"impossible struggle" in Hong Kong that C Force "...nonetheless held out with their imperial comrades for 17 days, proving that regardless of their state of training, Canadian troops were prepared to fight tenaciously and die hard". The American historian Gerhard Weinberg described the defence of Hong Kong together with the defence of Wake island and Baatan in the Philippines as the cases of "...a garrison with little hope of relief had fought hard and effectively against an experienced, but not very capably led opponent; Malaya was different on both counts". The same allegation made against the Canadians at Hong Kong was repeated by the defeated British GOC at Singapore, Arthur Percival, against the Indian Army troops under his command. Percival claimed that Singapore could have been saved if only he had more British troops, but that he had been let down by his Indian troops, whom he claimed were cowardly and undisciplined. From the other end, there has been a tendency of the part of Canadian nationalists to see the dispatch of C Force as an attempt by the British to use the Canadians troops as "cannon fodder". In his 1997 book Hell on Earth: Aging faster, dying sooner: Canadian Prisoners of the Japanese During World War II, the Canadian historian David McIntosh summed up the Battle of Hong Kong as: "A British waste of Canadian manpower". In response to the widespread criticism of C Force, McDonnell later stated in the same 2006 interview: "We won the fucking war...The people who are whining don't understand that war is a terrible thing. If you volunteer to fight for your country, it's not going to be a Sunday school party...It was tough, but the Canadians in the prison camps were magnificent...staved to death, but never disobeyed orders.". In the same manner, D'Avignon in his 1948 letter written in broken English defended the record of C Force as he wrote: "If such a battle was given to the Japanese and there [their] casualties prove it sure wasn't given by untrained soldiers. It took the Japanese seventeen days to capture Hong Kong with 6000 untrained soldiers to defend it and it took the same army eight days to defeat 75000 trained soldiers of Singapore...If during the seventeen days we fought it gave a chance to Australia to get reinforcement from England and USA. I think it was an honor for Canadian soldiers to participate