TW: War crimes; slurs

It's an unfortunate fact that Hong Kong local history is not my strong suit, and the Second World War less so, so I cannot claim to have a huge amount of broader contextual information. That being said, I did do some digging, and it seems that Hahn has not necessarily conflated, but certainly consolidated what seems to have been a number of events in the general area of the Hotel, rather than specifically at the Hotel itself. In particular, two residences – Eucliffe and Overbays – were the sites of POW killings perpetrated by the Japanese Army, which Hahn is presumably alluding to; in addition, two houses, The Ridge and Altamira, situated on the road from Repulse Bay to the north side of the island, were also the sites of massacres that formed part of the general spate of killings in the Repulse Bay area in the battle's closing days.

The Repulse Bay Hotel itself, held by initially by British troops and reinforced by Canadians and Punjabis over the course of the fighting there, overlooked the coastal road on the south side of Hong Kong Island, making it a key strongpoint for the British defence after the evacuation to the Island. It first came under attack from the north before dawn on Saturday 20 December 1941, with a back-and-forth for control of the hotel garage taking place ending with the defenders retaking the site. Eucliffe, to the southwest of the hotel, was held by Canadian troops and members of the Hong Kong Volunteers. The Repulse Bay Hotel had been the residence of some 200 civilians, leading to a quandary over whether to evacuate them and hold the hotel, or abandon the hotel to avoid the civilians being harmed collaterally. A further issue was that the British defence had been all but bisected by the Japanese advance down the Wong Nai Chung Gap, which threatened the line of communications that still linked Stanley in the southeast with Repulse Bay, and from there to the crumbling defence in the City of Victoria on the north side of the island.

On 21 December, the hotel's defenders were given orders to push out and secure the route to Stanley, but the Japanese troops were firmly emplaced by that stage and the British made no progress. The Japanese, meanwhile, managed to push towards Stanley Mound and cut communications between the eastern and western portions of the British defence, although they were repulsed later. The forces that had attacked the Repulse Bay Hotel had done so not via the low-lying roads but instead over the hills, and so were in a position to attack not just the Hotel but also Eucliffe and Overbays – the former of these was evacuated at 5 p.m..

On the evening of 22 December, it was decided to evacuate military personnel from the Hotel to Stanley so as to allow the civilians to surrender safely. The British troops holding Altamira and The Ridge attempted to retreat during the night, but almost all were taken prisoner; Overbays was supposed to be evacuated, but 35 men, mostly wounded, were left behind seemingly by mistake or perhaps due to a lack of vehicle transport. At midnight, Japanese troops captured the Hotel and killed one staff member, identified only as 'No. 1 Boy' – this would be the only civilian casualty at the Hotel itself. That evening, on capturing The Ridge and Altamira, the Japanese force killed anyone who had been left behind including the wounded, with numbers uncertain but totalling at least 30 men, with recent work suggesting at least 47. On the night of 22-23 December, some 53 POWs were shot after being moved to the Eucliffe. As described by Company Sergeant Major Fred Hamlen of the Royal Army Service Corps, who survived the attempted execution:

...We knew that we were going to be shot because on top of the bank were pools of blood and at the bottom of the cliff, near the sea, were dozens of dead bodies and it was evident that they had been shot on top of the bank and fallen down.

...A Firing Squad was then brought from the house and in a few minutes we were all shot... the bullet passed through my neck above the left shoulder and came out at my right cheek. I did not lose consciousness and the force of the bullet hitting me knocked me free from the others and I rolled down the bank.

At around 8 a.m. on 23 December, Overbays was captured, with at least 14 and likely around 30 of the remaining men killed by the Japanese army while attempting to surrender. As described by Private Leslie Canivet of the Royal Canadian Ordnance Corps:

the Japs [sic] stormed the house using hand grenades and a small portable machine gun. The wounded men downstairs were literally murdered in cold blood. Our white flag was torn down, and our interpreter was bayoneted and pinned to a door to die. The Japs came upstairs and kicked open the door of the room we were in, there being about thirty of us. First they sprayed the room with machine gun fire and followed it up with a barrage of grenades ... we got as many of the wounded out of the windows as possibl and then jumped out ourselves.

