A hell ship is a ship with extremely unpleasant living conditions or with a reputation for cruelty among the crew. It now generally refers to the ships used by the Imperial Japanese Navy to transport Allied prisoners of war (POWs) out of the Philippines, Hong Kong and Singapore during World War II. The POWs were taken to Japan, Taiwan, Manchuria, or Korea to be used as forced labor. In Japanese, they are known as jigoku-sen (地獄船), with the same literal meaning.
The term was coined much earlier, and was also used for German prisoner of war transports. When the Royal Navy's destroyer HMS Cossack had boarded the German tanker Altmark in a Norwegian fjord on 16 February 1940 (in what later became known as the Altmark Incident), and released some 300 British merchant sailors that had been picked up from ships sunk by the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee, Altmark was in the British newspapers frequently called "Hitler's hell-ship" or the "Nazi hell-ship".[1][2]
As Allied forces closed in, the Japanese began transferring POWs by sea. Similar to conditions on the Bataan Death March, prisoners were often crammed into cargo holds with little air, food or water for journeys that would last weeks. Many died due to asphyxia, starvation or dysentery. Some POWs in the heat, humidity, lack of oxygen, food, and water became delirious and unresponsive to their environment. Unlike weapons transports which were sometimes marked as Red Cross ships, these prisoner transports were unmarked and were targeted by Allied submarines and aircraft.
The name of hell ship Oryoku Maru collectively covers the seven-week voyages and fate of Allied POWs held in the Philippines, who survived the sinking of that ship in Subic Bay in December 1944, and the bombing of a second ship the Enoura Maru, in the harbor of Takao, January 1945, and the Brazil Maru which transported the last surviving Allied POWs to Moji, Japan. There the Japanese medics are said to have been shocked at the wasted condition of the POWs and used triage to divide them. The 110 most severe cases were taken to a primitive military hospital in Kokura where 73 died within a month. Four other groups were sent to Fukuoka POW camps 1, 3, 4, and 17. Of 549 men alive when the ship docked, only 372 survived the war. Some eventually went to a POW camp in Jinsen (Inchon), Korea, where they were given light duty, mainly sewing garments for the Japanese Army.[3]
The Oryoku Maru was a 7,363-ton passenger cargo liner that the Japanese used to try to transport 1,620 survivors of the Bataan Death March, Corregidor and other battle sites. It left Manila on 13 December 1944, and over the next two days was mistakenly bombed and strafed by American planes. About 270 died aboard ship, from suffocation or dehydration or were killed in the attack or from drowning while escaping the sinking ship. A colonel, in his official report, wrote:
- 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.[4]
The Junyō Maru was the worst of these, where 5,640 out of 6,520 POWs died after being sunk.[5]
On September 7, 1944 the hell ship SS Shinyo Maru was attacked by the submarine USS Paddle. Two torpedos hit the hull of the ship which sank, killing several hundred American, Dutch and Filipino service men. At the same time the Japanese guarding the prisoners opened fire on them while they were trying to abandon ship or swim to the nearby island of Mindanao. In the end 687 Allied prisoners were killed along with forty-seven Japanese, ony eighty-two Americans survived the affair.[6][7]
Another was unwittingly torpedoed by a US submarine, who later realised the ship contained Allied POWs. Footage of some of the survivors subsequently being picked up by the submarine is available here