The Hong Kong Volunteer Company, 1944–1945

This chapter turns to the Hong Kong unit that fought in the Burma Campaign. After the fall of Hong Kong, around 700 Hong Kong Chinese servicemen reported to the BAAG, and 126 of them were organised as the China Unit and received additional military training. They were then flown to India and were renamed as the Hong Kong Volunteer Company, which became part of the Chindit Force that fought in Burma from March to July 1944. This chapter chronicles the experience of the unit using untapped Chinese, Japanese, and British archival sources. Also, it looks at the complex cultural, ethnic, and social backgrounds of the members of the unit, and discusses the tension between the men from such diverse backgrounds and the difficulty of commanding them in war. This chapter then discusses the Volunteer Company’s experience during the war’s final stage, when the unit was almost disintegrated because of the politics between Britain, the United States, and China over the war in China and Southeast Asia, as well as bureaucracy within the British military. The last section of the chapter looks at some of the veterans’ post-war lives.