An Uninformed Intelligence Officer

I was a so-called intelligence officer. I didn’t know anything that was going on. All I remember was being called to a meeting, oh, Hong Kong time, the war started the morning of December the 8th and in this part of the world it was the afternoon of the 7th. I think it was only about two days before that that as the intelligence officer of the Grenadiers I got called to Command Headquarters to a meeting, and we were given a briefing which was very, very inadequate and, you know, mentioned that there were possibilities of troop movements and so on but there wasn’t really anything that you could put your finger on. It wasn’t until that Sunday evening I guess and we had had one, we had had one exercise where we had gone to man the positions that were our agreed positions as and when an invasion occurred. So we were familiar with that much at least where we had to go. And it wasn’t until, my recollection is, Sunday afternoon or evening that we were told that the situation looked threatening and that we would leave for our positions which we did and just a few people were left at the barracks and they were bombed.