The Peak is where the smart set in Hong Kong has always lived. It’s an area of relative peace and tranquillity that sits above the hubbub of the city. Before the Pacific war, Chinese people were banned from living there. It was from her terrace here on 8 December 1941 (the day after Japan’s carrier fleet attacked Pearl Harbor) that Emily ‘Mickey’ Hahn – an implausibly beautiful New York bohemian, opium addict, mining engineer and journalist – watched as Japanese bombers pelted Hong Kong 85 years ago. On the adjoining property she heard an Englishman harrumph, ‘That’s it. The Japanese have committed suicide.’ He was right, but not quite in the timeframe that he imagined.

The unexpectedly fierce defence of Hong Kong may partially explain the horrific crimes committed during the battle

Most of the British residents in Hong Kong would have agreed with a banker who was adamant that ‘there is no war sir, and there never will be. The Japanese have more sense than to attack a British colony.’ There was a complacent belief that Japanese troops would be no match for the British. A former expat, Maisie Prout remembered that ‘according to British propaganda, the Japanese were all bow-legged and squinty eyed and they all had very bad teeth.’ A misplaced sense of racial superiority pervaded Britain’s pre-war planning throughout Asia.

As late as January 1938, Winston Churchill declared that ‘it is quite certain that Japan cannot possibly compete with the productive energies of either branch of the English-speaking peoples.’ With few exceptions, western analysts failed to take note that by December 1941 the Japanese army was a battle-hardened force that had been fighting to conquer China for four years. The second Sino-Japanese war had started at the Marco Polo bridge outside Peking in 1937 after Japanese forces assumed that a missing Japanese soldier had been kidnapped or killed by the Chinese. (In fact, he had been caught short.) Arguably it was this incident that marks the start of the second world war, not the invasion of Poland that is assumed by western centric historians. Subsequently Japan’s armies, with 1.5 million troops, occupied northern China and most of its eastern seaboard. China’s nationalists retreated inland and founded its wartime capital at Chongqing – today the most populous city in the world.

When America imposed financial sanctions on Japan for its refusal to back out of China – ending oil shipments from California – Emperor Hirohito authorised the attack on Pearl Harbor. The de facto oil embargo also triggered Japan’s eastward march through Asia to find oil in Borneo and the Dutch East Indies.

Some naively assumed that Hong Kong........

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