Abstract
On 7 January 1941, Winston Churchill rejected a military request to strengthen Hong Kong’s British garrison. In the event of a Japanese attack, ‘… there is not the slightest chance of holding Hong Kong or relieving it’.1 The Japanese outmanned the British on land and outgunned them on the sea, and Britain’s defence priority was not its distant colony but the immediate German threat. There would be no further British commitment to Hong Kong. However, although reinforcement would be foolish, abandoning the colony would damage the British politically. The British garrison would not be evacuated. In the event of war with Japan, the British defence of Hong Kong would be an honourable defeat — at minimal cost in British lives and equipment.2
We never should, and I am sure, never shall be niggard of gratitude and benefaction to the soldiers who have endured toil, privations and wounds, that the nation may live.
—Abraham Lincoln
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Notes
Brereton Greenhous, ‘C’ Force to Hong Kong: A Canadian Catastrophe, 1941–1945 (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1997), 11.
J. L. Granatstein, The Generals: The Canadian Army’s Senior Commanders in the Second World War (Calgary, Canada: University of Calgary Press, 2005), 98.
L.H. Leigh, ‘Review Article Duff: A Life in the Law’, The Modern Law Review 49, no. 3 (1986): 410.
More recent re-revisionist historiography challenges much of this narrative as suffering from the inevitable benefits of ex post facto analysis. Gregory Johnson, ‘Canadian Experience of the Pacific War: Betrayal and Captivity’, in Forgotten Captives in Japanese-Occupied Asia, ed. Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn (London: Routledge, 2007), 128–129.
Kent Fedorowich, ‘“Cocked Hats and Swords and Small, Little Garrisons”: Britain, Canada and the Fall of Hong Kong, 1941’, Modern Asian Studies 37, no. 1 (2003): 117.
Terry Copp, ‘The Defence of Hong Kong — December 1941’, Canadian Military History 10, no. 1 (2001): 7.
A. Hamish Ion, ‘“Much Ado About Too Few”: Aspects of the Treatment of Canadian and Commonwealth Pows and Civilian Internees in Metropolitan Japan 1941–1945’, Defence Studies 6, no. 3 (2006): 294.
Gerald Horne, Race War! White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (New York and London: New York Univerity Press, 2004), 80f.
Jonathan Vance, Objects of Concern: Canadian Prisoners of War through the Twentieth Century (Vancouver, Canada: University of British Columbia Press, 1994), 192.
H. Clifford Chadderton, ‘Canada’s Hong Kong Veterans: The Compensation Story’ (Canada: The War Amps of Canada, 1998).
—, ‘Canadians in Hong Kong’, http://www.veterans.gc.ca/content/history/secondwar/asia/canhk/hongkong_e.pdf. Chadderton, ‘Canada’s Hong Kong Veterans’. Jeffrey A. Keshen, Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers Canada’s Second World War (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004), 356.
Kinue Tokudome and Azusa Tokudome, ‘Individual Claims: Are the Positions of the U.S. and Japanese Governments in Agreement in the American Pow Forced Labor Cases?’, UCLA Pacific Basin Law Journal 21, no. 1 (2003): 5.
Raymond E. Young, ‘Canadian L aw of Constructive Expropriation’, Saskatchewan Law Review 68, no. 2 (2005): 345.
Examination of Compensation for Canadian Far East Prisoners of War During World War II Cf. Jon Van Dyke, ‘The Fundamental Human Right to Prosecution and Compensation’, Denver Journal of International Law and Policy 29 (2000–2001): 86.
For discussion, see Spinner-Halev, Enduring Injustice, 105; Trudy Govier, ‘What Is Acknowledgement and Why Is It Important’, in Dilemmas of Reconciliation: Cases and Concepts, ed. Carol Prager and Trudy Govier (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2003).
Cf. Christopher Buck, ‘“Never Again”: Kevin Gover’s Apology for the Bureau of Indian Affairs’, Wicazo Sa Review 21, no. 1 (2005): 97–98.
For a similar argument in the Australian context, see Robert Sparrow, ‘History and Collective Responsibility’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 78, no. 3 (2000): 350.
