Brought to life by the personal accounts of six Navy pilots and one British POW, this is the history of the U.S. Navy airstrikes on Japanese-held Hong Kong. Commander John Lamade started the war in 1941 a nervous pilot of an antiquated biplane. Just over three years later he was in the cockpit of a cutting-edge Hellcat about to lead a strike force of 80 aircraft through the turbulent skies above the South China Sea. His target: Hong Kong. As a storm of antiaircraft fire darkened the sky, watching from below was POW Ray Jones. For three long years he and his fellow prisoners had endured near starvation conditions in a Japanese internment camp. Did these American aircraft, he wondered, herald freedom? Trawling through historic records, Steven K. Bailey discovered that the story of the U.S. Navy airstrikes on Japanese-held Hong Kong during the final year of World War II had never been told. Operation Gratitude involved nearly 100 U.S. Navy warships and close to a thousand planes. Target Hong Kong brings this massive operation down to a human scale by recounting the air raids through the experiences of seven men whose lives intersected at Hong Kong in January 1945: Commander John D. Lamade, five of his fellow U.S. Navy pilots and the POW Ray Jones. Drawing upon oral histories, diary transcripts, and U.S. Navy documents, this book expertly narrates the intertwined experiences of these servicemen to bring the history to life.

Bold Venture tells an important and riveting untold wartime story of the American airmen who flew combat missions over Hong Kong during the Second World War. Steven K. Bailey sheds light on a key narrative about a larger American campaign against Japanese forces throughout occupied China. Bailey begins with the discovery of an unexploded one-thousand-pound bomb in Hong Kong in 2014, which unfolds a rich history of American heavy bombers in World War II. As Bailey fills in the missing gaps of these heavy bombers' role in World War II, he reveals the story behind the American air raids and the airmen who were eventually shot down over Hong Kong. Bold Venture's exploration of World War II and its aftermath in Hong Kong goes into detail about the British civilians and soldiers who were released from prison and repatriated, and a U.S. military investigative team's recovery of the remains of the crew of Bold Venture, the B-25 that went down in Hong Kong in March 1945. Today unexploded aircraft bombs are unearthed with frightening regularity by construction crews in Hong Kong. Residents are eager to know where these bombs originated, who dropped them, when they dropped them, and what--or who--the targets were. Bailey's account helps answer some of these questions and also provides a unique historical perspective for Americans seeking to understand our contemporary military context and the complexities of foreign military involvement.