On May 31, 1945, U.S. bombers launched the deadliest air raid on Taiwan of World War II, killing an estimated 3,000 people in a single day and devastating much of central Taipei. Eighty years later, the bombing is largely forgotten, with few public memorials and little recognition in Taiwan’s historical narrative. Experts say Cold War politics and Taiwan’s complex identity under Japanese rule have obscured the memory of the attack, despite its lasting impact.
00:00In the closing months of World War II, Taipei was in ruins. A massive Allied
00:11bombing raid had ravaged the city at the end of May 1945. Even now, eight
00:17decades later, some who witnessed the attacks still remember them vividly.
00:21That way to the country I was only 15, 6 years old. I didn't know. I would say that
00:28I would say that when I was the American force of Bancuse, there would be people that
00:32say like, now that there is no more but they know that force of Bancuse.
00:36It is very big, very big. We were playing with the men in Newtown.
00:39They saw a couple of these in the week, a plummeted, like a plummeted,
00:45The raid would prove to be the largest to hit Taiwan during the war, killing an estimated 3,000 people in a single day.
01:0280 years ago, this building that you can see behind me, the presidential office building would have been in flames.
01:08It burned for three days after the bombing and wasn't fully repaired until the late 1940s.
01:15Now, just north of here, Taipei Rail Station, a key transportation hub, was also hit.
01:21Taipei's central government district suffered the worst of the damage.
01:25The area that's now 228 Peace Memorial Park was heavily cratered and the nearby Bank of Taiwan lost its roof.
01:33The bombings didn't spare important centers of Taiwanese religious life.
01:36Langshan Temple, a longtime symbol of local identity, was burned to the ground in the raids.
01:41Local legend has it that this temple, then made out of wood, was used to store weapons during the war.
01:47And that all but its statue of Guan Yin, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, was destroyed in blazes caused by the bombings.
01:53So is it true?
01:55Well, sources seem to differ.
01:57But what is certain is that the persistence of this story in Taiwan is exceptional.
02:01Because for the most part, the country seems to have forgotten the bombings.
02:05Despite the scale of destruction, the 1945 raid has largely faded from public memory.
02:11The raid is barely commemorated in Taipei and unlike bombings in Tokyo, Dresden or London, almost unknown abroad.
02:19The bombing of Taipei and other areas is, of course, horrific and several thousand die, but it's just several thousand.
02:28So it pales in comparison to the 150,000 or so that happened in March of 1945 with the Tokyo air bombing.
02:35So for all intents and purposes, Taiwan gets away relatively unscathed.
02:40The raid was just one part of a much larger conflict unfolding across the Pacific.
02:45Taiwan's strategic importance had diminished by 1944 through 45, especially as Japan's naval and merchant fleets were decimated by Allied attacks.
02:54Making the island less critical as a base for shipping and supply lines.
02:59I think it's fair to say that the island of Taiwan itself was not a primary part of either the Allied or the Japanese strategy in terms of the overall war.
03:09Clearly, it was geographically well located. Remain so just a few hundred miles off the coast of China.
03:14But that said, most of the land based warfare, which involved essentially the Japanese sending many troops on the peninsula through Korea, became more concentrated in Japanese mind.
03:27There's also the question of Cold War political narrative.
03:30Taiwan was part of the Japanese Empire from 1895 until 1945.
03:36Many of those killed in the raid were technically Japanese subjects, seen as legitimate targets by the Republic of China, which has ruled Taiwan since 1945, but during the war was fighting a bitter battle with Japan on the Chinese mainland.
03:50China carries the war to Japan. A dozen big Chinese bombers twice raided three cities on the island of Formosa, spreading death and terror among the inhabitants of the former Chinese possession.
04:03Death comes from the clear blue sky, just as it has come to thousands of our innocent people throughout the length and breadth of our land.
04:15After the war, Chinese nationalists wanted to build a new national identity for Taiwan, with China at its core, and that did not include Taiwanese people fighting for Japan or dying under American and Chinese bombs.
04:29The bombing of Taiwan pretty much kind of gets subsumed in the rest of the imperial era of Taiwanese history because it's about Taiwan that was part of the Japanese Empire and Taiwan that fought for Japan.
04:44And that can't be part of the KMT story.
04:46Heroes Day and through the streets of Taipei, a martial parade symbolic of the fighting spirit of nationalist China's army in the fortress island of Formosa.
04:53How could the Taiwanese have been bombed by the Americans? They're supposed to be Chinese allies. It doesn't fit the KMT narrative that they want to hoist on this former colony.
05:05And so pretty much all of that wartime history is put into the dustbin of history where it has to wait until the 1990s to come out.
05:14While official histories ignored their suffering, the survivors lived through a harsh and uncertain post-war reality.
05:21The Taipei Raid remains the second deadliest event in the city's history, surpassed only by the February 28th incident two and a half years later.
05:36But unlike that crackdown on anti-government protesters, there are no public memorials to the bombings.
05:55As fears of renewed conflict in the Taiwan Strait generate global headlines, the raid stands as a stark reminder of the consequences of the war.
06:04One many are content to forget.
06:07Ryan Wu, Ed Moon, Jeffrey Chen, and Bryn Thomas for Taiwan Plus.
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