Digging Up the Past

Almost 80 years after it was shot down in Hong Kong during the Second World War, the recently unearthed US Avenger warplane sheds light on a lesser-known chapter of the traumatising era

By Zabrina Lo.

On January 16, 1945, just three months after the success of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, three US Navy airmen were sent to aircraft carrier the USS Hancock to participate in Operation Gratitude. The mission: to bomb the South China coast and destroy Japan’s sea lanes in the region. While the exercise was a strategic success, it came with substantial human loss. “The pilots were just getting shot at from the minute they pulled out from the carriers,” says Craig Mitchell, a local amateur historian. “If you read the survivors’ accounts, even the most experienced pilots from the navy said that Hong Kong was the one place they did not want to come back to after the war and that it was not worth their losses.” The US Navy records…

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Tatler Hong Kong (Digital) - 1 Issue, February 2022

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