Floating Dungeons of the Far East: Japanese Hell Ships of World War Two and the Sinking of the Oryoku Maru

 No light.  

No air.  

No water.  

Temperatures in excess of one-hundred and fifty degrees.  The smell of excrement and piss.  Hundreds of filthy, naked and sweaty men with only room to sit cross legged on the floor.  No room to lie down.  Not enough room to stand up.

If heat exhaustion and dehydration don’t kill you then you may be lucky enough to lose your mind and go insane and into a blissful oblivion before someone strangles you, or bashes your head against the metal walls just to get you to shut up.  

And then there are the beatings and the periodic executions, performed for sport by your sadistic captors on deck who will blindfold you, have you kneel and then slice off your head at the neck with the curved blades of their samurai swords and then laugh as your severed head rolls off the deck and floats out into the vastness of the Pacific Ocean.

Maybe, just maybe you’ll be “lucky” enough to live through the beatings, the dehydration, the starvation and the insanity, but in the back of your mind you know that if the Japanese don’t kill you on this voyage then more than likely your own men, whether British or American, will.

You’ll be vaporized in an instant by a high-explosive bomb from an American airplane or you might have your body ripped in half by a torpedo launched from a Royal Navy submarine.  Perhaps you’ll be wounded in one of these allied air or naval attacks and be left leaving a blood streaked trail, shark bait, in the harsh and unforgiving tropical ocean waters.

You’re a Prisoner of War during the Second World War having been captured by the Empire of Japan and this floating dungeon you’re in is called a Hell Ship.  There are many ways to die aboard a Japanese Hell Ship and more than likely, you’ll witness them all, before your long journey is over…

Japanese Hell ships were converted merchant vessels that the Japanese Navy requisitioned during World War Two, stripped bare, and then stuffed with allied prisoners of war and foreign slave laborers who were being transported across the Pacific for internment and forced labor on the Japanese Home Islands.

Converted Japanese Merchant Ship

After 1942, as the combined American, British and Chinese armies launched decisive counter-offensives across Asia, greater and greater numbers of allied POWs were hurriedly transported aboard notorious Japanese Hell Ships from forced labor camps in the Philippines, Malaysia, China, Burma and isolated Pacific islands to mainland Japan.  Always desperate for manpower and natural resources the Japanese Empire sought to fill the void with slave labor.

Between 1942 and 1945 more than 1,500 British, American and Australian POWs would die as a result of inhumane conditions and acts of wanton violence aboard Japanese Hell Ships.

Nearly 20,000 deaths aboard Japanese Hell Ships would occur as a result of allied air and naval attacks and subsequent drowning.  In total, the death rate aboard Japanese Hell Ships during the course of the Second World War would approach thirty percent!

Even Japanese records compiled during the war state that over 50,000 American, British, Dutch and Australian POWs were transported aboard unmarked merchant vessels to the Japanese home islands and that nearly 11,000 died of either dehydration, starvation, execution or enemy action during their voyage.

Australian POW Roy Cornford writing years after the war in 2009 described in vivid detail what it was like to be attacked by a Royal Navy submarine while aboard the Hell Ship Rakuyo Maru in the South China Sea on September 12, 1944:

“It was at that moment that two torpedoes hit our ship: the Rakuyo Maru.  The explosion nearly washed us overboard.  It flooded the hold containing us POWs causing mass panic.  The shock of water washing over us and water nearly drowning us all in the hold is something hard to forget.”

In Japanese Oryoku Maru translates to Yalu River.  

All Japanese merchant ships were named after Asiatic rivers and in consequence so too were all Hell Ships.

The Yalu River divides mainland China, specifically the province of Manchuria, from the Korean Peninsula.  On December 13, 1944 the Oryoku Maru left Manilla Harbor in the Philippines carrying  1,620 Prisoners of War, the overwhelmingly majority of whom (1,550) were Americans.  With the American army having already landed in the Philippine archipelago and poised to retake the capital city, Japan was desperate to remove these American prisoners from the Philippines, as a way to save face, before any of the men could be liberated by the victorious combined American and Philippine army led by General Douglas MacArthur.  Most of the American prisoners aboard the Oryoku Maru were survivors of the infamous Bataan Death March of 1942 and had already endured years of imprisonment inside horrific Japanese Prisoner of War camps.

American Survivors of the Bataan Death March 1942

In addition to the 1,600 American and British prisoners aboard the Oryoku Maru there were also an additional 1,900 indigenous laborers crammed into the hellish hold belowdecks on the converted merchant ship.

An official American report on conditions aboard Japanese Hell Ships conducted in the month’s after World War Two said of conditions aboard the Oryoku Maru that:

“Many men lost their minds and crawled about in the absolute darkness armed with knives attempting to kill people in order to drink their blood or armed with canteens filled with urine and swinging them in the dark.  The hold was so crowded and everyone so interlocked with one another that the only movement possible was over the heads and bodies of others.”  

(Quoted from “The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire 1936-1945” by John Toland pp. 601)

On December 15 only about two days into the Oryoku Maru’s voyage to the Japanese home islands, planes from the American aircraft carrier USS Hornet attacked and sank what they mistakenly took to be an unmarked merchant vessel transporting possible wartime supplies back to Japan.

An estimated 300 people, mostly POWs, were killed instantly in the airstrike.  The crippled ship limped back into port at Subic Bay in the Philippines.  Many more prisoners were shot as they tried to jump overboard off the flaming vessel.  Several hundred prisoners crowded onto ladders leading down over the sides of the stricken ship but were either shot down by Japanese soldiers lining the shoreline or were crushed to death in the panic that took hold.

American Airstrike on the Oryoku Maru, December 15, 1944

But, as a result of the American air attack, the deck of the Oryoku Maru was split in half, which enabled light and air to reach many of the American POWs who had been trapped below decks in the suffocating hold for the past few days.  For the several hundred men who remained stuck onboard the damaged ship as day turned to night, this little bit of light and fresh air proved to be a lifesaver.

After being abandoned by their Japanese guards aboard the stricken ship over 1,000 American POWs were forced to jump overboard and swim to shore where all were quickly recaptured by the Japanese.

Eventually, the ship sank to the bottom of Subic Bay just outside Manilla, where today a monument called the “Hell Ship Memorial” is located.

Hell Ship Memorial in Manilla

The survivors of the Oryoku Maru were loaded onto another Hell Ship and sent to Japan.  Out of the 1600 POWs who originally departed Manilla aboard the Oryoku Maru in December of 1944, less than 500 are known to have ever made it to POW camps on the mainland where they endured horrors in Japanese prison camps comparable to those they had already endured aboard the Hell Ships.

Tragically, the history behind Japanese Hell Ships is little remembered and little reported on today.  No one has ever been held responsible for the suffering that was inflicted upon captured American prisoners aboard these floating dungeons and today the story of what American, British and other allied servicemen endured so long ago aboard these floating prisons is largely forgotten altogether…