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opinion of the General Staff was that the Japanese had no intention of entering the war against Britain. It was said that they still had plenty on their plate in China and that they would be fools to imperil the seaborne trade out of which they were making so much money. For a young subaltern Singapore offered many delightful distractions; so, with an untroubled conscience, Julian had spent a minimum of time in his office and had happily given himself up to the joys of tennis, bathing, cocktail parties and good dinners with pretty girls.
    But this pleasant existence was not destined to last. In September 1941 the energetic Major-General Christopher Maltby was nominated to succeed General Grassett as G.O.C. British Troops in Hong Kong; and with him, as one of his Staff Officers, he took Julian.
    On arriving there they found the same state of complacency as had existed in Singapore, and Julian discovered that the island in the China Seas offered a personable bachelor who had ample private means even more distractions; so for some weeks, although his new Chief worked him considerably harder, his leisure was most happily filled by participating in the peacetime activities of the Colony.
    Nevertheless, he was aware that his General and the Governor, Sir Mark Young, also newly appointed, were extremely worried men. Neither of them concealed from his Staff the anxiety he felt about the poor state in which he found Hong Kong’s defences.
    The mobile military garrison consisted of only fourbattalions: the 2nd Royal Scots, the 1st Middlesex, the 5/7th Rajputs and the 2/4th Punjabis, and all were under strength owing to the prevalence of malaria and venereal disease. At the last moment they were reinforced by two Canadian battalions: the Winnipeg Grenadiers and the Royal Rifles of Canada; but these troops, gallant as many of them proved when they found themselves with their backs to the wall, were raw, ill-disciplined and quite unfitted to be put into a line of battle before they had had several months’ intensive training. To these could be added seven companies of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps, many of whom were middle-aged and, again, were unsuited to being thrown into a battle. With this force, totalling some six thousand men, half of whom could not be deployed, Maltby was expected to hold a line on the mainland laid down by some past military pundit that extended for ten and a half miles against—as it later transpired—thirty thousand battle-hardened Japanese.
    The prospect of having to defend the island would not have appeared quite so grim if Maltby had had adequate sea and air forces to support his troops on the mainland and, when they were forced to withdraw, to prevent the island being invaded. But the Navy could muster only two old destroyers and six motor torpedo boats, while the pitiful air force consisted of four Vickers Wildebeeste torpedo bombers and three Walrus amphibians, none of which had a maximum speed of more than one hundred miles per hour.
    Still more perturbing, the garrison’s munitions had been most scandalously allowed to run down. Shells for the gunners would have to be so strictly rationed that it would be impossible for them to put up barrages lasting for more than a few minutes; ammunition for the mortars was so limited that the whole lot would be blazed off in a single day’s intensive fighting; effective training had to be curtailed because little small-arms ammunition couldbe spared for it; the supply of drugs and other hospital requirements was hopelessly inadequate and the four torpedo bombers had not a single torpedo.
    Yet in the winter sunshine the social life of the Colony continued unabated. There were dances at the Peninsula Hotel, water picnics in Gindrinkers Bay, golf tournaments on the fine course in the south of the island, and every Saturday the race course in Happy Valley was thronged with huge crowds that afterwards dispersed to form hundreds of jolly