” Red Deer Express, 28 December
2016,
https://www.reddeerexpress.com/opinion/remembering-the-battle-of-hong-kong/.
15 Craig S. Smith, “A Doomed Battle for Hong Kong, With Only Medals
Left 75 Years Later,” The New York Times, 23 December 2016,
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/world/canada/a-doomed-battle-for-hong-kong-with-onlymedals-left-75-years-later.html.
16 Kevin Lui, “How Untrained Canadian Troops Fought and Died in the
Defense of Hong Kong,” Time Magazine, 17 January 2017,
https://time.com/4635638/battle-of-hong-kong-canada-winnipeg-grenadiers-royal-rifles/.
All quotes are left in their original style.
17 Galen Roger Perras,
“Defeat Still Cries Aloud for Explanation: Explaining C Force’s Dispatch
to Hong Kong,” Canadian Military Journal 11, no. 4 (2011): 46.
18
Stockings, “Introduction,” 1.
19 Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever
Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 2016), 213.
20 Stockings, “Introduction,” 2–3.
21 Donald E. Chipman and Robert S. Weddle, “How Historical Myths Are
Born…And Why They Seldom Die,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly
116, no. 3 (2013): 252.
22 Vance, Death So Noble, 8.
23 W.T.
Jones, “On the Meaning of the Term ‘Influence’ in Historical Studies”
Ethics 53, no. 3 (1943): 200
24 Despite the Canadian ground forces
not being called the Canadian Army until 1940, this dissertation will
use that title throughout to avoid confusion. If the Canadian Militia is
discussed, this said use will be explicitly stated.
25 Kwong Chi Man
and Tsoi Yiu Lun, Eastern Fortress: A Military History of Hong Kong,
1840–1970 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015), 165–166.
26
Jane E. Calvert, “Myth-Making and Myth-Breaking in the Historiography on
John Dickinson,” Journal of the Early Republic 34, no. 3 (2014): 467.
27 There are two versions of revisionism connected to the Battle of
Hong Kong. The first is the popular history revisionism defined by the
rejection of official histories on the battle. This group includes
authors such as Carl Vincent and the documentary series The Valour and
the Horror. The second version of revisionism is by defined by academic
historians who rejected the claims made by Vincent and in The Valour and
the Horror.
28 Tony Banham, “A Historiography of C Force,” Canadian
Military History 24, no. 2 (2015): 239.
29 C.M. Maltby, “Operations
in Hong Kong from 8th to 25th December, 1941,” Supplement to The London
Gazette, 27 January 1948, 701, 720, 700.
30 Louis Morton, “The
Historian and the Study of War,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 49
(1962): 607.
31 Tim Cook, The Fight for History, 118.
32 C.P.
Stacey, The Canadian Army 1939–1945: An Official Historical Summary
(Ottawa: The King’s Printer, 1948), vii.
33 C.P. Stacey, A Date with
History: Memoirs of a Canadian Historian (Ottawa: Deneau Publishers,
1983), 238– 239.
34 Stacey, Six Years of War, 441–442.
35 Ibid.,
490.
36 Kenneth Taylor, “The Challenge of the Eighties: World War
Two from a New Perspective, the Hong Kong Case,” in Men at War:
Politics, Technology and Innovation in the Twentieth Century, eds.
Timothy Travers and Christon I. Archer (New Brunswick, New Jersey:
Transaction Publishers, 2011), 197–198.
37 Tim Cook. Clio’s
Warriors: Canadian Historians and the Writing of the World Wars
(Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006), 3.
38 S. Woodburn Kirby, The War
Against Japan: Loss of Singapore (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery
Office, 1957), 113, 146, 150.
39 Morton, “The Historian and the
Study of War,” 612–613.
40 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The
“Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 372.
41 Eric Arnesen,
“The Recent Historiography of British Abolitionism: Academic
Scholarship, Popular History, and the Broader Reading Public,”
Historically Speaking 8, no.6 (2007): 22.
42 Ibid., 22.
43 Nick
Sacco, “Can a Distinction Be Made Between ‘Academic’ and ‘Popular’
History?,” Exploring the Past (blog), 16 October 2014,
https://pastexplore.wordpress.com/2014/10/16/can-a-distinction-be-made-betweenacademic-and-popular-history/.
44 Michael Robinson, “Popular vs Academic History,” Time to Eat the
Dogs (blog), 4 May 2008,
https://timetoeatthedogs.com/2008/05/04/who-should-write-about-exploration/.
45 David Greenberg, “That Barnes & Noble Dream,” Slate, 18 May 2005,
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history_book_blitz/features/2005/that_barnes_noble_dream/are_po
pular_histories_vapid.html.
