21 Jul 1944, John Charter's wartime journal

My birthday tomorrow and the Japanese have just issued a warning that a typhoon is heading straight for the Colony and is due to strike us within the next 24 hours!

Today has been another stupendous day for news. The Japanese cabinet has resigned en bloc. It would appear that the fall of Saipan island is chiefly responsible for this. I think the Japanese leaders are extremely worried men today. As for Germany, I don’t think she can last beyond the end of this year. The Russians in the central sector have been advancing at the rate of about 20 miles per day, recently! The Anglo-American forces have made their first real break through in France – towards Cagny, and the Cotentin Peninsula has been in our possession sometime now. In Italy too our forces are steadily advancing and I heard that in the Chinese paper of 20th July there was an unconfirmed report that Turkey has entered the war against Germany and her allies and that General Tito in Yugoslavia was waiting with a fully equipped army of 300,000.

Recently the Japanese authorities here have been allowing Mr North (one of the senior Govt Cadets) a Chinese newspaper and a Japanese paper, both printed in HK. North translates and summarises the Chinese paper and from Bickerton’s translation of the Japanese paper he draws up daily news bulletins. The peculiar thing is that the Chinese and Japanese papers contain far more up-to-date news than does the English paper. In fact much of the news that appears in these Asiatic papers is not reported at all in the English printed paper. We cannot understand why the censorship of the English paper is so strict if they allow us to have the other papers. Anyway, North’s bulletins are much more interesting and exciting than the HK News and there is always a regular scrum in the entrance hall of Block 5 where the bulletins are posted.

We wonder about the food situation in HK which is steadily deteriorating. If HK is retaken by the Americans there may be a period of a week or two during which time the Japanese, though still in possession of the Island, might be unable to obtain any supplies from the mainland and might be unable to send in any rations to us even if they were prepared to do so. With fighting going on here I can’t see them bothering about us in Stanley, unless they thought it diplomatic to try and do their best for us at the end. Rice comes in generally for one month and if we were lucky we might have say two weeks supply waiting in the godowns; but the vegetables and the miserable little quantity of fish comes in daily or every two days and as all the vegetables come from the mainland they would certainly be unobtainable if this place were invested.