Bold Venture: The American Bombing of Japanese-Occupied Hong Kong, 1942-1945. Steven K. Bailey. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2019.
On July 29th 1943, as 18 B-24 Liberators trundled above the city of Hong Kong, the crew of the gunboat IJN Suma—exposed on a dry dock 4 kilometers below—manned its guns and fired into the sky. Neither the airplanes nor the gunboat found their marks. The Liberators’ payloads splashed into the harbor or else landed amidst civilian homes while the Suma, its guns too small, could do nothing to reach its tormentors.[1] Stephen K. Bailey’s Bold Venture: The American Bombing of Japanese-Occupied Hong Kong, 1942-1945, chronicles this and the dozens of other raids launched by American air wings over the Pearl River Delta in Southern China with an exciting style and the skill of a professional storyteller. Yet, as with the hapless Suma, Bold Venture puts out an impressive fusillade while failing to find an appropriate target to focus its fire upon.
Stephen K. Bailey is an Associate Professor of English at Central Michigan University with several publications relating to Hong Kong under his belt. His affinity for the city becomes clear as soon as the reader digs into Bold Venture’s quick-firing narrative. Hong Kong is the central tether around which Bold Venture flies, a decision that anchors the narrative even as it restricts the human stories that weave in and out of the city from 1941-45. Had the civilians who lived there been allowed more of a voice, Bold Venture would have succeeded not only as a collection of daring raids, but also as an informative look at how the Second World War impacted an enemy-occupied city far from the front lines. As it stands, Bailey’s good storytelling and pacing create a digestible narrative containing enough background to situate readers unfamiliar with the war in China while also dedicating sufficient space to explaining, in layman's terms, the intricacies of the aircraft used without being overwhelming. As a readable work exploring an underrepresented air campaign and as a vehicle for war stories and daring engagements in the skies above China, Bold Venture unquestionably succeeds. If readers are looking for anything more substantial, they may find themselves unfulfilled.
Bold Venture begins with the earliest raids carried out above Hong Kong in October of 1942 and continues until the final mission flown by a Navy PB4Y-2 on August 14, 1945. Bailey’s first few chapters provide readers with a crash course in the difficult situation Allied airmen faced in the China-Burma-India theater. Here readers are exposed to some of the more conventional, though important, details of the Allied air effort. Claire Lee Chennault, first as leader of the famous volunteer Flying Tigers and then as Commander of the China Air Task Force (CATF) tried to wrest the foundations of a fruitful air campaign from a logistical nightmare and obstinate superior commanders. Here Chennault and his strategic plans for the region form a cohesive, if light, grounding for the chapters that follow. Bailey succinctly lays out the pressing issues and force dispositions allowing readers the briefest glimpse into the man that made Hong Kong a target and the vehicles with which he carried out his plans.
Claire Chennault and the Flying Tigers (DoD Image)
As we follow the China Air Task Force’s first few raids into the Pearl River Delta, both the polish and the rust that mottle Bold Venture’s fuselage come into clear view. The narrative of the first raid is delivered from the perspective of a single B-25 bomber crew. Bailey adeptly manages to both engage with the personal struggles of the crew while also providing enough of an overhead look at the raid that the reader is never lost in the minutia. He accomplishes this feat by blending personal accounts, both published and unpublished, and official mission reports into a cohesive and exciting narrative. When the bomber is shot down, Bailey follows the crew’s attempt to escape and their capture at the hands of the Japanese. Bold Venture excels when it dives into the thick of the action, and Bailey will return to this style in the many raids he covers.
Yet, when Bailey strays from this narrow and personal focus, the narrative slips. As the war continued, an increase in supplies and focus allowed the China Air Task Force to transform into the 14th Air Force and eventually be replaced by the 5th Air Force based out of the Philippines. At each major strategic transformation, Bailey leaves behind the previous crews and commands and shifts focus to the next. This shifting focus would work if Hong Kong remained the primary component of the narrative. Rather, Hong Kong sits as a painted, if beautifully so, target against which the narratively episodic raids are launched. The city and its residents consistently come second to the bombers and their crews. Readers who are solely looking to learn more about individual raids can do so without difficulty, yet the privilege given to the Allied air command, combined with the fleeting nature of the different campaigns over Hong Kong lead to an alienation of the work as a whole. There is no central figure or focus to which the reader can attach themselves.
