70 years ago: Hong Kong's wartime diaries

About a fortnight ago, Monday 15th I believe is the exact date, we had all gone to bed and lights out at 10 p.m. as usual. The moon was just past the full and had risen at about 9.30. I was practically asleep when Yvonne suddenly said, “Aeroplanes!” and hopped out of bed. I listened and sure enough there was the drone of distant engines. Harold and Elsie joined us on the verandah and we heard the planes passing right over head. I strained my eyes to see if I could catch a glimpse of their ghostly shapes against the stars, but saw nothing. They passed over in the direction of the harbour and then, after a little while, we saw a great flash behind the hills and some seconds later we heard the heavy crump of bombs. At that we all rushed into the next flat and into the end room that faces north (occupied by Christine Wyatt, Jill Beavis and two other girls) and with scarcely so much as by your leave we crowded around the French windows and overflowed onto their small balcony. Soon there were some 15 of us (clad in all kinds of peculiar night attire ranging from a singlet and a pair of cotton pants in my case to a pair of short sleeved pyjamas made from flour sacks in the case of Richard Mills) all talking excitedly and exclaiming at the flashes and resounding thuds. Then the Ak Ak guns got going furiously – not a search light lit up at all so I imagine the AA guns were putting up box barrages over important objectives. We saw little stars of light bursting high in the moon lit sky and then a very pretty display of reddish orange star shells or ‘flaming onions’ or whatever they were, following each other in rapid succession and shooting like large rockets into the sky about six of them in the air at the same time, making a ladder of glowing balls. They were not tracer shells and I believe Very lights are white, so that cannot have been what they were. The last night raid over Hong Kong (which I had not witnessed) took place over a year ago.

Well, after much talking we got back to bed – it was after 11 p.m. – and then we heard the roar of a single low flying plane and leapt up again. We saw this plane in the moonlight flying very low down Tytam Bay and wondered if it was one of ‘our’ planes. The noise died away and then later it came back again and yet again so we concluded it was a Japanese plane which had probably taken off from Kai Tak to avoid damage and was waiting till it could return again.