What REALLY Happened on the Hell Ships From Bataan — POWs Locked Below Deck, Bombed by Their Own
On October 24th, 1944, an American submarine fired a torpedo into the hull of a Japanese freighter called the Arisan Maru in the waters between the Philippines and Formosa. The submarine crew had no way of knowing what was inside the ship. Inside the ship were 1,781 American prisoners of war, men who had survived the Bataan Death March, the starvation camps at Cabanatuan, and years of captivity in the Philippines.
When the torpedo struck, the Japanese crew abandoned ship. They did not unlock the holds. The prisoners broke free on their own. They escaped the sinking vessel into the open sea. The Japanese destroyers that arrived to rescue survivors picked up their own men. They left the Americans in the water. Of the 1,781 prisoners aboard, nine survived.
It was the greatest single loss of American life at sea in the history of the United States. The Arisan Maru was not unique. It was one of approximately 134 Japanese transport ships used during the Second World War to move Allied prisoners of war from the territories where they had been captured to the mines, factories, and shipyards of Japan, Manchuria, Korea, and Formosa.
The prisoners called them hell ships, and the name was precise. Across the war, an estimated 126,000 Allied prisoners were transported on these vessels. Approximately 21,000 of them died, killed by suffocation, dehydration, and disease in the holds, or killed by torpedoes and bombs from their own navies and air forces that did not know they were aboard.
40% of all American POW deaths in the Pacific Theater occurred on the hell ships or in their immediate aftermath. The ships were unmarked. Under the Geneva Convention, vessels carrying prisoners of war were required to display Red Cross insignia. Japan ignored this requirement entirely. The result was a catastrophe of identification.
Allied submarines patrolling the South China Sea and the Philippine Archipelago sank ships carrying their own countrymen and the men in the holds died calling out in English to pilots who could not hear them. The hell ship system began in 1942, shortly after the fall of the Philippines and the surrender of Allied forces across Southeast Asia.
Japan’s war economy required labor, bodies to work in coal mines on Kyushu, in steel mills in Osaka, in shipyards in Yokohama, and in factories throughout the home islands. The prisoners captured at Bataan, Corregidor, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies were the supply. The ships used were merchant freighters, cargo vessels designed to carry rice, coal, sugar, and livestock.
They were not designed for human transport. They were not modified for human transport. The holds that had carried freight were simply filled with men. The Japanese military regarded this as efficient. The prisoners regarded it as a death sentence. The loading process followed a pattern that survivors described with remarkable consistency across dozens of different ships and voyages.
The prisoners were marched to a port, Manila, Singapore, Rangoon, or one of a dozen smaller harbors across the occupied territories. They were held on the dock side, sometimes for days without shade, food, or water. Then, they were ordered into the holds. The holds were accessed by ladders or, in some cases, by being pushed through hatches.
The men were packed standing, shoulder to shoulder, chest to back, with no room to sit, no room to lie down, and no room to move. The hatches were then closed. In some cases, they were sealed with wooden covers and tarpaulins. Ventilation was minimal or non-existent. The temperature in the holds in the tropics in metal hulled ships with hundreds of bodies generating heat exceeded 120° Fahrenheit.
There was no water. There was no food. There were no latrines. The men stood in darkness in their own waste breathing air that grew thinner with every hour. The voyages lasted anywhere from days to weeks depending on the route, the weather, and whether the convoy was attacked. Before we continue, if this story matters to you, consider subscribing.
Every video on this channel follows a prisoner of war from capture to captivity to liberation or the absence of liberation. And if your family has a POW story, a grandfather who was loaded onto a ship in Manila, an uncle who never arrived in Japan, a father who came home and never spoke of the ocean, write it down.
That story may be the only record that exists. Now, back to the holds. What happened inside the holds of the hell ships represents one of the most extreme environments of human suffering in the Second World War. The accounts of survivors are consistent across dozens of ships and voyages, and they describe conditions that test the limits of documentary restraint.
The heat was the first killer. Metal hulled ships in tropical waters absorbed the sun’s energy and radiated it inward. With hundreds of bodies generating additional heat in an unventilated space, temperatures in the holds routinely exceeded 50° C. Men stripped naked. Men lost consciousness. Men died standing up held in place by the bodies around them unable to fall because there was no room to fall.
