(Link to footnotes for this chapter)
“In the Garden of Memory We Meet Every Day”1
—Tombstone of Sergeant David William Lumb, Royal Canadian Army
Pay Corps, died in Hong Kong, September 1942
Writing about Canadian memories of the Second World War, historian Jonathan F. Vance has concluded that “social memory is all about the creation of a usable past, but in the two decades after 1945, Canadians did not have much need for the past. The present seemed all too good, and the future too promising, for people to want to take refuge in the war that had just ended. Nor did they show any great need to make sense of it.”2 Creating the concept of a “usable past,” Van Wyck Brooks called for the manufactured past that would bind of American culture together for “the past is an inexhaustible storehouse of apt attitudes and adaptable ideals; it opens of itself at the touch of desire; it yields up, now this treasure, now that, to anyone who comes to it armed with a capacity for personal choices. If, then, we cannot use the past our professors offer us, is there any reason why we should not create others of our own?”3 As applied by Vance, Canadians had no need to make a usable past out of the Second World War. Still, many historians, writers, and others have applied Brooks’ definition of the phrase to the Battle of Hong Kong to mold and distort events to fit a preconceived narrative. A usable past has informed the creation of many of the myths surrounding the battle. As such the next three chapters will examine how the battle’s legacy was created.