What Happened in Hong Kong

On the 93rd day of war against Japan, the British lion roared at the Japanese as he had never roared against Germany in 920 days of war. What angered him was a statement read slowly and quietly in the House of Commons by Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden.

> "The Japanese Army at Hong Kong," he said, "perpetrated the same kind of barbarities which aroused the horror of the civilized world at the time of the Nanking massacre of 1937. . . .

> "Fifty officers and men of the British were bound hand and foot and then bayoneted to death. . . .

> "Women, both Asiatic and European, were raped and murdered. . . . One entire Chinese district was declared a brothel regardless of the status of its inhabitants. . . .

> "All the survivors of the garrison, including Indian, Chinese and Portuguese, have been herded into a camp consisting of wrecked huts without doors, windows, light or sanitation. By the end of January 150 cases of dysentery had occurred, but no drugs or medical facilities were supplied. The dead had to be buried in a corner of the camp."

Anthony Eden got his facts from trustworthy eyewitnesses who had escaped from Hong Kong around Feb. 1. Confirmation came immediately from a Miss Phyllis Harrop, first British woman to escape. An anti-vice crusader attached to the Foreign Office, she told reporters in Chungking last week: "My houseboy was killed--bayoneted in the stomach. My [woman servant] was raped by three or four Japanese soldiers. . . . An Englishwoman I knew was first slashed in the face with a soldier's belt, then raped."

The story infuriated the British nation. Cried the Daily Mirror: "The pitiful message of the slaughtered victims of Hong Kong is to stop talking, muddling and planning . . . to revenge them with deeds, not sympathy."

Fearing the wrong kind of deeds, Scotland Yard strung a guard of 27 policemen around the Japanese Embassy, whose staff is awaiting exchange. After Viscount Hisaakira Kano, ex-manager of London's Yokohama Specie Bank, told a reporter the atrocity story was "so much propaganda," Scotland Yardmen bundled him off with one suitcase and a fur rug to the Isle of Man internment camp.

The Viscount's chic, young (26) wife had her troubles, too. When she appeared at Elizabeth Arden's Bond Street shop to get a shampoo and facial, the manager marched her into a private office and said: "I don't want to embarrass you, but after what happened in Hong Kong there is not a girl here who wants to give you a treatment. You ought to go away before you are insulted. . . ." Viscountess Kano left.

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