During the last legs of the Japanese occupation, US planes dumped thousands of tonnes of explosives on the city to destroy shipping and docking facilities. Those that didn’t go off are still a threat today
After 26 hours of road closures, the evacuation of 1,300 people and a delicate operation performed by police, a 450kg (1,000 lbs) wartime bomb was on Sunday declared to no longer be a threat to the public.
But the return to normalcy was short-lived. On Wednesday, a second similar bomb was discovered at the same site on Harbour Road and Tonnochy Road in Wan Chai, where construction of the Sha Tin-Central rail link is going on.
By mid-afternoon, police had closed roads and ordered students and office workers in the area to go home, with bomb disposal operations expected to last well into the night.
Workers unearthed the first device – cigar-shaped, 140cm long and 45cm in diameter – on Saturday.
The authorities sprang into action and cleared an area within a 400-metre radius of the site, piling up sandbags for extra protection.
Senior bomb disposal officer Tony Chow Shek-kin said the device, an American-made AN-M65 likely dropped by US warplanes during the second world war, contained 225kg of explosives.
Had it exploded, it could have sent shrapnel flying up to 2km away, with the impact being felt within a 200-metre to 300-metre radius, he said.
Military historian Kwong Chi-man suspects the bomb was dropped 72 years ago by US Navy planes during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, which lasted from January 1942 to August 1945.
On January 16,1945,471 planes from Task Force 38 dumped 150 tonnes of ordnance on the city, including 13 bombs each weighing 907kg and 72 devices weighing 450kg, making it “probable” that Saturday’s discovery was part of that day’s assault, Kwong said.
“It was the biggest bombardment suffered by Hong Kong during the Pacific War,” the assistant professor at Baptist University said.
And more unexploded wartime bombs could be buried around Hong Kong, experts said.
Who dropped the bombs?
Most wartime bombs were dropped by US planes, with a small number by British and Japanese military.
After the Japanese invaded and occupied the city, it became a logistics centre for the Japanese military in the South China Sea, Kwong said. Ships transporting oil and food between Southeast Asia and Japan stopped at Hong Kong to refuel.
“The Americans were primarily concerned with destroying the Japanese shipping and supporting docking facilities,” Dave Macri, a history professor at the University of Hong Kong, said.
