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

“Pillbox 3 did not open fire!” Mapping the Arcs of Fire of Pillboxes at Jardine’s Lookout and Wong Nai Chung Gap
Photo 1 – The attack on Pillboxes 1 and 2
Many of the casualties suffered by the Japanese
attackers were inflicted by two pillboxes (PB 1 and
PB2) held by No. 3 (Machine Gun) Company of the
HKDVC, which comprised mainly Eurasian Hong
Kong citizens. A wartime painting by a Japanese artist
(Photo 1) showing Japanese soldiers fighting uphill,
with Mount Nicholson and Wong Nai Chung Gap Road
in the distant background to provide geographical
context, obviously refers to their costly assaults on
these two pillboxes up from the Ride.
Unlike other fighting elsewhere during the Battle
of Hong Kong, the dispositions of the defenders
and invaders were recorded in two almost identical
sketches (the smaller scale at 1:20000) in a war diary
(“War Diary”) written by Major G. Evan Stewart, the
commander of No.3 Company of the HKVDC, while
he was interned in a Japanese POW camp.
This present work is however the first to provide
accurately surveyed locations and measurements
of the defensive structures of this major battlefield,
some of which have been concealed by heavy postwar
overgrowth, for the benefit of historians and military
experts who are interested in the Battle of Hong Kong,
but have never been able to evaluate certain aspects of
the battle scientifically due to the absence of accurate
maps.
PURPOSE
This short paper represents the first professional
mapping exercise for the defensive structures on the
battlefield of Wong Nai Chung Gap during the Battle of
Hong Kong, with particular attention paid to the firing
arcs of PBs1 to 3. Some of these structures (save the
PBs) have never been marked on government survey
maps.
METHODS
This exercise involved examining archival materials
and aerial photos (in order to locate the structures for
surveying), field trips and actual site measurements
using standard land surveying tools, and line of sight
analysis. The starting point is the larger scale sketch
by Major Stewart in his war diary. The only structures
that we have not been able to ascertain are posts JLO
1, 2, and 3 and those along the Ride. Those on (and
including) Blue Pool Road, now buried under the Hong
Kong Cricket Club grounds and reclaimed by 1972
post war, were identified using aerial photos of 1949
and 1963.
The exercise shows how GIS techniques can be used
for heritage mapping and explaining gaps in a battle’s
history.
The authors visited the structures marked in the larger
SBE
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