Massacre and Rape in Hong Kong: Two Case Studies Involving Medical Personnel and Patients

Abstract

One continuing challenge to historians of the second world war in the Far East is to attempt to explain the numerous Japanese excursions into brutality, rape and murder. In Hong Kong and elsewhere, a number of these assaults seem to have been directed particularly against medical officers, orderlies, nurses and patients. Was this deliberate or coincidental? Innate brutality as the sole explanation fails on the now general understanding that we all are capable of brutality in certain circumstances. There were several incidents of brutality against groups of individuals at the time of the Japanese capture of Hong Kong, examination of which suggests a variety of explanations. Among these are drunkenness, so-called battle lust or blood lust, perception of offensive military action from within a group purportedly surrendering, confusion because of propinquity of combatant and non-combatant formations, apparently official orders to kill prisoners, and implicit or explicit sanction to celebrate victory and expiate the death of friends by means of theft, brutality, rape and murder. All of these excuses were put forward in Hong Kong, not only at the time of the events, but also at war crimes trials held after the war and in more recent writings. The intent of this paper is to examine and compare two of these brutal assaults in order to try to discover how they came to happen. These events took place on Hong Kong Island on 19 and 25 December 1941. One was the murder of Royal Army Medical Corps and other personnel near the Salesian Mission at Shau Kei Wan, early on the morning of 19 December 1941. The second was the bloody rampage of murder and rape at the temporary hospital in St Stephen's College on 25 December 1941. There were medical establishments overrun by the Japanese where no atrocities occurred. For example, the staff of the Kowloon Hospital were not ill-treated physically in any way, though for a few days they went very hungry. Dr Isaac Newton, the surgeon in charge of all civilian medical personnel on the Kowloon peninsula, recorded in his diary on 13 December 1941 that the