Fall of Hong Kong
| Battle of Hong Kong | |||||||||
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| Part of the Pacific Theatre of World War II | |||||||||
 Japanese invasion of Hong Kong Island, 18–25 December 1941 |
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| Belligerents | |||||||||
 Canada
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 Empire of Japan
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| Commanders and leaders | |||||||||
 Mark Aitchison Young (POW) Christopher Maltby (POW) John K. Lawson † Cedric Wallis (POW)
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 Takashi Sakai Mineichi Koga Tadamichi Kuribayashi
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| Strength | |||||||||
| 13,981 troops 1 destroyer 1 gunboat |
29,700 troops 47 planes 1 cruiser 3 destroyers 4 torpedo boats 3 gunboats |
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| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
| 2,113 killed or missing 2,300 wounded 10,000 captured 1 destroyer captured 1 gunboat sunk |
675 killed 2,079 wounded |
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Civilian casualties: 4,000 killed 3,000 severely wounded |
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The Battle of Hong Kong (8–25 December 1941), also known as the Defence of Hong Kong and the Fall of Hong Kong, was one of the first battles of the Pacific War in World War II. On the same morning as the attack on Pearl Harbor, forces of the Empire of Japan attacked the British Crown colony of Hong Kong. The attack was in violation of international law as Japan had not declared war against the British Empire. The Japanese attack was met with stiff resistance from the Hong Kong garrison, composed of local troops as well as British, Canadian and Indian units. Within a week the defenders abandoned the mainland and less than two weeks later, with their position on the island untenable, the colony surrendered.
Britain first thought of Japan as a threat with the ending of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in the early 1920s, a threat that increased with the escalation of the Second Sino-Japanese War. On 21 October 1938 the Japanese occupied Canton (Guangzhou) and Hong Kong was surrounded. British defence studies concluded that Hong Kong would be extremely hard to defend in the event of a Japanese attack, but in the mid-1930s work began on new defences, including the Gin Drinkers' Line. Key sites of the defence of Hong Kong included the Wong Nai Chung Gap, Lye Moon Passage, the Shing Mun Redoubt, the Devil's Peak and Stanley Fort.
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