Nathan Greenfield - The Damned: The Canadians at the Battle of Hong Kong and the POW Experience, 1941-45

I picked this book up a few months back because I realized that I knew virtually nothing about the Canadian role in the Pacific Theatre during World War Two. The book is divided into two major sections: the Battle of Hong Kong, and the Canadian POW experience. I definitely enjoyed the second section more than the first.


Greenfield states from the outset that his desire is to poke holes in a number of the pervasive myths that surround the battle, such as the idea that the Canadian troops were under-trained, but then provides evidence that they were, in fact, not trained as fully as they could have been because in many cases they had only been recently recruited. One of the reasons why I did not enjoy the battle section is because Greenfield does not do a very good job of setting things up. For one thing, he does a poor job of introducing the various men, which made it difficult to keep track of who was who. For another, he jumps from event to event in the battle so rapidly that it becomes somewhat confusing. The most interesting part of the first half of the book was Greenfield's general contempt for the British General Wallis, who he showed to have been largely out of touch with the situation and content to blame the Canadian troops for the problems that occurred. This seems to follow a general pattern in which British war histories tend to either disparage or diminish the contributions of the Dominion troops in both World Wars (or simply refer to them as "British," which while technically true does not do those soldiers justice).

The book improves considerably when Greenfield begins to describe the captivity of the soldiers. Perhaps because in this section he was confined to using smuggled diaries and interviews with the surviving troops the account he gives is focused on a manageable number of people and follows a relatively clear storyline. He does an excellent job of describing the horrors that the Canadian prisoners went through, and I was struck by the bizarre contradiction between the Japanese allowing some prison camps to have large libraries and sports events while simultaneously denying them sufficient food or medicine.

There were a number of factual errors that bothered me while reading The Damned. One was that Greenfield misidentified the dates of the liberation of Belgium and the Netherlands. While this is not a significant error (at least not for this book, since those events were mentioned only in passing), it made me wonder if other dates which I was not familiar with might have been misidentified as well. In addition, Greenfield makes that claim that by January 1943 the Japanese knew that the war was over because of Midway and Guadalcanal. This is not strictly true. Midway had hampered the Japanese fleet, but had certainly not "neutered" it as Greenfield claims, and while Guadalcanal was significant, it was only the first step of a very long process that the Americans did not yet have a clear guarantee of winning (at least not as easily as Greenfield makes it appear).

Overall, The Damned was a relatively good book. I wish that the account of the battle had been better written, but there was a definite improvement as the book progressed into the POW section.