The thirst was the second killer. In some holds, the Japanese lowered a single bucket of water for hundreds of men. In others, there was no water at all. Dehydration in tropical heat kills within days. Men drank their own urine. Men licked condensation from the metal walls. Men fought each other for access to the bucket when it appeared.
The fights were not about violence. They were about survival. And survival in the holds was measured in swallows of water. The air was the third killer. With the hatches sealed and no ventilation, the oxygen in the holds was consumed by the men who breathed it. Carbon dioxide accumulated. Men gasped. Men hyperventilated.
Men suffocated in a space that still technically contained air, but not enough of it. In the holds of the Oryoku Maru, survivors reported that men who were standing at the center of the hold, farthest from the hatches and any residual air, died first. Disease was the fourth killer. Dysentery spread through the holds within hours.
The men had no access to latrines. The floor of the hold became a layer of human waste. In ships that had previously carried livestock, the holds were encrusted with manure that the Japanese had not cleaned before loading the prisoners. Cholera, malaria, and tropical infections compounded the dysentery.
Men died of diseases that would have been treatable on land. But in the hold, there was no medicine, no doctor, and no room to move. The most documented hell ship voyage was that of the Oryoku Maru, a former luxury liner that had been converted into a military transport. On December 13th, 1944, 1,619 Allied prisoners of war, the vast majority American, most of them survivors of Bataan and Corregidor, were marched through the bombed-out streets of Manila to Pier 7 and loaded into the ship’s holds.
Japanese civilians, diplomats, and military personnel occupied the upper decks and passenger cabins. The prisoners were packed into three cargo holds below. The Oryoku Maru sailed from Manila Bay on the morning of December 14, hugging the coast of Bataan, the same peninsula where many of the prisoners had surrendered 2 and 1/2 years earlier.
That afternoon, American aircraft from the carrier USS Hornet spotted the unmarked convoy and attacked. The pilots had no way of knowing that the ship below them carried American prisoners. They saw a Japanese military transport. They did their job. The bombs hit the ship throughout the afternoon.
Approximately 270 prisoners were killed in the attacks. Some by bombs that penetrated the deck and exploded in the holds, others by shrapnel, and others by the fires that broke out above. The Japanese guards fired into the holds to prevent the prisoners from escaping to the upper decks. The prisoners sat in darkness as their own aircraft bombed them and their captors shot at them from above.
The Oryoku Maru was beached in Subic Bay on December 15. The surviving prisoners, approximately 1,300 men, were ordered off the ship and assembled on a tennis court at the Olongapo Naval Station. They sat in the open for 2 days without food or water while American aircraft continued to attack the harbor around them.
On December 27, the survivors were divided between two ships, the Enoura Maru and the Brazil Maru. Both had previously carried livestock. The holds were encrusted with animal manure. No attempt was made to clean them before the prisoners were loaded aboard. The Enoura Maru and the Brazil Maru sailed north from Subic Bay on December 27th, 1944, carrying the surviving prisoners toward Formosa.
The conditions in the holds were, if anything, worse than on the Oryoku Maru. The holds had not been cleaned of animal waste. The men were packed into spaces designed for cargo. There was almost no food. Men who had been wounded in the bombing of the Oryoku Maru received no medical treatment. They bled, developed infections, and died in the darkness beside men who could do nothing for them.
The convoy reached Takao Harbor in Formosa on New Year’s Day, 1945. The prisoners remained in the holds at anchor. On January 9, American aircraft from the USS Hornet, the same carrier whose planes had bombed the Oryoku Maru, attacked the harbor. A bomb penetrated the forward hold of the Enoura Maru. Approximately 330 prisoners were killed instantly.
The dead were removed from the hold over the following days and cremated on shore. The survivors were transferred to the Brazil Maru. The Brazil Maru departed Takao on January 14th, 1945 for the final leg of the voyage to Japan. The journey took 15 days. During those 15 days, conditions in the hold reached their absolute worst.
The cold increased as the ship moved north into winter waters. The prisoners, dressed in tropical clothing or naked, had no protection from temperatures that dropped below freezing. They had been starving for weeks. Many were delirious. Men died at a rate of 30 to 40 per day. The dead were passed up through the hatch and thrown overboard.