46 Gordon Wood, “In Defense of Academic
History Writing,” Perspectives on History, 1 April 2020,
https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/april-2010/in-defense-of-academichistory-writing.
47 Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein, “America's Worst Historians,”
Salon, 19 August 2012,
https://www.salon.com/2012/08/19/americas_worst_historians/.
48
Novick, That Noble Dream, 372.
49 Wilfred H. Kesterton, A History of
Journalism in Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1967), 71.
50
Sacco, “Can a Distinction Be Made Between ‘Academic’ and ‘Popular’
History?.”
51 Greenberg, “That Barnes & Noble Dream.” 52 Cook,
Clio’s Warriors, 6.
53 Evan Stewart, Record of the Actions of the
Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps in the Battle for Hong Kong December,
1941 (Hong Kong: Ye Olde Printerie, 1956), 4, 47.
54 Tim Carew, The
Fall of Hong Kong (London: Pan Books, 1963), 22.
55 W.A.B. Douglas
and Brereton Greenhous, Out of the Shadows: Canada in the Second World
War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 6.
56 Ibid., 104.
57
Ibid., 106.
58 G.B. Endacott, Hong Kong Eclipse (Hong Kong: Oxford
University Press, 1978), 59.
59 Ibid., 109.
60 Oliver Lindsay,
The Lasting Honour: The Fall of Hong Kong, 1941 (London: Sphere Books,
1980), 199.
61 Ibid., 201.
62 Ibid., 114, 200.
63 Oliver
Lindsay, The Battle for Hong Kong 1941–1945: Hostage to Fortune
(Staplehurst, United Kingdom: Spellmount, 2005), 54, 60, 138, & 51.
64 Ted Ferguson, Desperate Siege: The Battle for Hong Kong (Toronto:
Doubleday, 1980), 1.
65 Ibid., 5, 7.
66 Banham, “A
Historiography of C Force,” 244.
67 Vincent, No Reason Why, 9, 35,
43.
68 Ibid., 3.
69 Ibid., 209, 249
70 Perras, “Defeat Still
Cries Aloud for Explanation,” 40. Johnson, “The Canadian Experience of
the Pacific War,” 128–129.
71 Legion Magazine Staff, “Face To Face:
Should The Canadian Government Have Sent Troops To Hong Kong?” Legion
Magazine, 1 January 2015,
https://legionmagazine.com/en/2015/01/face-to-face-should-the-canadiangovernment-have-sent-troops-to-hong-kong/.
72 Ernest J. Dick, “‘The Valour and the Horror’ Continued: Do We
Still Want Our History on Television?,” Archivaria 35 (1993): 266. David
Taras, “The Struggle over ‘The Valour and the Horror’: Media Power and
the Portrayal of War” Canadian Journal of Political Science 28, no. 4
(1995): 725. Graham Carr, “Rules of Engagement: Public History and the
Drama of Legitimation,” The Canadian Historical Review 86, no. 2 (2005):
31.
73 Dick, “‘The Valour and the Horror’ Continued,” 266.
74 Gar
Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam The Use of the
Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power (New York:
Vintage Books 1965).
75 The Valour and the Horror, episode 1,
“Savage Christmas,” directed by Brian McKenna, written by Terence
McKenna and Brian McKenna, aired 12 January 1992, on CBC,
https://www.nfb.ca/film/savage_christmas_hong_kong_1941/.
76
Ibid.
77 S.F. Wise, “The Valour and the Horror: A Report for the CBC
Ombudsman,” in The Valour and The Horror Revisited, eds. David J.
Bercuson and S.F. Wise (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 1994), 17.
78 The Valour and the Horror, episode 1, “Savage
Christmas.”
79 Merrily Weisbord and Merilyn Simonds Mohr, The Valour
and the Horror: The Untold Story of Canadians in the Second World War
(Toronto: HarperCollins, 1991), 12.
80 Ibid. Tim Cook, The Necessary
War: Canadians Fighting the Second World War 1939–1943 (Toronto:
Penguin, 2014), 70.
81 Weisbord and Simonds Mohr, The Valour and the
Horror, 11.
82 John Ferris, “Savage Christmas,” in The Valour and The
Horror Revisited, eds. David J. Bercuson and S.F. Wise (Montreal and
Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 111.
83 Ibid.,
122.
84 Ibid., 118–119.
85 Ibid., 122.
86 Peter Stanley,
“Dramatic Myth and Dull Truth: Invasion by Japan in 1942,” in Zombie
Myths of Australian Military History, ed. Craig Stockings (Sydney,
Australia: University of New South Wales, 2010), 142.
