However, the authors also deflate Japanese exculpatory narratives which, serving their own ideological agendas, holds that Nanking was a combat operation against unlawful belligerents, which produced only a few dozen innocent victims. This volume, which is both history and historiography, offers the most recent scholarship about what actually happened in Nanking and places those findings in the context of how Chinese and Japanese writers have attributed mutually incompatible meanings to the event ever since an event that is coined, on the Chinese side, as "the forgotten Holocaust," after the subtitle of Iris' Chang's 1997 bestseller, The Rape of Nanking, uncritically adopted by Western public opinion, a gross distortion according to the contributors of this volume. The "Nanking Atrocity" of winter 1937-8, also known as the "Nanking Massacre," lies at the core of bitter disputes over history, wartime victimization, and postwar restitution that preclude amicable Sino-Japanese relations to this day. Grierson’s contribution to Canada was profound during the war years and when he returned to teach at McGill University in the 1960s, his advice to the federal government as the new world of global electronic communication was dawning proved to be his final and useful contribution to contemporary interest in film, video and communications in general.ĭecemmarks the 70th anniversary of the fall of the Chinese city of Nanking to the Japanese army. Prime Minister Mackenzie King invited Grierson to Canada and approved his elevation to become founder and first commissioner of the National Film Board. He returned to Britain with the goal to use film to illuminate “drama that resides in living fact.” He began making documentaries and building the documentary film movement based on his opn-ended definition of documentary as “the creative interpretation of actuality.” He thought of himself as a visionary who saw how mass communication could enrich individual lives and perhaps effect humanity’s long history of warmaking. Post-war, after finishing his Master’s degree, he went to the United States on a fellowship to study mass media. Born in Scotland, he was a flamboyant personality whose experience in World War I convinced him to do something with his life to help make peace more exciting than war. The book tells the stories of the Battle for Hong Kong, daily civilian lives, Hong Kong mafia's collaboration with the Japanese Imperial Army, and the POWs camp in Hong Kong during the occupation.John Grierson, a modernist who believed film and aesthetics could change the world, created the National Film Board of Canada and shaped Canadian documentary film. Instead of caring for the citizens' stories and wellbeings at the end of WWII, people cared about who Hong Kong belonged to as England and China raced to reach the city. Civilians were raped and tortured during the occupation. During the Christmas of 1941, the governor of Hong Kong, Mark Aitchison Young surrendered Hong Kong and started the 3 years 8 months of the Japanese Imperial Army's occupation of Hong Kong. However, soldiers defending the city at the time were largely unprepared and Japan claimed its victory within 18 days. Since Hong Kong was a British Colony at the time, soldiers from British colonies including India and Canada fought alongside Chinese guerrilla fighters. The British spent 5 million pounds on building this defensive line and it was inspired by France’s Maginot Line from World War I.Įight hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Imperial Army launched an invasion plan for Southeast Asia, including Hong Kong. The initial construction of this line began in 1934. These battalions would fight from the Gin Drinkers' Line. ” General Christopher Maltby assigned three battalions to the mainland. This line separated Kowloon and the New Territories, as known as the “ Gin Drinkers' Line. The British decided to set up a strategic defensive line along the mountains. Only one infantry battalion was deployed on the mainland for demolition duties and for delaying purposes. An initial strategy called for the main defense in Hong Kong to be on the island. British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was aware of the threat of a Japanese attack on Hong Kong, but he knew there was little he could do to assuage the colony of its fears. With the defeat of the British Expeditionary Force and its near decimation, Britain had little, if any, available resources to be allocated to the defense of its Asian holdings. General Sakai of the Imperial Japanese Army, commander of the 23rd Regiment stationed in Guangdong, was ordered to attack Hong Kong and conquer it within 10 days.
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