The Brazil Maru arrived at Moji, Japan on January 29th, 1945. Of the 1,619 men who had boarded the Oryoku Maru in Manila 47 days earlier, approximately 500 were still alive. Japanese medical personnel who received them were shocked at their condition. The most severe cases, 110 men, were sent to a military hospital in Kokura, where 73 died within a month.
Of the original 1,619, only approximately 264 survived the war. If the Oryoku Maru voyage was the most documented, the sinking of the Arisan Maru was the most devastating. On October 21st, 1944, 1,781 American prisoners of war, most of them survivors of Bataan, were loaded into the holds of the Arisan Maru at Manila.
The ship joined a 13-vessel convoy escorted by three destroyers and sailed north toward Formosa. On the afternoon of October 24, the convoy scattered after detecting American submarines. At approximately 5:00, a torpedo from the submarine USS Shark struck the Arisan Maru. The ship began to sink slowly. The Japanese crew abandoned ship, but did not open the holds.
The prisoners managed to break free on their own, climbing out of the holds as the ship listed and settled. Nearly all 1,781 prisoners escaped the sinking ship and entered the water. They clung to wreckage, debris, and improvised flotation. Japanese destroyers arrived. They rescued the Japanese survivors. They did not rescue the Americans.
They left the prisoners in the water and departed. As darkness fell, men who had survived the hold, survived the torpedo, and survived the sinking began to die in the water. They died of exposure, exhaustion, and dehydration. They died of wounds sustained during the sinking. They died because their bodies, weakened by years of captivity and starvation, could not sustain themselves in the open ocean. By morning, the sea was quiet.
Nine men survived. Five reached China in a lifeboat. Four were picked up by Japanese vessels, one of whom later died. The remaining eight survivors were the sole witnesses to the greatest single loss of American life at sea. 1,772 men died, not in combat, not in a prison camp, but in the ocean after being torpedoed by their own navy, abandoned by their captors, and left to the sea.
The Oryoku Maru and the Arisan Maru were the most documented hellship disasters, but they were not the only ones. Across the Pacific War, Allied submarines, aircraft, and warships sank dozens of Japanese transports carrying prisoners. Each sinking adding to a death toll that accumulated in silence. The Junyo Maru, torpedoed by the British submarine HMS Trade Wind on September 18th, 1944, off the coast of Sumatra, produced the single largest loss of life of any hellship sinking.
The ship carried approximately 2,300 Allied prisoners and 4,200 Asian forced laborers. When the torpedoes struck, the ship sank in 20 minutes. 5,620 men died, making it one of the deadliest maritime disasters in history. The Lisbon Maru, torpedoed by the American submarine USS Grouper on October 1st, 1942, carried approximately 2,000 British prisoners from Hong Kong to Japan.
When the ship began to sink, the Japanese battened down the hatches, sealing the prisoners inside. The prisoners broke free. Japanese guards shot men who climbed out of the holds or swam in the water. Chinese fishermen from the nearby Zhoushan Islands sailed out and rescued 384 survivors, an act of extraordinary civilian courage.
800 British prisoners died. The Shinyo Maru was torpedoed by USS Paddle on September 7th, 1944 off the coast of Mindanao. It carried 750 American prisoners. As the ship sank, Japanese guards machine-gunned prisoners who emerged from the holds or swam in the water. 687 died. 82 survived. The Rakuyo Maru, torpedoed by USS Sealion on September 12th, 1944, carried 1,317 Australian and British prisoners.
After the ship sank, the Japanese escort vessels rescued Japanese survivors and left the prisoners in the water. The following day, Japanese naval vessels returned and attacked the prisoners’ lifeboats. 350 men who had survived the sinking were killed in their lifeboats. Four days later, American submarines returned to the area and rescued 149 survivors from rafts.
The question that haunted the hell ship story during the war and haunts it still is whether the Allied forces knew that the ships they were sinking carried their own men. The answer is complicated, painful, and incomplete. Allied intelligence, particularly the code breakers who had cracked the Japanese naval codes, intercepted convoy movements, ship schedules, and sometimes cargo manifests.
In some cases, intelligence analysts knew or suspected that specific convoys contained prisoner transports. In the case of the Arisan Maru, decrypted messages had identified the convoy that included the ship. In the case of the Shinyo Maru, the State Department made inquiries about POW casualties shortly after the sinking, suggesting awareness.
