Saluting history

Updated: 2008-09-18 07:41

By Zhao Xu(HK Edition)

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 Saluting history

Crown Wine Cellars Photos coutesy of Crown Wine Cellars

There are only two ways that you might know Crown Wine Cellars - either you are a history buff or a wine lover.

Tucked in the dense foliage of Shouson Hill on Hong Kong Island, the place is as unheralded as it was intended to be upon creation. But if you listen to Gregory De'eb, co-founder of the wine cellar, this piece of land is where "all the energy of the island is focused".

Seven decades ago, what is today's Asia's most advanced wine cellar facility was the site of a secret arms and ammunition depot. Comprised of 12 pairs of underground bunkers, a depot headquarters and a sentry box, the site was used by the British to store guns and grenades for the defence of Hong Kong. Construction was believed to have started in 1937, just before the Second World War started.

According to De'eb, the site was meant to be a secret.

"There were many Japanese spies in the local community before the Japanese invasion, and they were very effective from a military point of view," he said. "If the British wanted the location of their ammunition depot to remain a secret, it had to be built in the middle of nowhere".

The local fishing village of Aberdeen is located about 5 km away and is known as "Little Hong Kong" in Cantonese. The British used this version as a "code name" to refer to the military site and thus confuse those spying for the Japanese.

"The Japanese had no clue where it was. It was, of course, where we are standing right now," said De'eb, during a recent interview at the cellar.

Today, what is best known about the site is that it was the last place to surrender during the Battle of Hong Kong, which lasted for 18 days and ended with the British colony being taken by the Japanese army.

 Saluting history

'Little Hong Kong' photographed by Japanese occupying forces on December 29, 1941

Due to the fact that most of the war records were destroyed prior to and during the Japanese occupation, the history of the bunkers was highly incomplete, if not totally obscure.

That had posed the biggest challenge for De'eb and his corps of professional and amateur historians while they were trying to piece together the whole story at the beginning of the site's renovation in 2002.

One expert whose help De'eb has successful enlisted is Tony Banham, whose 2005 book Not the Slightest Chance - The Defence of Hong Kong 1941 amounts to a phase-by-phase, hour-by-hour, death-by-death account of the battle. ("Not the slightest chance" was Winston Churchill's April 1941 estimate of Hong Kong's prospects in the face of a Japanese assault.)

"Tony is probably the most famous historian in Hong Kong to do with the Battle of Hong Kong," said De'eb. "He started his research on the subject in the early 1990s and was able to get many people who were still alive at the time to tell their stories."

One of those stories tells why Little Hong Kong lasted two days longer than "Big" Hong Kong.

In retrospect, what seemed to be the end of a story was the beginning of another.

Hong Kong officially surrendered on Christmas Day in 1941. There was a very bloody battle on December 26 in Stanley, the southeastern part of the Hong Kong Island. Both sides sustained heavy casualties.

On December 27, the Japanese commander was alerted that Little Hong Kong was still under the control of the British.

"They (The Japanese) had two choices. They could attack and stand the chance of losing more soldiers. Or, they could negotiate," said De'eb.

To negotiate appeared to be the right choice, according to Banham, the historian.

"The bunkers were almost impervious to attack, and would have contained sufficient food, water and ammunition for the defenders," he wrote in an email interview. "Once locked inside, there was relatively little the Japanese could do to dislodge them."

Captain Suzuki, who was sent by the Japanese commander to negotiate the surrender, finally made the decision upon being informed that Major Dewar, the British commander, had wired up all the 24 bunkers to a central detonator.

"He (Major Dewar) was basically saying: attack if you want to and we will all die," said De'eb. "The Japanese captain was very impressed by his British counterpart's willingness to defend the site at all costs and therefore agreed to an honorable surrender."

The surrender finally took place later in the day. What happened thereafter reads more like a fiction-novel than anything real.

 Saluting history

Surviving veterans from the Battle of Hong Kong gather at the bunkers' site on Victory Day.

The translator used by the Japanese was a British man named Lewis Bush. Bush later wrote in his diary about how the Japanese treated the surrendering troops "like heroes".

They were taken down to Aberdeen where a "Japanese officer arrived with beer and whisky in plenty". The captives and the Japanese soldiers drank together that day. (These refreshments were actually from stocks captured from the Allied Forces. )

The next morning, the captain put the captives in a truck and drove them to the concentration camp.

"It was one of the few occasions during the war that true soldiers treated each other, not as friends, but with due respect," said De'eb. "It speaks a lot about humanity."

Another thing the founder likes to point out to his visitors is that the troops that defended Little Hong Kong "represented the United Nations".

"There were the Panjabis - soldiers from India and Pakistan when the two countries were still together. There were the British Royal Engineers, the Canadian Grenadiers, and the only uniformed Chinese troops taking part in the Battle of Hong Kong," De'eb said.

The Canadian Grenadiers, known as the Winnipeg Grenadiers, were young soldiers with immense courage but limited combat experiences. Those stationed at the bunkers were put into the concentration camps after the surrender. Many died there.

"Those young men came to Hong Kong because they were told that they were needed here," said De'eb. "And they demonstrated an extraordinary show of caring for the people and a nation they had no previous contact with."

Given that history, it's no wonder that the Canadians are extremely proud of the memory.

And the Indians too take pride in the fact that they were defending Hong Kong so far back in its history.

"Some Japanese companies from both Hong Kong and Japan had specifically requested the site as the venue for their corporate events," De'eb said.

According to him, there were thought to be a total number of 23 soldiers captured in the bunkers, excluding the Chinese. The reason for that, as he explained, is because the Chinese soldiers, at the request of Major Dewar, were allowed to remove their uniforms and merge with the local population.

Here comes De'eb's "energy theory".

"This place has fantastic 'fengshui'," said the man, referring to a typical Hong Kong concept. "No people died here - the British and the Japanese came very close but they didn't collide."

After the war, the British Military ceased its use of the site in the 1970s, and transferred its control to the Hong Kong Police Driving School in the early 1980s.

At least four pairs of the bunkers were destroyed in the mid-1980s as a result of the development of two residential apartments. The remaining bunkers were subsequently refitted and utilized by the Hong Kong Geotechnical Engineering Office from the mid-1980s until recently to store rock core samples.

In 2000, the Hong Kong government put forward a partnership proposal to invite private sectors to revitalize various discarded military sites in Hong Kong. De'eb attended that conference, fell in love with the idea and began to work on a business model. It was almost two years later before De'eb discussed his bunker reuse plan with Jim Thompson, chairman of the Crown Worldwide Group. The two co-founders then came forward in 2002.

After four years of assiduous work and around 30 million HK dollars later, the place was transformed from a weapon storage facility to a wine cellar.

On January 15 this year, the site was given a UNESCO Asia-Pacific Heritage Award of Merit for being a "vibrant, living project".

Arthus Gomes, one of the last surviving "foreign" soldiers to have participated the Battle of Hong Kong, wrote a recommendation letter to UNESCO on March 15, 2007, six days before he bid a final farewell to the world.

"This place represents Hong Kong perfectly," said De'eb. "It's more important than the company, or anything else. It keeps our memories alive."

 Saluting history

Gregory De'eb, co-founder of Crown Wine Cellars

(HK Edition 09/18/2008 page4)