70 years ago: Hong Kong's wartime diaries

Two Norwegians begin an escape that will lead to the biggest of the 1943 influxes into Stanley. Ragnar Brodersen describes the situation of the Norwegians in town and the lead-up to the escape of February 10 :

Things got worse and worse, and there was every indication that sooner or later we would be interned. Captain Halfdan Kvamso and I knew Mr. Monaghan, a Canadian of Irish descent, who claimed Irish neutrality so that he could accomplish the work as a go-between for people who wanted to escape, and he certainly did a magnificent job. He told us that he could not at that stage give exact details, as it was all hush-hush, but he arranged for a Russian, William Vallesuk, Chief Radio Engineer of China Electric Co. Ltd. (whom the Japanese would have liked to get their hands on because of an important invention he had made), and Kvamso and myself to be met by two Chinese in Kowloon on a certain afternoon in February 1943. We were not to speak to our guides, but to follow them.

After some hair-raising adventures, the party was delivered to a British Army Aid Group Forward Post. But the result was the internment of the rest of the Norwegian community.

Dr. K. W. Chaun is 'abducted' after visiting the Medical Department and taken to Central Police Station where he is questioned about the escape of another doctor.

Tomorrow the arrests will get even closer to the Medical Director, Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke.

Source:

Brodersen and Kamvso escape: http://www.galaxylink.com.hk/~john/paul/memoirsxiii.htm

Chuan: China Mail, January 8, 1947, page 2

Note:

Thomas Christopher Monaghan, the pre-war manager of Candian Pacific, who'd avoided internment by claiming to be Irish, was executed for his role in this escape and other resistance activity - see entry for October 29, 1943.

For the interment of the Norwegians, see entry for February 22, 1943