Had a fun chat with RTHK3’s Morning Brew host Phil Whelan the other morning about Hong Kong in the First World War….internment of Germans, the SMS Emden, British men running home to fight, divided European communities in the Colony etc etc – you can listen online here…
Anyway, I promised a few links and some further reading for anyone interested in this subject – which really does deserve a book of its own….
The story of the SMS Emden (below) is told in this recent book about the Battle of Penang and in this excellent article by Stuart Heaver in the South China Morning Post and citing the research into the period by Bert Becker of HKU.
The article below, from the San Francisco Chronicle (1/9/14) refers to the seizure and internment of German and Austrian nationals in Hong Kong during World War One – click on it and it should expand and readable.
For more on the old Stonecutters Island (now part of the West Kowloon reclamation) see here – the picture below shows the old gun sheds on the Island back in the 1930s…
Details of the Penguin China and World War One series of books and e-books is here – they’re available as small books in China and Hong Kong or online via Amazon everywhere else. Most relevant perhaps to all this is Robert Bickers’s book on the men from Shanghai who left to fight in Europe in 1914…
War came to Shanghai on August 14, 1937 known thereafter as “Black” or “Bloody Saturday”, from the air.
The Japanese launched bombing raid attacks on Shanghai and Nanking from Taiwan , but a passing typhoon made it impossible for their fighter cover to take off from the carrier Kaga, near Shanghai. The large Mitsubishi G3M2 “Nell” bombers were greeted by the unopposed Chinese 4th Fighter Wing led by Gao Zhihang and miserable weather over target. Col. Gao’s Hawk IIIs shot down several of the raiders and the others diverted to bases in Korea and Japan. This good luck would not last. The Chinese air force launched its own attacks despite the bad weather. Chinese Northrop bombers took off from Guangde, about 120 miles west of Shanghai with early Curtiss Hawk II dive-bombers supporting them. About 40 planes arrived over Shanghai, which was covered in thick cloud. The Curtiss Hawks began dive-bombing the Japanese Marine headquarters at the Kung Ta textile mills while Northrops attacked Japanese cruisers and supply ships at Wusong and the Japanese warship Idzumo, moored next to the Japanese consulate on the Whangpoo River, which served as the Japanese military headquarters. They missed.
One of the 550-pound bombs fell at the crowded intersection of Nanking Road and the Bund while two more bombs from a Northrop fell on bustling Avenue Edward VII. The bombs caught crowds of onlookers gazing up at the planes and the loss of life was appalling – 1,740 people killed and 1,873 injured. According to one account attributed to Claire Chennault, Chinese airmen had been trained to bomb from 7,500 feet, but the thick cloud made it necessary to come in much lower, and they released their bombs at 1,500 feet without adjusting their bombsights.
Another possibility is that the bomb racks, notoriously tempermental, released early when the arming switches were thrown. This would better account for the bombs falling where they did, according to some. The damage may even have been caused by or compounded by bombs jettisoned or dropped from a Japanese aircraft in the clouds above. In war strange things happen.
The next day and over the next weeks, the Japanese bombers from Taiwan and Korea returned with escort and inflicted great damage on Shanghai and Nanking. Victims ranged from Mr and Mrs Robert K. Reischauer, brother of the Japanologist and future ambassador, to the burnt baby photographed on the tracks at Shanghai South by “Newsreel” Wong.
China put up a heroic resistance in the air and on the ground, its Curtiss Hawk and Boeing 281 pilots fighting to the last with frightful losses against the deadly new Mitsubishi “Claude” shipboard fighters. An elite Chinese unit of Boeing 281 (P-26) monoplanes defended Nanjing to the last plane, while on the ground in Shanghai the crack German-trained KMT “Ironsides” troops, the “Lost Battalion” held the Joint Savings Godown on Suzhou Creek. But Shanghai (the parts not controlled by the foreigners), and then Nanjing, fell to the invaders.
I always seem to be coming across foreigners trashing cinemas – Italians getting angry at the Isis here and others getting angry at Nazi movies in Hongkew Park somewhere – and now Russians getting angry. Apparently in November 1941 (a couple of weeks before Pearl Harbor) white and red Russians were going at it at showings of Soviet films in the French Concession…..
This is the story of Southeast Asia’s natural history collections.Officially established in 1878, the previous Raffles Museum – the oldest in the region – has one of the largest collections of Southeast Asian animals. With the opening of the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum at the National University of Singapore in 2015, the original Raffles Museum was ‘reincarnated’ and the loop on its remarkable 127-year history has closed.
Beneath the sleek exterior of the modern museum building lies a saga of titanic struggles and changes. That the collections survived at all—through the multiple challenges of the nineteenth century, the disruption of World War Two, and its potential disintegration in the face of Singapore’s modernization—is nothing short of miraculous. This book is not only an institutional history of the museum but also tells the story of the frustrations, commitment and courage of the numerous individuals who battled officialdom, innovated endlessly and overcame the odds to protect Singapore’s natural history heritage.
Japan’s attempt, begun in 1935, to detach the whole of North China into a pro-Tokyo buffer state was met with anger and protest in Peiping (as Peking then officially was) in early 1936. More on the North China Buffer State Strategy here (I haven’t got the time to run through the whole thing). Anyway, here in pictures is how the Peiping Police reacted to student protests against Tokyo’s attempted annexation in January 1936. Think how cold a Beijing January is and how cold that was! In this instance students got the best of the cops and managed to turn the cold water hoses on them….
This is a great video about the old Nansheng Department Store in Shantou, built in the 1930s and now sadly derelict and decaying after decades of neglect. It’s obviously not going to last much longer, despite being a beautiful building and well constructed originally. Strangely this fascinating video, by Peter Lin and DJ Clark, is released by the China Daily, not a newspaper who’s editors (all good Communist-Nationalists) or sponsors (the Communist Party of China) have ever cared one jot about heritage or preservation in China. It also happens to pop up on the China Daily’s Youtube channel – again strange that a Communist Party newspaper that presumably supports the Party’s ban on Youtube in China itself should have a Youtube channel!! Still, terrific video and let’s hope the building can survive somehow….
Every city has areas that shine for a few decades and then fade away but none so visible as Shantou. In the 1930’s a new commercial district was built with a new shinny department store at its heart. Streets radiated in every direction full of shops and small markets. It stayed the epicenter of this thriving port city until the local government rebuilt the central business district in the 1990s to the west, leaving the store and the streets around it to slowly decay.
If you’d gone to the cinema in America in April 1927 to see Kosher Kitty Kelly you’d have got some newsreel footage of the US Marines parading through Shanghai – they were there to protect the International Settlement as the strikes mounted that led days later to the Shanghai Massacre of 1927….as to whether it was worth bothering to hang around to watch the silent main reel I really can’t say….Irish wit meets Jewish humour?
