Written by Bryn Thomas.
Image credit: Provided by the author.
Grandma Jiang Jin-zao was fifteen and looking forward to finishing school when American bombers appeared over Taipei on the morning of May 31, 1945. Then called Taihoku, the capital city of the Japanese Empire’s then colony of Taiwan.
Watching from what is now Xindian, on the city’s outskirts, Jin-zao saw multiple bombings during World War II.
“The B29S would come in threes, one in front and two at the wings to the sides… three by three. It was always groups of three. They’d fill up the entire sky, a lead plane followed by two others.”
It was not B-29s but B-24 Liberators she saw – identifiable by their four engines and large, flat tail panels. Still, she got the other details right.
US bombers typically flew in elements of three planes, a wing leader, and two wingmen. These groups would then form grid formations consisting of hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of aircraft.
In the early hours of May 31, 1945, one such formation from the Fifth Air Force of between 114 or 117 bombers left the recently liberated Philippines, arrived over Taipei at about 10:00 am, where they’d drop an estimated 3,000 bombs in three hours, before departing around 1:00 pm.
“Boom boom…they’d make these rumbling sounds…it was like the sky was storming…the sound was enough to scare us to our souls.”
Jin-zao recalls people scrambling to put out fires and crying in the streets after the raid.
An estimated 3,000 people were killed in three hours, and substantial portions of Taipei’s government district, including many of today’s most famous landmarks, were destroyed. A wing of what is now the Presidential Building was levelled and was not repaired for years. Reports suggest a nearby bank lost its roof, and Longshan Temple burned to the ground. To this day, English brochures at the city’s oldest temple contain inaccurate descriptions of a fire started by “cannon balls” that spared nothing but the temple’s statue of Guanyin.
By “cannon balls,” they meant what were likely 500- to 1,000-pound high-explosive or HE bombs mixed with incendiaries. It is a combination that Allied bombers had found especially effective against Japanese cities in 1945. The brochure says the temple — which predated Japanese rule by about 150 years and was distinctly Chinese in its architecture and practice — was targeted because it had been used as an arms depot. In reality, though, the carpet-bombing strategy of the time was both inaccurate and indiscriminate.
(Note: Sources differ on the date that Longshan was bombed, with some saying it was hit on a follow-up raid on June 8, 1945, one week later, still part of the same campaign.)
The day would become one of the deadliest in Taipei’s history, second only to the bloody outbreak of political violence on February 28, 1947, nearly two years later.
But unlike 228, which is remembered yearly with a memorial day and a “peace park” in nearly every major city — there are no public memorials to the Taipei Air Raid. That is striking, given that the 228 Massacre, the subsequent White Terror, and the Martial Law era are all much more politically salient in Taipei today. After all, the deadly raid of May 1945 involved actors — the U.S. and Japan — who have little stake in how Taiwan remembers those events. Why would a society so actively memorialise victims of its own government, yet seem to forget the victims of war from less than two years earlier? In many cases, those victims were the very same people.
Indeed, despite many millennial Taipei residents having senior family members, like Grandma Jiang Jin-zao, who lived through the raid, ask around and you will find very few who know much about it. Ask the same person about the period of political repression that followed, and often they will—drawing on visits to the Jingmei Human Rights Memorial Hall, Green Island, and years of social science classes—give you far more vivid answers.
It is a reality that speaks first to Taiwan’s history as a Japanese colony, second to the realities of the post- and Cold War periods, and third to the modern political narratives Taiwan tells about itself.
In our April 2025 interview, Barak Kushner told us that in 1895, when Japan acquired Taiwan at the end of the First Sino-Japanese War, it set out on what it framed as a civilising project. They planned to take Taiwan—which Tokyo viewed as a Chinese backwater—into the modern era. And while episodes of mass violence punctuated its early rule – The Tapani Incident in 1915, or the use of poison gas to suppress Indigenous resistance in the Wushe Incident in 1930—by the end of the interwar period, Japan’s most visible impact was in modern buildings, an emerging intelligentsia and infrastructure.
(Note: Japan initially said it had only used tear gas. Later scholarship strongly points to a WWI-era agent – like phosgene or mustard).
In the same interview, Kushner also emphasised that while the Taiwanese never achieved equal status with the Japanese before 1943, many saw a thriving and winning Empire. In 1905, Japan defeated Russia; after World War I, it acquired new territories; it had carefully controlled information about what was happening in China; and before the Battle of Midway, it even seemed to have the Americans on the back foot.
Geographically, Taiwan was important as well, providing a jumping-off point for Japanese southern expansion at the beginning of the war, and serving as a transit point for moving POWs north as the conflict neared its end. Taiwan was also a valuable source of men—often Hokkien-speaking translators—and materiel.
