Discovery of US plane wreck sheds light on one of Hong Kong's darkest days

It was January 16, 1945, a day that saw the heaviest American bombing of Japanese targets in Hong Kong. Between 9am and 5pm, 154 tonnes of bombs were dropped, and hundreds of thousands of machine gun rounds were fired.

US military archive reports describe the exercise as one of the most dangerous and hazardous ever undertaken by the US Navy aviators as they flew sorties under heavy Japanese anti-aircraft artillery fire. The US carrier task force defiantly described Hong Kong as the worst theatre of the Pacific war up to that point. Nineteen planes were shot down or went missing. It was one of the highest rates of losses for US Navy planes during the war.

But for a local amateur military historian, this is only the beginning of the story. In November 2011, Craig Mitchell was out in the hills above Hong Kong searching for evidence of a Japanese gun position that had been set during the battle for Hong Kong in December 1941.

Born and bred in Hong Kong, Mitchell, 33, has a fascination about Hong Kong during the war years, particularly the Japanese occupation.

What he found was much more than he expected.

"The location was about three hours hike up a very difficult hill with no paths, so there was a lot of crashing through thick bush and getting scratched and tangled by plants," he says.

"While I didn't find the gun position, as I was leaving I noticed a large piece of metal, clearly very out of place with the surroundings. I recovered it as it looked like a piece of aircraft."