Bailey’s focus on the city itself is not given the same care and attention that the raids he discusses. It also uses few sources, all of them English, to ascertain any sense of how the city fared. An American writer named Emily Hahn and civilian prisoners of war are the two wells of sources Bailey often returns to when offering a glimpse from the city’s perspective. These are interspersed with write ups by the Hong Kong English language paper and, on occasion, by prominent civilians discussing the carnage wrought by particularly off-target raids.[2] One chapter stands out as Bailey diverts slightly from his focus on aircraft and airmen to detail the sinking by the Black Lightning Reconnaissance Squad of a civilian transport Reinan Maru carrying the notorious Cham Lim-pak on December 24, 1944.[3] This diversion is short lived, but it marks the longest foray into the life of Hong Kong itself. The casualties that are the products of the dozens of raids described throughout are never ignored, yet Bailey does not dwell on them, instead focusing on flights and their crews.
Often Bailey touches upon important aspects of bombing the friendly occupied city of Hong Kong and the moral and strategic thought that surrounded the campaign without ever going into sufficient detail. Readers who are hoping to glean more about the purpose of these raids, their utility, or their effects on the civilian population of Hong Kong can content themselves with Bold Venture’s unfortunately basic observations or else consult further readings. This constitutes the primary failing of Bold Venture. The fact that Bailey covers such an underrepresented campaign alone gives some credence to his broader assessments, but the fact remains that the campaign over Hong Kong was strategically interesting enough for a more in depth discussion of it to feature prominently in a work dedicated to the fighting of that campaign.
The lack of strategic follow up is most evident in Bold Venture’s assessment of General Chennault. An early proponent of fighter aircraft, Chennault chafed against the Army Air Corps’ intensifying argument in the 1920s and 30s that heavy bombers would invariably fly past interceptors to reach their targets unharmed.[4] Chennault believed in the ability of fighters to gain control of the sky and therefore win sufficient support for ground forces. Hong Kong was Chennault’s practical application of this theory. He hoped to use the city, given its valuable facilities and ports, to force Japanese air forces to engage him on his terms, thereby winning air superiority and devastating Japanese air power.[5] While Japanese pilots wreaked havoc across the skies of the Philippines, British Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies after hostilities commenced, the pilots of Chennault’s Flying Tigers knew their craft well enough to emerge victorious where their less experienced allies had failed. Bailey touches upon these factors while noting that the actual bombing of the city of Hong Kong was secondary to this cause.[6] Chennault wanted air superiority, and the way to achieve that was to destroy enemy aircraft, either on the ground or in the air.
Bold Venture makes clear, again without really addressing the fact that Chennault’s idea worked, that the Japanese did lose more often than the American fighters, though accurate reporting was often difficult. What did not work, until the vast resources of the 5th Air Force were brought to bear at the end of the war, was the actual bombing of the city. The Hong Kong docks were rarely put out of commission for long, and few ships of import were sunk, yet for every raid the potential for unwanted casualties in a friendly occupied city increased. These two factors pull in an interesting way that I wish Bailey engaged with.
