Target Hong Kong

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.

25 December 1941 is known to this day by the people of Hong Kong as ‘Black Christmas’. The battle for Hong Kong is a story that deserves to be better known.

This study of Hong Kong's new towns covers the historical and conceptual origins of new towns and satellite towns worldwide, as well as development procedures and controls, aspects of design, design problems, and the role of government and the private sector in catering to the public need. Hong Kong's physical size and rapid population growth provide unique material for this volume, which will prove useful to town planners and students in the field of community planning.

This paper proposes a quasi-bounded process for exchange rate dynamics within a target zone, consistent with a credible exchange rate band in which the exchange rate cannot breach the strong-side limit while the weak-side limit is only accessible under restricted conditions of the relationship between the parameters of the drift term and stochastic part of the process. The empirical results suggest that this model can describe the dynamics of the Hong Kong dollar, which is operated under a target-zone system, where the drifting force is an increasing function of foreign reserves.