Perilous sea voyages for Australian POWs in World War II

Transport by sea

The ship was like a wreck; ragged, rusted gear, broken casting, bits of plating and junk, winch cylinders almost rusted through, great cankers of rust as if the ship had leprosy, the lagging of the steamlines rotted and gapped like ulcered limbs. Because of the crowding, some of the men had found billets among the heaps of coal ... they were quite exposed to the rain.

[Ray Parkin, The sword and the blossom, p 75.]

The Japanese transported prisoners by sea to move them to POW camps or to get them to work sites around South-East Asia and northern Asia.

Many of those captured in places like Singapore and Java, for example, were shipped in 1942 and 1943 to construct the Burma-Thailand Railway.

More than 4,000 Australians were sent to POW camps in Japan.

Many others were transported to Japanese-held territories, such as:

• Borneo
• Formosa (now Taiwan), China and Korea.

The ships that transported prisoners were cramped, old, dirty and in poor repair. Many of them were cargo vessels that were only roughly converted into troop transports.

POWs were crammed into every available space in the holds. They were forced to sit and sleep on crudely constructed and small wooden bunks.

With poor ventilation in the holds, the atmosphere soon became stiflingly hot and putrid. While at times, the POWs were allowed to sit on the deck, they were forced into the holds at night. On some ships, they were not allowed to go up on deck at all.

Conditions in the holds below decks became foul because many POWs were suffering from dysentery. Toilets were little more than wooden structures suspended over the edge of the ship. These were inadequate for the prisoners' needs. They also became incredibly dangerous on rough seas.

The poor food aboard the ships exacerbated the POWs' suffering. They usually received only rice and watery stew.

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Attacks on Japanese shipping

Although the United States (US) offensive against Japanese shipping took time to gather momentum, early Pacific War voyages were subject to attack.

On 15 January 1943, Allied aircraft attacked a 2-ship convoy carrying Australian and Dutch prisoners. Some 39 Dutch prisoners died when Nichimei Maru was sunk. Moji Maru was damaged in the attack.

From 1943 onward, as the Allies gained the initiative in the Pacific, increasing numbers of Japanese ships were sunk. The remains of some victims were found in the Indian Ocean off Tavoy, Burma (now Myanmar), on 31 May 1943.

The loss of life among POWs being transported by ship was staggering. Despite the efforts of the International Committee of the Red Cross, none of the enemy powers in World War II agreed to mark ships carrying prisoners. They assumed their enemies could not be trusted and would use POWs as cover to move contraband goods.

The US also believed that its highest priority was to sink Japanese shipping, regardless of the risk to POWs, and so bring an end to the war as quickly as possible.

The Japanese did not provide life vests or rafts for POWs. Locked in the holds during an attack, the prisoners were almost certainly doomed if their ship was hit.

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Not surprisingly, prisoners felt mixed emotions during these sea voyages. Some rejoiced at the sinking of Japanese ships and the superiority of the Allies that this represented. Others, having experienced the horrors of Burma and Thailand, approached the dangers of their voyages with resignation.

Corporal Roy Whitecross, bound for Japan on the ocean liner MV Awa Maru, remembered an attack by US submarines:

In the hold there was silence and a deep calm. No man deluded himself about his chances of escaping if a torpedo struck the ship. Five hundred men and one steel door, which would have to be opened anyway... So this was it. No fuss, no shouting. Just quiet resignation.

[RH Whitecross, Slaves of the son of heaven, p 161.]

Whitecross survived, but many others did not.

In September 1944, when the SS Rakuyo Maru was sunk by a US submarine, 543 of the 649 Australians on board died. Of the rest, 80 were picked up by the US vessel. The rest were rescued by Japanese ships.

It was from these exhausted men who were coated in oil, rescued from the Rakuyo Maru, that the world first learned of the terrible experiences of Allied POWs on the Burma-Thailand Railway.

Similarly, the loss of life was immense when the submarine USS Sturgeon sank the MV Montevideo Maru on the morning of 1 July 1942. The Japanese ship was transporting more than 1,000 POWs and civilians from New Britain to Hainan after the fall of Rabaul. None of the Allied personnel on board survived.

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