It is in these reports that Bailey shines, deftly weaving numerous first-hand accounts and mission reports together to form a coherent and often Hollywood-worthy narrative. As the wider war begins to turn against the Japanese and the might of American industry picks up steam, the ramping up of American action in Hong Kong propels the narrative along towards a natural climax in the truly spectacular scale of the 5th Air Force’s bombing campaigns, including the tragic flight of the Bold Venture itself, a B-25 that succumbed to friendly fire over Hong Kong in the waning months of the war.[7] Therefore, without explicitly spelling it out for the reader, Bailey weaves the wider narrative of the war through the very human stories of the air crews he covers. This extends from noting Japanese pressure on India and Burma to exploring the vast reach and import of the 1944 Ichigo Offensive for both American bomber groups and the wider war in China.[8]
On March 15, 1945, one of World War Two's most famous B-25 Mitchell bombers crashed into a ridge during a mission targeting Japanese freighters anchored in Hong Kong's harbor. (BoldVentureB25.com)
This natural sense of progression is also evident in Bailey’s description of the technical aspects of air warfare. The intricacies of each of the major planes that flew over Hong Kong, including their relative combat abilities and potential to survive the long flights, are explained easily enough that a layman will understand how each might fare in these dangerous missions. Bailey’s skill at simplifying complex mechanics extends to discussions about radar, bombing sights, and bomb types, including details about the “bombing experiment” where the 22nd Bomb Group dropped napalm for the first time on ships in the Pearl River.[9] Also commendable is the detail Bailey extends to the Japanese opposition. Their aircraft, and where available the pilots themselves, receive space in Bold Venture that is often lacking in other works.
For historians of the period or those looking to learn lessons about strategic bombing more specifically or airpower more generally, Bold Venture does not offer any revelations. Yet this work can comfortably claim to be an accessible entry point for an underrepresented field, even if it fails to make any significant contributions to the scholarship. Those that comprehend how history is a collection of personal stories that can help us understand our world as it was will appreciate the craftsmanship that Bailey demonstrates as a storyteller. But Bailey’s narrative straddles a difficult line.
On the one hand, as a work exploring the technical, personal, and logistical intricacies and struggles of trying to manage and fly bombing campaigns from the difficult to reach and dusty interior of western China, Bold Venture succeeds. On the other, it does little to engage with the city that remains the only constant throughout and fails to take any difficult stance or engage with the current historiography as it stands. Bold Venture’s presence as a window into a little known air campaign that evolved and grew as fortunes, strategies, and leadership changed, makes it worthwhile for those interested in learning more about how American bomber crews and fighter pilots and their Japanese opponents interacted above the skies of the Pearl River Delta between 1942 and 1945.
Joseph Fonseca is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Calgary. He studies the Military and Diplomatic history of East Asia with a focus on the rise of the Japanese Empire.
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Header Image: Japanese shipping at Hong Kong under attack by United States Navy aircraft on 16 January 1945 (U.S. Navy Photo/Wikimedia)
Notes:
[1] Stephen K. Bailey, Bold Venture: The American Bombing of Japanese Occupied Hong Kong, 1942-45. Potomac Books, 2019. 101-102.
[2] Stephen K. Bailey, Bold Venture: The American Bombing of Japanese Occupied Hong Kong, 1942-45. Potomac Books, 2019. 208, 237.
[3] Stephen K. Bailey, Bold Venture: The American Bombing of Japanese Occupied Hong Kong, 1942-45. Potomac Books, 2019. 182-15.
[4] Bob Bergin, “Claire Lee Chennault and the Problem of Intelligence in China.” Studies in Intelligence 54.2 June 2010. 2.
[5] Stephen K. Bailey, Bold Venture: The American Bombing of Japanese Occupied Hong Kong, 1942-45. Potomac Books, 2019. 101-102.
[6] Stephen K. Bailey, Bold Venture: The American Bombing of Japanese Occupied Hong Kong, 1942-45. Potomac Books, 2019. 14-15.
[7] Stephen K. Bailey, Bold Venture: The American Bombing of Japanese Occupied Hong Kong, 1942-45. Potomac Books, 2019. 213.
[8] Stephen K. Bailey, Bold Venture: The American Bombing of Japanese Occupied Hong Kong, 1942-45. Potomac Books, 2019. 162.
[9] Stephen K. Bailey, Bold Venture: The American Bombing of Japanese Occupied Hong Kong, 1942-45. Potomac Books, 2019. 251.