According to aggregated casualty reports, at least 99 surrendering, surrendered or captured solders were killed in the vicinity of the Repulse Bay Hotel as part of the spate of atrocities at The Ridge, Eucliffe and Overbays: 42 from the Royal Army Service Corps, 38 from the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, 16 from the Royal Rifles, 1 from the 1st Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment, 1 from the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps, and 1 from HQ China Command. A further 15 Royal Rifles were listed as KIA at Repulse Bay but any number could have been victims of the firing squads at Eucliffe, and possibly three more artillerymen were killed at The Ridge. The recently-released digital map and dataset project by Hong Kong Baptist University would give a minimum figure of 58 POWs killed at all three sites, with awareness of the limitations of the available information. And of course add to that one known civilian casualty, the Hotel staff member mentioned previously.

Many of the civilians who surrendered at the Hotel would be moved to the Eucliffe while the Japanese converted it to a hospital and temporary headquarters; they would later be moved up to Victoria via Wong Nai Chung Gap. Jan Marsman, a Dutch civil engineer who managed to escape to the US in early 1942, said the following in his (somewhat propagandistic) pamphlet I Escaped From Hong Kong:

The hundred and fifty of us — mothers with a baby in one arm and the other hand held over head, feeble old Dr. Arlington, children of four and five and ten, crying and frightened — were marched up a side trail to a hillside castle, which the Japanese had taken over as their local headquarters. Along the way we saw some of the bodies of soldiers and naval reserves we had known during the siege. When we came to the hillock on which the castle stood we saw, beside it, many of the British officers and men who had marched out of the Repulse Bay Hotel in the dark hours that same morning. Some of them were in agony from bayonet wounds, inflicted in idle thrusts by their captors. All of them were still being tortured.

Another civilian, Siu-Feng Huang, wrote to his wife that:

When we passed Eutongsen's garden, we began to see dead soldiers here and there lying along the highway. From RBH to the Gap — you remember the highest spot in the midway from HK to RBH — I think there were at least 100 in uniform and lying in different forms ... It is a tragic sight that I don't like to describe. But I can tell you it just showed the barbarity and narrowmindedness of the Japs. [sic]

While none of the individual sites saw the single largest set of non-combatant killings in the Battle of Hong Kong (that being the massacre of 60 medical personnel and wounded soldiers at St Stephen's College in Stanley on 24-5 December), the combined killings around Repulse Bay constitute, numerically, the most severe set of warcrimes committed during the period of the battle itself. While Hahn seems very vague as to what she may even be alluding to, it is probable that she is referring to the series of massacres around the Hotel, and especially the one at the Eucliffe that the surrendered civilians witnessed the aftermath of.

The Wong Nai Chung Gap and Repulse Bay massacres would be singled out during the postwar war crimes trials as well. Major General Tanaka Ryosaburo, who had been the commander of the 229th Regiment which was engaged at Repulse Bay, was charged on three counts of committing war crimes at Hong Kong, with specific allegations relating to these charges including:

5. Eucliffe at Repulse Bay: A number of soldiers who had surrendered were executed.

6. Wong Nei Chung Gap to Repulse Bay: Murder of personnel at various places.

Tanaka was convicted on two of the three charges but acquitted of the third (as it could not be established that his unit was present at the specific massacre at the Salesian Mission) and he was imprisoned for 20 years.

Lieutenant General Ito Takeo, who had been in overall command of the 38th Division's infantry (including Tanaka's regiment), was charged on four counts of committing war crimes, with the specific allegations including:

1. During the attack on Repulse Bay, Japanese troops committed various atrocities. When they took Sai Wan Hill, they captured a number of prisoners. They were placed in a concrete pill-box for several hours. They were called out and were bayoneted and their bodies tossed over a stone embankment. Two survived and gave evidence in person.

Ito was convicted on two charges but acquitted of two others, and received a 12-year sentence. (That Tanaka had received 20 years for the same charges and accusations was remarked upon in the case file, which posits that the Court had not been able to prove Ito's complicity to the same extent.)