Special issue to commemorate the 70th Anniversary of the Battle of ...

Decoding the Enigma of the Fall of the Shing Mun Redoubt Using Line of Sight Analysis
INTRODUCTION
Despite the widespread recognition of the
importance of terrain within military action, it
has been rarely been used as an historical tool to
help deconstruct events, actions, and outcomes
of military engagements, yet clearly its potential
to impact on our understanding of such actions
is considerable. In recent years, however, the
relevance of terrain as a tool in the historical
analysis of historical engagements has gained some
momentum…(Doyle and Bennett 2002: 1).
Chinese strategist Sun Tzu (Griffith 1971), wellknown
to Western and Japanese military thinkers, had
a sharp focus on the importance of terrain to strategic
and tactical operations (Doyle and Bennett 2002).
The available technology of the profession of land
surveying was used to help investigate the mystery
of the fall of a stronghold at the Shing Mun Redoubt,
guarded by the famous Royal Scots. This loss was
a significant event during the Battle of Hong Kong,
as it triggered the premature abandonment of the Gin
Drinker’s Line 1 and the evacuation of the mainland
side of Hong Kong. The geography and hardware of
this battlefield, like many others in this minor Pacific
theater engagement of World War II, have never been
seriously studied by war historians or heritage theorists
in spite of a wartime inquiry by British military leaders
in captivity and a postwar Cabinet inquiry in 1958
(Latham 1958). This was so, even though it was
known that Hong Kong was probably one of the few
places where British pillboxes were in action with the
enemy during World War II (Osborne 2008: 301) and
the defenders in the Battle of Hong Kong inflicted
disproportionately high casualties on the enemy
(Lai 2001). The report of the inquiry, authored by
Brigadier H.B. Latham, Head of the Historical Section
of the Cabinet Office, consolidated diverse sources
of evidence, naturally all adduced in English, by the
leaders of the defence and attack (captured at the
Japanese surrender in 1945). It was obvious from the
tenor and wordings of the Cabinet investigation that the
British military authorities were not pleased with the
rapid fall of the Gin Drinker’s Line, the defensive line
that was supposed to anchor the British defence on the
mainland side.
As for the Japanese victors, they treated their capture
of the Redoubt as a sumptuous, albeit unanticipated,
success that exonerated Lt. Wakabayashi Touiti, who
attacked on his own discretion and saved him from a
court martial. The report of this postwar inquiry (the
Cabinet Report), when read alongside reliable Japanese
accounts of the fight, has left more mysteries as to what
happened and how during the contest for the Redoubt.
The most intriguing question found in both the British
and Japanese official accounts is the amazingly
low casualty figures: merely two soldiers on each
side. Another intriguing question is that the physical
dimensions and design of the concrete tunnels, which
are professionally surveyed, mapped, and reported here
for the first time, could not permit large scale hand-tohand
fighting, not to mention the fact that no apparent
war damage was found inside the tunnels.
Was there really fierce fighting at the Redoubt? Was
the Redoubt poorly designed to withstand a day attack
when fully manned? This paper seeks to provide
informed answers to these two questions based,
respectively, on a documentary analysis and a GIS
reconstruction and evaluation of the design of the
Redoubt.
The documentary study involved a comparison of the
account of the battle consolidated in the Cabinet Report
vis-à-vis Japanese information that was not available
for the Cabinet Office’s consideration when it made its
inquiry.
Based on an accurate site survey of the ruins of the
Redoubt combined with some assumptions about the
weaponry employed, the GIS study reconstructed the
Redoubt as it was during the battle by focusing on the
arcs of fire of its five pillboxes and concrete trenches,
which was essential information that had a bearing
on the design of the Redoubt against an attack from
Jubilee Dam (known as the “gorge dam” on some
maps), the main dam of the Shing Mun (also known
as the Jubilee) Reservoir built across the valley of the
Shing Mun River. 2
This paper is the result of interdisciplinary efforts
by researchers, conversant in English, Chinese, and
Japanese, who specialized in heritage conservation
planning, land surveying, and military history. It
publishes the key findings of the first on-ground land
survey by a chartered surveyor of the Redoubt and has
illuminated a number of interesting questions over its
rapid loss by highlighting the influence of terrain on
a battle (Badsey 2002). These questions were raised
and consolidated by a careful documentary analysis
of postwar materials in the aforementioned three
languages and settled by digital analysis based on the
data obtained by a ground survey. The GIS techniques
adopted (ESRI 2002; Dakowicz and Gold 2003;
Forkuo 2008) included those used in typical line of
sight analysis, which has been growing in importance
in landscape planning and conservation research in
foreign (see, for instance, Lathrop and Bognar 1998;
Germino et al 2001) and local (Mak et al 2005a, b)
situations. In a post-colonial heritage conservation
context, this work follows in the footsteps of works by
Hill and Lian (1995); Phang (1998), Ko and Wordie
(1996); Henderson (2007); Ip (2007); Lai and Ho (2002,
2003, 2007); and Lai et al (2003, 2007) by offering
an example of how geographical information from
archival materials on battles and the modeled data of
battlefields (Pearson 2002) can be jointly used to better
articulate issues relevant to war history and relics
conservation (Smith 1996).
1
For the locations of the pillboxes along the Line, see Lai et al. (2009).
2
Another reservoir, called Lower Shing Mun Reservoir, was built below Jubilee Dam further down the Shing Mun Valley through the construction
of an earth dam from 1963 to 1964 to increase water supply to Hong Kong’s rapidly growing post-war population. The lower reservoir does not
flood the battle area or the pillboxes guarding the valley.
SBE
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