Allied Air Raids on Keelung Port (1944-1945)

Keelung was Taiwan's principal port for traffic with Japan under colonial rule and was used by both merchant shipping and the Imperial Japanese Navy, with the batteries of the Keelung Fortress ringing the harbour. As American forces closed on the Philippines, Taiwan became the logistics hub for Japanese forces in Southeast Asia and the Philippines, and Keelung's port was one of the main targets in the Allied effort to cripple the island's transport capacity.

From October 1944 through the end of the war in August 1945, Keelung Port was subjected to sustained Allied air attacks as part of the Formosa Air Battle and subsequent operations. The first bombs fell on 12 October 1944. US Navy Task Force 38 under Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher, with 17 carriers and about 1,000 aircraft, struck military installations across Taiwan, including Keelung, during the massive air raids of October 12-14, 1944, targeting port infrastructure, warships, merchant shipping, and fuel storage; according to Chinese Wikipedia, seven F6F fighters from USS Bunker Hill attacked Keelung harbour on the first day. Additional carrier raids followed in January 1945, after which B-24s of the US Fifth Air Force flying from the Philippines took over; on 20 May, for example, a merchant ship was destroyed in the harbour by B-24s. The heaviest bombing, known today as the Great Keelung Air Raid, came on 16-19 June 1945. On 16 June, 60 B-24s escorted by eight P-51s attacked ships in the harbour with 260-pound bombs and the port facilities with 1,000-pound bombs, partly destroying two power plants of the Taiwan Dockyard Company and cutting the tracks at Keelung Station in five places; 41 B-24s followed on the 17th, 53 on the 18th and 51 on the 19th, hitting factories, railways, the port and residential districts, burning a fertilizer plant and a timber warehouse and leaving the port wrecked. Raids continued sporadically until mid-July 1945.

The Keelung Fortress batteries, originally designed for coastal defense against naval assault, were repurposed for anti-aircraft defense during these attacks. The fortress's strategic location overlooking the harbor approaches made it both a defensive position and a target during these operations. The raids caused significant damage to Keelung's port facilities and shipping, and to public buildings including the railway station, post office, city hall and joint government office, degrading Japan's ability to use Taiwan as a logistics hub for its forces in Southeast Asia and the Philippines. Japanese colonial government figures put the toll of air raids across Taiwan between October 1944 and August 1945 at more than 5,500 dead, 8,500 injured and nearly 280,000 people affected; the sources consulted give no separate casualty figure for Keelung.

Because of Keelung's hilly terrain, residents dug large numbers of air-raid tunnels; 85 usable ones were still recorded in a 1955 survey, and some were later turned into restaurants and shops. The former Keelung Fortress Command building was designated a municipal monument in 2010 and opened to the public after restoration was completed in 2022.