Hell Ship

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The term Hell Ship refers to any of the ships used by the Imperial Japanese Navy to transport Allied prisoners of war out of the Philippines, Hong Kong and Singapore during World War II. The POWs would be taken to Japan, Taiwan, Manchuria, or Korea to be used as forced labor. In Japanese, they are now known as Jigoku sen (地獄船), with the same meaning.

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, unaware of their real purpose.

The Oryoku-maru was a 15,000-ton luxury liner that the Japanese used to try to transport 1,618 survivors of the Bataan Death March. It left Manila on December 14, 1944, and the next day was mistakenly bombed and strafed by American planes. 318 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.^[1]

The Junyō Maru was the worst of these, where 5,640 out of 6,520 POWs died after being sunk.