Voyage of Horrors: The Tragic Journeys of WW2's Hell Ships

by Anna Costa

During the Second World War, Imperial Japan sought to increase its influence over greater Asia in an effort to expand its empire’s borders. Attacks and invasions in places like the Philippines and Hong Kong were deemed as successful exploits and resulted in the capture of thousands of prisoners of war (POWs). In many cases, the Japanese military did not know what to do with all of the POWs. One of their “solutions” was to implement methods of forced labor onto their prisoners in what would become known as Japan’s Hell Ships. The majority of these ships were originally former Japanese luxury passenger ships. The ships quickly transformed from lavish forms of transportation to floating military zones that regularly inflicted forms of terror, humiliation, forced labor, and torture. 

Conditions on Board

 The Japanese Hell Ships were vessels that were overflowing with POWs, some of whom would later remark that their experiences were comparable to the slave galleys of the transatlantic slave trade of the 17th century. Survivors described being packed in the boats like sardines in their tins, the sick mixed with the healthy below deck. Infections spread quickly in these inhumane conditions. Many who were plagued with illnesses, like dysentery, were unable to make their way to the buckets and holes which were supposed to be their “bathrooms”. One account expressed that those who were too sick to wait in the lengthy lines would “foul themselves,” their defecation spreading from “stem to stern”.[1]
Japanese captors set a strict list of rules. The punishment for any kind of “misbehaving” was an immediate beheading.[2] Only allowed one drink of water a day, many POWs became desperate for a drink and were “bound and gagged” as punishment for asking for more water.[3] This abhorrent treatment en route continued when the POWs reached their destination, which was usually Japan. Many, but not all, of those who survived the brutal conditions of the hell ships were forced to become laborers for major Japanese corporations in work camps. Numerous  POWs, who barely survived the suffocating journey to Japan, were deemed too weak and sick to continue working. Because of this, they were left on the docks to rot and die.[4] Unfortunately, their misery did not end with the completion of their journey on the hell ships. They went to camps like Mukden in Manchuria, China, where they became slaves for the Mitsubishi Corporation. Those who represented the corporation even surveyed the hell ship survivors to gather the men who already had skills in areas such as aircraft engineering, in hopes of gaining experienced workers with minimal effort put into their training.[5] Employers further exploited and profited from the POWs in the harrowing conditions of their camps. In these camps, unthinkable horrors occurred: some Allied prisoners were selected for biological experimentation from which there was no recovery.[6]

Notable Hell Ships and their Journeys

Figure 1. “Postcard of the Oryoku Maru” Pacific Asia War Archive, accessed July 2, 2024, https://pacificatrocitiesedu.reclaim.hosting/admin/items/show/1148.

Oryoku and Brazil Maru

The hell ships were not labeled as such by their contemporaries. They had more ordinary names such as the Oryoku Maru, Arisan Maru, or even Brazil Maru. ‘Maru’ was traditionally attached to the names of Japanese ships. Many of these ships had prewar uses, were not technically military vessels, and commonly had no easily identifiable notations to indicate that they were carrying POWs (or sometimes stranded Japanese nationals). The only outward notice of identification were military cargo and anti-aircraft guns standing at attention on the hulls of the ships. This would leave the American military to play the fool as often as they sunk hell ships laden with their Allied POWs onboard. 
The Oryoku Maru left Manila’s port with 1,619 POWs boarded on the morning of December 13th, 1944.[7] Stuffed into the holes, they attempted to sleep and eat the paltry rations that were provided until their journey to Japan was interrupted by an attack the very next day. Bombs dropped by the Allied forces exploded forcefully upon the deck of the naval ship. All the other ships that had departed from the port with them were sunk while the Oryoku Maru was isolated, left floating on the sea.[8] Unfortunately, with the dawn of the next day came the determined fire of Allied forces attacking the Oryoku Maru until it was finally sunk. The POWs who could, jumped ship and swam to the nearest shore, upon which they were shot by Japanese soldiers who were on the beach.[9] The 1,300 who survived were recaptured by Japanese forces and forced to continue their cruel confinement. The prisoners were then dumped in the town of San Fernando in the Philippines and they were pushed to go aboard the Brazil Maru to continue their journey on the hell ships. Before the prisoners had been loaded, the vessel had been transporting livestock. There was no attempt made to clear the animal debris and manure between its docking and when the POWs boarded. The POWs were crammed into its filthy holds and no food provided for three days. The next time they ate was when they docked in Japan on January 1st, 1945. Throughout the war, many other Japanese hell ships continued to be sunk by American and Allied forces, unaware of the countless POWs that continued to lose their lives.

