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Heroes from History People Really Don’t Appreciate Enough

Khalid Elhassan November 10, 2020 32 min

William Colby - William J. Donovan — William Colby (oak leaves on cap) with OSS personnel and Norwegian Resistance members in Norway. Special Operations

26. The Canadian Military Might Have Spurned Bill Chong, but the British Military Knew How to Spot a Potential Hero

British Army Aid Group (BAAG) badge. Australian War Museum

Bill Chong fled Hong Kong for mainland China, taking nothing but money. He reasoned that if he was caught carrying supplies for a journey, it would probably mean his summary execution. He planned to buy food from villages en route, but those hopes were dashed when he saw a Japanese flag flying from each one. So he subsisted on raw vegetables, dug from gardens in the dead of night.

Chong seems to have had a hero streak from early on, and he formed nebulous plans to join Chinese guerrillas. However, he ran into a British military intelligence officer who saw something in Chong, and convinced him that he would be more valuable as a clandestine agent. The Canadian military had scorned Bill when he tried to enlist, but the British eagerly snapped him up. As a fluent speaker of both English and Chinese, Chong was ideally suited for intelligence work, so he was assigned to the Directorate of Military Intelligence, Section MI9. When volunteers were sought for hazardous work with an MI9 subunit, the British Army Aid Group (BAAG), Chong stepped forward.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.