This closeness to the Japanese war effort was not just geographical. Many Taiwanese worked with the Japanese willingly—serving in the military, as labourers, or as translators, or in civilian industries supporting Japan’s war machine—hook, line, and sinker with the Empire’s vision of the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.
When war broke out between Japan and China in 1937, some in the Republic of China or ROC came to view people in Taiwan as enemy subjects—even traitors.
As a result, Taiwan became a target for bombing in 1938. Soviet pilots, flying older Tupolev SB bombers, took off from China, aiming at the airfield that is now Taipei’s Songshan Airport. Some reports say the raid largely missed its target and instead killed civilians.
A 1938 Universal Newsreel on the bombing found in the Associated Press archive is cut so that Soong May-ling, wife of ROC leader Chiang Kai-shek, look like she’s comparing the attack to Japanese bombings being carried out in China — an awkward parallel, given that the ROC’s official position is that the people in Taiwan were ethnic Chinese.
“Death comes from a clear blue sky, just as it has for thousands of our innocent people, throughout the width and breadth of our land.”
The US paid little attention to the ethnicity of those it targeted – instead, focusing on war aims. Its carrier-based aircraft began to bomb Taiwan in earnest in 1944 – notably during the Formosa Air Battle.
As recently as 2025, bomb fragments were removed from the former site of the Kaohsiung Refinery, now being developed by TSMC. To this day, visitors to Tainan can see bullet holes in the walls of the Hayashi Department Store, possibly remnants of attacks on an anti-aircraft gun that was once stationed there. In both cases, as was so common in the Second World War, civilian deaths were tolerated in the pursuit of military objectives.
The fact that the Allies treated people in Taiwan as enemy combatants, rather than as colonial subjects with little say over their futures, contributed to why these bombings are not officially remembered. In May 1945, people in Taiwan were considered enemy subjects, but by October of the same year, they were ROC citizens.
By the end of 1945, the ROC and the United States had already turned their ire toward communism, and the Allied bombings of Taipei quickly became historically inconvenient. Acknowledging them would complicate the ROC’s “retrocession” narrative — one centred on liberation rather than conquest. As Barak Kushner noted in our April interview,
“How could the Taiwanese have been bombed by the Americans, when they’re supposed to be Chinese allies? It doesn’t fit the KMT narrative that they want to hoist on this former colony.”
Similar problems with the history of the bombings persist in modern narratives. Whereas the 228 Incident and Taiwan’s authoritarian past fit neatly into the story of democratisation and Taiwan’s current role as a regional leader in human rights, the May 31 bombings point back to the island’s role within the Japanese Empire — raising uncomfortable questions about the part Taiwanese people may have played in it.
Finally, there is the simple question of scale. World War II is exceptional in that events involving thousands of deaths often fade in histories that focus on incidents with millions. Although the Taipei air raid killed around 3,000 people — roughly 1% of the city’s wartime population — this pales in comparison to the 110,000 who died in a single night during the Tokyo firebombing on March 9–10, 1945, under a much larger, but similar combination of HE and incendiary bombs.
Multiple interviewees emphasised that modern Taiwanese would likely have stronger collective memories of the war if Taiwan had experienced an Okinawa-style invasion in 1945. Kushner highlighted that many ethnic Japanese wanted to remain in Taiwan at the end of the war because, compared with the burned-out cities of Japan, Taiwan had fared much better.
Indeed, future research could ask whether the Japanese, seeing the devastation in Tokyo, were better prepared for Taipei. Urbanisation planned in the thirties planned streets out with fires in mind, and long strips of buildings were cleared to create firebreaks.
In the absence of official memorials, it may be Taipei’s very streets that serve as the most tangible reminder of the May 31 bombing. In the 80 years since the war, a combination of political realities and dominant narratives has left it largely forgotten, except by those who lived through it.
Today, in her late 90s, Jiang Jin-zao continues to live in Xindian, busying herself with her garden and grandchildren, and oddly, her Instagram account.
“It was a scary time in my youth,” she says.
Bryn Thomas’s interest in World War II began as a child, marvelling at his Great-Uncle Bob’s prosthetic leg — the result of a landmine in the Battle of the Bulge. He is an avid reader of history, holds a master’s degree in Social Science from National Chengchi University, and currently works as a copy editor and reporter for TaiwanPlus News. Although the research and data collection that went into these articles also contributed to stories published for that outlet, the conclusions presented here are mine alone and do not reflect those of TaiwanPlus. Special thanks to Jeffrey Chen and Ed Moon.
This article was published as part of a special issue on ‘Between Empires and Allies: Documenting Taiwan’s WWII Experience‘. All articles of the special issue are written independently of TaiwanPlus News.