87 Galen Roger
Perras, “‘Our Position in the Far East would be Stronger without this
Unsatisfactory Commitment’: Britain and the Reinforcement of Hong Kong,
1941,” Canadian Journal of History 30 (1995): 233, 245.
88 Ibid.,
248, 249.
89 Ibid., 251, 233.
90 Christopher Bell, “Our Most
Exposed Outpost: Hong Kong and British Far Eastern Strategy, 1921–1941,”
The Journal of Military History 60, no. 1 (1996): 61.
91 Ibid.,
75–76.
92 Ibid., 86–87.
93 Brereton Greenhous, “C” Force to Hong
Kong: A Canadian Catastrophe, 1941–1945 (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1997),
19, 4.
94 Ibid., 16, 15, 41.
95 Ibid., 109–110.
96 Cook, The
Fight for History, 324.
97 Bomber Command was the Royal Air Force
branch tasked with strategic bombing raids over Germany; Cook, Clio’s
Warriors, 252.
98 Wai-Chung Lawrence Lai, “The Battle of Hong Kong: A
Note on the Literature and the Effectiveness of the Defence,” The
Journal of the Hong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 39 (1999): 118,
121.
99 Ibid., 124–126.
100 John Keegan, The Second World War
(New York: Viking, 1989), 165, 171.
101 Terry Copp, “The Defence of
Hong Kong: December 1941,” Canadian Military History 10, no. 4 (2001):
6, 19.
102 Ibid., 11.
103 Ibid., 16, 19.
104 Kent Fedorowich,
“‘Cocked Hats and Swords and Small Little Garrisons’: Britain, Canada
and the Fall of Hong Kong, 1941,” Modern Asian Studies 37, no. 1 (2003):
113.
105 Johnson, “The Canadian Experience of the Pacific War,” 126
106 Matthew Schwarzkopf’s “The Second Mission: Canadian Survival in Hong
Kong Prisoner-of-War Camps, 1941– 1945” is an excellent study of the
POWs’ time in the Japanese camps. (MA Thesis, University of Ottawa,
2019).
107 Greenfield, The Damned, 13.
108 Perras, “Defeat Still
Cries Aloud for Explanation,”44.
109 Greenfield, The Damned, 21.
110 Ibid., 14–15.
111 Ibid., 22, xxix.
112 Perras, “Defeat Still
Cries Aloud for Explanation,” 37.
113 Ibid., 38.
114 Ibid.,
45–46.
115 Terry Copp, “The Decision to Reinforce Hong Kong September
1941,” Canadian Military History 20, no. 2 (2011): 11, 13.
116 Kwong
and Tsoi, Eastern Fortress, 64
117 Ibid., 136, 159, 223.
118 J.L.
Granatstein, Conscription in the Second World War, 1939–1945: A Study in
Political Management (Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1969), 51.
119
Cook, The Necessary War, 93, 70.
120 This group includes Wai-Chung
Lawrence Lai, Rob Weir, Chi Man Kwong, Tim Ko, and Y.K. Tan.
121 See
Wai-Chung Lawrence Lai et al., “The Gin Drinker’s Line: Reconstruction
of a British Colonial Defence Line in Hong Kong using Aerial Photo
Information,” Property Management 27, no. 1 (2009): 16. Rob Weir, “A
Note on British Blockhouses in Hong Kong,” Surveying and Built
Environment 22, no. 1 (2012): 8–18. Chi Man Kwong, “Reconstructing the
Early History of the Gin Drinker’s Line from Archival Sources,”
Surveying and Built Environment 22, no. 1 (2012): 19–36. All articles
provide important details of the development of the Gin Drinker’s Line
and why it fell so quickly to Japanese forces.
122 Antony Best,
Britain, Japan and Pearl Harbor: Avoiding War in East Asia, 1936–1941
(London: Routledge, 1995), 2.
123 Ibid., 201.
124 Ibid., 16, 195,
196.
125 Ibid., 165, 174–176.
126 Richard J. Aldrich,
Intelligence and the War against Japan: Britain, America and the
Politics of Secret Service (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 2.
127 Ibid., 36.
128 Ibid., 40, 52, 61.
129 John Ferris “‘Worthy of Some Better Enemy?’: The British
Estimate of the Imperial Japanese Army, 1919–41, and the Fall of
Singapore,” Canadian Journal of History 28 (1993): 231.
130 Ibid.,
247–248.
131 John Ferris, “‘Consistent with an Intention’: The Far
East Combined Bureau and the Outbreak of the Pacific War, 1940–41,”
Intelligence and National Security 27, no. 1, (2012): 10.
132 Ibid.,
26.
133 Perras, “Our Position in the Far East would be Stronger
without this Unsatisfactory Commitment,” 259.