Keelung Port (Kiirun Naval Port)

Keelung Port (Japanese: 基隆港 / Kiirun-kō) is located on the northern tip of Taiwan, facing the East China Sea. The port was opened to foreign trade in 1863 as a subsidiary port of Tamsui, harbor works were first planned under Liu Mingchuan in 1886, and it underwent massive expansion under Japanese colonial rule beginning in 1895. Between 1899 and 1944, the Government-General of Taiwan executed five phases of harbor construction, transforming Keelung into the island's largest and most strategically important port. The fifth phase was left unfinished because of the Pacific War.

During World War II, Keelung served as a critical naval base and repair facility for the Imperial Japanese Navy. Military shipping to and from China, Japan, and Palau regularly transited through Kiirun. The port supported Japanese operations toward Southeast Asia in the opening stages of the Pacific War.

As Allied forces advanced in the Pacific, Keelung became a prime target for US strategic bombing. On October 12, 1944, carrier aircraft from USS Bunker Hill, USS Intrepid and USS Hancock attacked the harbor, its warehouses and shipping. From January to June 1945, the US Army Far East Air Force conducted repeated B-24 and B-25 bomber raids against port facilities, warehouses, docks, and industrial targets.

The most devastating attack was the "Keelung Air Raid" of June 16–19, 1945. On June 16 alone, sixty B-24 heavy bombers from the US Fifth Air Force, escorted by eight P-51 fighters, struck the port. One group dropped 260-pound bombs onto ships in the harbor while another delivered 1,000-pound and 2,000-pound explosives onto port infrastructure. Targets included two power plants operated by Taiwan Shipping Dock Corporation, Keelung Railway Station, a fertilizer plant, and timber warehouses. The May 29, 1945 raid involved over 100 B-24 bombers.

Keelung was raided more than fifty times. No reliable separate casualty total for the city was found; the figures often quoted — 5,582 killed, 419 missing, 8,760 injured and 277,383 affected — are the Government-General's statistics for air raids on the whole of Taiwan between October 12, 1944 and August 10, 1945. The west bank of the port suffered the most severe damage.

After Japan's surrender, Keelung Port served as the main entry point for Chinese Nationalist officials arriving to administer Taiwan (October 1945) and as the departure point for Japanese repatriation operations (January–March 1946). Today the port remains one of Taiwan's busiest commercial harbors, and the West Pier 2 and 3 warehouses, completed in 1932 and 1934, survive on the west bank; the West 3 warehouse was listed as a historic building in 2014.