Secret wartime agents who defied Japanese during occupation of Hong Kong

With people like Kay Chinn Mah, the British Army Aid Group (BAAG) served as an important intelligence unit active in southern China and Hong Kong during wartime. Their secret contributions became known only after the second world war.

The group was founded by Colonel Lindsay Ride (1898-1977), an Australian soldier, physiologist and musician in Hong Kong, after he escaped from the Sham Shui Po prisoner-of-war camp to the mainland with the help of local communist guerillas. He later became vice chancellor of the University of Hong Kong, four years after the war ended.

The BAAG was formally launched in Kukong (now known as Qujiang), Kwangtung (now known as Guangdong), in May 1942, five months into the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong. Ostensibly its aim was to assist escaped prisoners of war, but its most important agenda was gathering war intelligence and it was classified as a unit of MI9 in Britain.

Most of the leaders were British military officials who had served in the city; agents were mainly Chinese or Eurasians.

"The BAAG played an important role during the war by preventing the effective use of Hong Kong as a Japanese shipping and naval base in the South China Sea," said Dr Kwong Chi-man,a military historian at Baptist University.

Its members monitored Japanese shipping, made contact with prisoners of war and the internees at Stanley Prison, and collected general information about Japanese rule and conditions in the city.