Savage Christmas: Hong Kong 1941 (V&H, pt. 2)

The McKenna brothers seem to use one source, and one source only - Carl Vincent's book, No Reason Why. This could account for the fact that while "Death by Moonlight" and "In Desperate Battle" receive vast coverage on the official web site for The Valour and the Horror, "Savage Christmas" receives very little. The impression created in the film is that the Canadian army was poorly trained, and that Britain knowingly sent them in (to quote "Roger Cyr" from the film) "as lambs to the slaughter in order to meet some sort of political expediency." Yet this idea seems to be unsupported by many of the books and documents published on the subject. Oliver Lindsay, author of The Lasting Honour, relates the Canadian belief that there would be plenty of time for the army to train in Hong Kong, since the general belief was that there would be no combat. That does not make Lindsay's work any more historically accurate than the McKenna brothers' film, but it does show that there are different viewpoints on every issue.

I watched the video prior to reading any literature regarding the situation. In fact, before watching the video, I hadn't been aware that there WAS anything that had gone on in Hong Kong in 1941. Having no prior knowledge, it was easy to be "sucked in" by the riveting account of betrayal and pain suffered by the Canadian army during that short period in WWII. By the end of the film, I had this picture of the Canadian army as an incredibly inept group of people who basically spent the time they should have been training playing baseball and singing songs. The British, of course, were inhumane murderers, who deliberately lied to Canada to get them to go to war. Even knowing that truth is in the eye of the beholder, it was easy to be taken in, especially considering the small prologue to the movie, where it assures the viewer that all the information to be had within is the full and complete truth. The truth about the film is that the truth within belongs not to the world of history, but to the history as the McKenna brothers saw fit to show it. Their views are unsupported by C. P. Stacey, who writes extensively on WWII. Even he saw the Canadian entry into Hong Kong as not a group of soldiers going to war, but a group of soldiers going to keep an eye on an area that it was believed at the time the Japanese had pretty much lost interest in.

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