FDR, Hong Kong and his Desire to see it a Free Port in 1945

Kenneth Weisbrode’s Churchill and the King is an interesting monograph on the wartime relationship between Winnie and George VI. Included in it is a new FDR anecdote I didn’t know, taken apparently from Sarah Bradford’s 1990 book The Reluctant King (also about George VI). Apparently, as FDR lay dying in April 1945 he was found staring into space, absorbed in his own thoughts and repeated three times, “If Churchill insists on Hong Kong. I will have to take it to the King.”

Presumably this refers to the fact that of the Big 3 – Churchill, FDR and Stalin – Churchill was the only who could technically be countermanded and overruled at the peace conferences towards the end of the war. Stalin was in complete control as a dictator, FDR as president of a republic, but Churchill was technically subject to his monarch. As Weisbrode shows, no public conflict ever did occur between Prime Minister and King over any of the big decisions but it would have been possible for FDR to appeal to George VI if he was serious about overturning a position of Churchill’s. This is is interesting as FDR’s interest, and minor obsession some say, with the post-war fate of Hong Kong is little known or commented upon.

The fact was that the Americans had wanted Britain to surrender the colony after it was liberated from Japan (which eventually happened in August 1945, several months after FDR’s death). FDR had suggested an international free port, similar to Trieste, an idea London was obviously loath to entertain. In the end the British colonial secretary Franklin Gimson contacted London the moment he was released from Stanley Camp, accepted the post of lieutenant governor and swiftly reasserted British rule. Roosevelt’s plan died a quiet death and Hong Kong returned to being a British Crown Colony until 1997.

While I knew this story I have to say I hadn’t heard the story that FDR was so concerned over the re-establishment of British colonial power in Hong Kong that it was obviously on his mind right up until the end of his life and that he had, seemingly, considered taking the ultimate step of going over Churchill’s head to George VI with the issue. One of the great “what if’s?” of Hong Kong/Chinese history just became a bit more “what if”….