T. M. Wilkinson, ‘Last Rights: The Ethics of Research on the Dead’, Journal of Applied Philosophy 19, no. 1 (2002); Stephen Winter, ‘Against Posthumous Rights’, Journal of Applied Philosophy 27, no. 2 (2010). Joel Feinberg, ‘Wrongful Life and the Counterfactual Element in Harming’, in Freedom and Fulfillment: Philosophical Essays, ed. Joel Feinberg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
The portion of Colorado south of the Arkansas was incorporated after the Mexican-American War. It permitted customary Mexican marriage practices, including ‘inter-racial’ unions, to continue. For the relevant text, see Werner Sollors, Neither Black nor White yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 400.
Luke Wilson, ‘Monetary Compensation for Injuries to the Body’, in Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism, ed. Linda Woodbridge (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 23.
Morton estimates 20%. Gerber suggests 38%, Desmond Morton, ‘The Canadian Veterans’ Heritage from the Great War’, in The Veterans Charter and Post-World War II Canada, eds Peter Neary and J. L. Granatstein (Toronto: McGill-Queens University Press, 1999), 15.
David Gerber, ‘Introduction: Finding the Disabled Veterans in History’, in Disabled Veterans in History, ed. David Gerber (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 18.
Jeff Keshen, ‘Getting It Right the Second Time Around: The Reintegration of Canadian Veterans of World War II’, in The Veterans Charter and Post World War II Canada, eds Peter Neary and J. L. Granatstein (Toronto: McGill-Queens University Press, 1998).
Morton, ‘The Canadian Veterans’ Heritage from the Great War’, 24; Peter Neary and J. L. Granatstein, eds, The Veterans Charter and Post-World War II Canada (Toronto: McGill-Queens University Press, 1999), 4.
Neary and Granatstein, eds, The Veterans Charter and Post-World War II Canada, 9. Cf. Peter Neary, ‘The Origins and Evolution of Veterans Benefits in Canada, 1914–2004’, Veterans Affairs Canada — Canadian Forces Advisory Council (Ottawa, Canada: Public Works and Government Services Canada, 2004), 9–10.
Robert England, ‘Canada’s Program to Aid Its Veterans’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 248 (1945): 97. See also Neary, ‘The Origins and Evolution of Veterans Benefits in Canada, 1914–2004’.
Mary Tremblay, ‘Going Back to Main Street: The Development and Impact of Casualty Rehabilitation for Veterans with Disabilities, 1945–1948’, in The Veterans Charter and Post-World War II Canada, ed. J. L. Granatstein and Peter Neary (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), 166.
From the 1946 information pamphlet for returning service personnel, Ian MacKenzie, Ministry of Veterans Affairs, ‘Back to Civil Life’, in The Veterans Charter and Post-World War II Canada, eds J. L. Granatstein and Peter Neary (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998 [1946]), 249.
Terry Copp, ‘From Neurasthenia to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Canadian Veterans and the Problem of Persistant Emotional Disabilities’, in The Veterans Charter and Post-World War II Canada, eds J. L. Granatstein and Peter Neary (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), 152.
Lloyd Francis, Ottawa Boy (Burlington, Canada: General Store Publishing House, 2000), 112.
Brian Barry, Why Social Justice Matters (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005), 10.
Alan Cairns, ‘Whose Side Is the Past On’, in Reconfigurations: Canadian Citizenship and Constitutional Change: Selected Essays by Alan Cairns, ed. Williams Douglas (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1995), 22.
Deborah Cowen, Military Workfare: The Solider and Social Citizenship in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 16.
See also Chris Madsen, Another Kind of Justice: Canadian Military Law from Confederation to Somalia (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1999), 142f.
Cf. Hon. Gilles Létourneau, ‘The Status of the Military Nexus Doctrine in Canada: Discussion’, in Global Military Appellate Seminar (Yale University, 2011), 21; Cowen, Military Workfare, 61f.
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© 2014 Stephen Winter
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Winter, S. (2014). Administrative Justice and Canada’s Hong Kong Veterans. In: Transitional Justice in Established Democracies. International Political Theory series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316196_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316196_7
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