The military leadership faced a strategic calculus. The submarine war against Japanese shipping was one of the most effective campaigns of the Pacific War. By 1944, American submarines were strangling Japan’s supply lines, sinking merchant vessels faster than Japan could build them. Every convoy that reached Japan delivered oil, steel, rubber, and raw materials that sustained the Japanese war machine.
The decision to attack convoys that might contain prisoner transports was weighed against the strategic value of interdicting those supplies. The decision was made, not explicitly, not in a single document, but through the accumulated weight of strategic priorities, that the submarine and air campaigns would not be paused or modified to protect ships that might carry prisoners. The ships were unmarked.
The responsibility for marking them under the Geneva Convention lay with Japan. The deaths of Allied prisoners on Allied torpedoes were, in the cold logic of war, the fault of the nation that had failed to mark the ships, not the nation that had sunk them. This logic was legally sound. It was strategically rational.
And it was no comfort to the men in the holds. The men who survived the hell ships arrived in Japan broken in ways that even the camps had not broken them. They had been starved, dehydrated, suffocated, bombed by their own forces, and left in the water to die. Many weighed less than 80 lb. Many could not walk.
Many had lost the ability to speak coherently. They were sent to forced labor camps across Japan, coal mines, shipyards, and factories. They worked through the winter of 1944 to 1945, the final months of the war, in conditions that continued to kill. The men who had survived the Oryoku Maru voyage, the 264 who remained from the original 1,619, were scattered across labor camps on Kyushu and Honshu.
Some died of starvation in the final weeks of the war. Some died of disease. Some died of injuries sustained in the holds or the bombings. The war ended before the hell ships could kill the last of them. When Japan surrendered in August 1945, the survivors were liberated by American forces.
They were flown to hospitals in the Philippines and Hawaii and on the American mainland. They were given medical care that documented damage beyond what most doctors had seen. Bodies that had been subjected to a sequence of trauma that read like a medical textbook of extremes. Starvation, dehydration, tropical disease, blast injuries, immersion, hypothermia, and sustained psychological stress.
The survivors were debriefed extensively. Their testimonies formed the basis of war crimes investigations into the hell ship system. Some of these testimonies were used in the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. Japanese officers responsible for the prisoner transport system were charged. Some were convicted. The system itself, the decision to transport prisoners in unmarked, unsealed, unventilated cargo holds without food, water, or sanitation was documented as a violation of the Geneva Convention.
Of the approximately 126,000 Allied prisoners of war transported on Japanese hell ships during the Second World War, approximately 20,000 died. They died in the holds of heat, thirst, suffocation, and disease. They died in the water, torpedoed by their own submarines, bombed by their own aircraft, and abandoned by their captors.
They died on shore of injuries sustained in the holds and the bombings. And they died in Japan in the mines and factories where they were sent to work after the voyage that should have killed them. The ships are gone. Most were sunk during the war or scrapped after it. The Oryoku Maru lies on the bottom of Subic Bay. The Oryoku Maru is somewhere in the South China Sea.
The Junyo Maru is off the coast of Sumatra. The Lisbon Maru was located off the Zhoushan Islands in 2022. These wrecks are graves. 21,000 men are scattered across the floor of the Pacific. Men whose names are carved on memorials in Manila, in Canberra, in London, and in Washington, but whose remains will never be recovered. The survivors carried the holds with them.
The darkness, the heat, the thirst, the sound of bombs hitting the deck above them, the feel of bodies pressing against them, the knowledge that their own forces were killing them. These things did not end when the hatch opened. Many survivors never boarded a ship again. Some could not tolerate enclosed spaces.
Some could not tolerate darkness. Some could not tolerate heat. The hell ships had taught their bodies that the world could become a hold at any moment, sealed, suffocating, and beyond rescue. What remains is not a war story. It is a captivity story. And in this case, it is a story about what happens when prisoners are moved from one captivity to another through a space that was worse than either.
The holds of the hell ships were not camps. They were not prisons. They were transit, a passage between one form of suffering and another. And in that passage, 21,000 men died, many of them killed by the very forces that were fighting to free them. If this channel should continue documenting what happened to the prisoners of war, subscribe.
Most of these men left no record, no diary, no memoir, no interview. They came home and said nothing. Or they didn’t come home at all. We document the ones we can still find while the evidence remains.