Survivor Testimonies

Many stories of maltreatment the POWs faced aboard these hell ships died with them ranging from anecdotes recounting the squalor they were confronted with en route to camps and the conditions they lived through as hell ship slaves. Many who survived into old age were too scarred to convey their experiences, still fearing they would be harmed for telling their stories and speaking out. 
Robert Dow, a survivor among the 1,500 POWs aboard the Nissyo Maru described the suffocating and claustrophobic space with countless bodies littering the floor and being trampled like a living carpet as more prisoners were thrown in.[10] He described men becoming crazed for water as they sunk deeper and deeper into their thirst: “Men had to be bound and gagged when they went mad for want of water.”[11] They quickly became covered in the filth that accumulated from the combination of the living and the dead coexisting in such a confined space, forcing them to occasionally pass corpses down the line to be dumped overboard by the Japanese sailors.[12]
Another former POW, Tom Woody, described his experience coming off of the Kamakura Maru:
“Passing through rank after rank of laughing, cheering, screaming Japanese who jeered… They spit at us, shouted taunts, and did everything but throw things.”[13] 
However, even after arriving at the destination of his assigned hell ship, he and his fellow soldiers still did not know where they were being transported to and for what purpose. 
“We were scared to death, afraid to react in any way, for we had no idea of why we’d been brought to Japan, what they intended to with (or to) us, or how to behave.”[14]
The POWs who were subject to the terror and torture of the aptly named hell ships underwent mental and physical forms of torture, both on their voyage and at their unknown destinations. The Japanese military created an atmosphere of putridity and suffering which went on to torment its survivors well after the war. The lack of safe conditions or any accordance with the Geneva Conventions committed by the Japanese culminated in numerous charges of cruelty and mistreatment suffered by POWs. Without any moral standards for the Japanese forces to adhere to, POWs perceived the Japanese military as unforgiving and cold-blooded in the Pacific War.

Sources: 
1. Gregory Michno, Death on the Hellships (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2001), 19.
2. Linda Goetz Holmes, Unjust Enrichment: How Japan’s Companies Built Postwar Fortunes Using American POWs (Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books, 2001), 36. 
3. Holmes, Unjust Enrichment, 36
4. Holmes, Unjust Enrichment, 43.
5. Linda Goetz Holmes, Guests of the Emperor: The Secret History of Japan’s Mukden POW Camp (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2010), xii. 
6. Holmes, Guests of the Emperor, xiii.
7. “American POWs on Japanese Ships Take a Voyage into Hell,” Prologue Magazine, National Archives, last modified Winter 2003, https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2003/winter/hell-ships.
8. National Archives, “Voyage into Hell.”
9. National Archives, “Voyage into Hell.”
10.  Dow, Robert. Interview by Linda Goetz Holmes. Unjust Enrichment: 37.
11.  Dow, Robert. Interview by Linda Goetz Holmes. Unjust Enrichment: 37.
12.  Dow, Robert. Interview by Linda Goetz Holmes. Unjust Enrichment: 37.
13. Woody, Tom. Interview by Linda Goetz Holmes. Unjust Enrichment: 42.
14. Woody, Tom. Interview by Linda Goetz Holmes. Unjust Enrichment: 42.