TLDR: A 2015 Hong Kong apartment demolition yielded a forgotten diary revealing that 24 Chinese naval officers—volunteers who trained with the Royal Navy—fought alongside Allied forces on D-Day, their existence erased by Cold War politics and institutional bias until a 13,000-character firsthand account forced historians to redraw the boundaries of WWII’s most mythologized battle.
"Saw the army's landing craft, as numerous as ants, scattered and wriggling all over the sea, moving southward." The date was June 5, 1944. The writer was a naval officer aboard a British battleship, watching the largest invasion fleet in history cross the English Channel. "Everyone at action stations," he noted. The next morning would be D-Day.
The man writing these words wasn't American, British, or Canadian. He was Lam Ping-yu, a Chinese naval officer whose diary—rescued from a condemned Hong Kong apartment in 2015—reveals a corner of World War II that most history books skip entirely. Twenty-four Chinese officers trained with the Royal Navy and participated in the Normandy landings. Then politics, geography, and institutional bias conspired to erase them from the story.
The Tenement Building That Rewrote D-Day
Urban explorers Angus Hui and John Mak found Lam's diary while salvaging items from a Hong Kong building scheduled for demolition. Inside a suitcase were 80 pages covered in 13,000 delicate Chinese characters—a firsthand account of the war's most pivotal battle, written by someone the official narrative had forgotten.
The duo verified their discovery by cross-referencing British archives. A May 29, 1944 ship's log from HMS Ramillies confirmed it: "Junior Lieut Le Ping Yu Chinese Navy joined ship." The misspelled name was a small indignity that foreshadowed a larger erasure. Lam's diary appears to be the only known primary source documenting Chinese participation in D-Day.
Today, that diary has vanished again—likely taken abroad by emigrants—but not before being photographed. Now copies tour universities from Hong Kong to London, introducing thousands to a history they never learned.
How 24 Chinese Officers Ended Up at Normandy
In 1943, while China fought Japan in the Pacific, Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government selected two dozen naval officers for an unlikely mission: train with Britain's Royal Navy to strengthen Allied cooperation. The officers underwent months of instruction at the Royal Naval College, learning gunnery, navigation, English, and British naval protocols.
The journey itself reads like an adventure novel. The officers flew over the Himalayas, rode camels past Egyptian pyramids, and dodged Nazi patrol boats in the Mediterranean. They weren't drafted. They volunteered to join a fight thousands of miles from home, motivated by national duty and the belief that victory required global partnership.
By May 1944, officers like Lam had been assigned to British warships. Lam joined HMS Ramillies, a battleship tasked with bombardment support for the Normandy invasion. Another officer, Huang Tingxin, served aboard HMS Searcher during D-Day and later during Operation Dragoon, the Allied invasion of southern France.
What the Diary Saw
On the night of June 5, Lam described the Channel filled with vessels "as numerous as ants," all moving south toward France. By dawn on June 6, his vantage point became a maelstrom. Around 5 a.m., HMS Warspite opened fire. Ramillies joined the bombardment, its heavy guns shelling German fortifications while the ship dodged torpedoes. Lam documented the chaos with remarkable precision.
But the diary wasn't only about strategy and firepower. He captured the full spectrum of wartime emotion: excitement at being part of history, frustration with the Navy's bureaucracy, even envy of pilots who earned better pay. There were hints of romance with a British woman named Violet. These weren't the sanitized observations of an official report. They were the thoughts of a young man far from home, caught between duty and ordinary human longing.
After D-Day, Lam continued serving with the Royal Navy. In 1945, he participated in Operation Armour, a British effort to relieve Hong Kong after years of Japanese occupation. He eventually settled there, working as a sea captain before emigrating to the United States in the 1970s. His family, historians now believe, may never have known the full scope of his wartime service.
The Mechanics of Forgetting
The Chinese officers' contributions didn't just fade—they were actively obscured. China's 1949 civil war scattered records and personnel. With the Nationalists defeated and Cold War tensions rising, celebrating East-West wartime cooperation became politically awkward. Meanwhile, Western histories of D-Day defaulted to a Euro-American narrative, leaving little room for stories that complicated the geography.
Institutional bias played a role too. The Royal Navy had lifted its formal "color bar" only in 1939, reluctantly and under government pressure. Archival notes from the period reveal assumptions that sailors of color would face "gibes" from crews or become targets of "amusement" due to their "pronounced native features." Even when Chinese officers served with distinction, bureaucratic resistance ensured they remained marginal figures in official records—their names misspelled, their contributions footnoted.
The result was a nearly complete historical amnesia. For decades, D-Day belonged solely to the beaches and the soldiers who stormed them from the West. The global coalition that made victory possible stayed hidden.
Curators Fight Back
The touring exhibition "Lost and Found in Hong Kong: The Unsung Chinese Heroes at D-Day" is changing that. After stops at universities in Hong Kong, the show arrived at King's College London and the Royal Hospital Chelsea in 2025, drawing thousands of visitors. School groups crowd around display cases holding Lam's letters, photographs of the officers in British uniforms, and digital copies of the diary itself.
Visitor reactions tend toward disbelief. "I never imagined China in this story," one guest noted at the King's College launch. Curator Angus Hui frames the exhibition as more than historical correction. "This illustrates the deep connections between the histories of Hong Kong, China, and the rest of the world," he explained. "All history is contemporary."
The curators are still searching for the original diary. Whoever has it—tucked in an attic somewhere in the U.S. or U.K.—holds a document that changes how we understand one of the twentieth century's defining moments.
Ants, Revisited
Lam's metaphor lingers. Landing craft scattered like ants across the Channel, each one small and vulnerable, together moving toward an impossible shore. History loves its generals and grand strategies, but wars are won by individuals—people willing to cross oceans, learn new languages, and fight for a future they believed in.
Lam Ping-yu's diary proves that diversity wasn't invented by modern institutions. It was practiced by volunteers decades before anyone thought to call it that. If one forgotten notebook can rewrite who gets credit for D-Day, it raises a bigger question: What other essential stories are still waiting in mislabeled archives, abandoned apartments, or family attics? The answer matters. Because the real lesson of Lam's diary isn't just about the past. It's about paying closer attention to who we're forgetting right now.