Launching of SS Arisan Maru

Launching of SS Arisan Maru (Wikimedia Commons)

by Rona Simmons

In 1943, the Japanese began emptying their Philippine prison camps and shipping able-bodied POWs to the home islands or other Japanese-controlled territories. The country’s shipyards, wharves, coal, copper, and nickel mines, steelworks, and road building, and wood cutting operations were suffering a severe shortage of manpower and needed workers to feed the nation’s war effort. The trove of prisoners of war offered the perfect solution.

The Japanese herded the prisoners into groups of a hundred and sent them to Manila. There, the prisoners sat or hours in the tropical sun without food or water,. Finally, the guards rousted the men and pushed and prodded them into a waiting ship’s hold until there was no room to sit or stand. Who first coined the name for the prisoner’s ship is unknown, but soon the tens of thousands of men transported in them recognized and knew the horrors the term  hellship represented.

Lost, with countless Japanese records destroyed at the end of the war, is the precise number of ships, voyages, prisoners transported, and prisoners who died during transit. By some estimates, however, well over fifty ships and perhaps as many as one hundred crisscrossed the South Pacific with as many as 68,000 prisoners in their cargo holds. Some 22,000 men are believed to have perished during these voyages.

The Japanese freighter Arisan Maru, was one of those hellships. On October 10, 1944, she stood at anchor in the Manila port preparing to take aboard 1,800 American prisoners, most of whom came from Camp Cabanatuan. Of those the Japanese forced aboard, more than half had served in the US Army’s Coast Artillery and Infantry Regiments and the Army Air Corps. The other half were Marines, hospital and medical staff, men from US Navy ships, including the Canopus, Tanager, Pigeon, Finch, and the Napa, and one hundred civilians.

As the prisoners entered the hold designed to accommodate four or five hundred people, they clambered into makeshift bunks or were left standing with no room to sit or lie down. They stood or sat slumped against each other. Weakened and emaciated from dysentery and with little or no access to a handful of five-gallon oil cans that served as latrines, their excrement soon covered the floors. Once all were on board, the crew closed and locked the hatches. Darkness blanketed the hold. The lack of light was uncomfortable and the stench was all but unbearable, but when temperatures soared to over one hundred degrees, the situation turned deadly.

The Arisan Maru departed Manila on October 12. Based on the snippets of information gleaned from their guards or overheard in conversations, the prisoners guessed they were destined for labor camps in Japan or China.

The already wretched conditions in the hold grew even more intolerable. Some men developed heat blisters and collapsed from heat exhaustion. Others moaned and screamed in agony from the lack of food and water, and some went mad.

On October 23, the eleventh day, although unbeknownst to the prisoners below, radios crackled across the convoy. In their path through the Bashi Channel, two hundred miles west of Luzon, convoy defenses had detected a wolfpack of eight Allied submarines lying in wait.

At 5:24 p.m., the wolfpack’s leader, the USS Sawfish (SS-276) attacked. The ship’s logs recorded the sinking of a large cargo or transport—later identified by Japanese records as the Kimikawa Maru, a seaplane tender. Fearing more attacks, the convoy scattered, each ship proceeding toward Formosa at its own pace.

Throughout the night, a classic sea battle raged. Convoy escorts chased the pack and deployed a series of depth charges, only to have the submarines escape, speed away, and then return to make another attack. The encounter was a devastating loss for the Japanese, leaving a total of eight ships lying at the bottom of the sea.

Making only seven to eight miles per hour, the Arisan Maru trailed the former convoy through the Bashi Channel. For the moment, she had escaped detection.

As the number of prisoners dying aboard the Arisan Maru soared, the crew allowed their charges to take shifts on deck and to have water and a cup of rice a day.

Temperatures in the region reached ninety-five degrees despite a partial cloud cover.  Inside the holds, the temperature climbed well above that mark.

The men stripped themselves of shirts and pants, wore only skivvies or loincloths, or went naked. The sides of the hull became hot to the touch, nearly searing the skin of any man inadvertently pressed against the metal. Sweat, such as the men could produce having consumed little more than a few sips of water daily, poured from their foreheads, chests, and backs. Most stood pressed against each other, back to belly. One man’s sweat was indistinguishable from another’s. One man’s urine and feces, like another’s, pooled on the floor. Perhaps the semi-darkness was a godsend.

The shrieks of those who were going mad or had already done so continued, their agony weighing increasingly heavy on those who clung to the threads of their sanity. To wall themselves off from the most desperate, friends chatted in raised voices to be heard over the din. Their conversations ranged widely, from their family back home to their sweethearts, from their favorite foods to what they would do first when they returned, if they returned. They made solemn pledges to each other to contact their loved ones should one or the other friend survive.

Just before five o’clock on October 24, shouts and the slap of dozens of pairs of feet sounded above their heads.

Sgt. Calvin R. Graef, one of a group of prisoners on deck preparing the evening meal, was an eyewitness to the commotion. As several of the Japanese crew ran toward the bow, he risked a glance over the side of the ship where a series of ripples in the water outlined the path of a torpedo headed toward the stern. It missed, but seconds later another came through the water aiming for the bow. “It missed by inches,” he said..

In the confusion, the Japanese herded the men on deck together and shoved them back into the hold. There, they relayed the news of what was occurring top side. Excitement spread across the throng of desperate souls. All had prayed for their deliverance, be it by bomb or torpedo, even if by the hands of their own military, and now their prayers seemed to be answered.

In minutes, a third torpedo struck the hull on the starboard side, ripping into the empty number- three hold.. Pvt. Anton Cichy remembered shouts of “Hit her again!”. Sea water flooded in and spread in an instant to the holds containing the prisoners.

Men crowded near the makeshift stairs in the number-two hold and at the center of the number-one hold, waiting for the hatches to open.

Shortly the hatch cover to the number-one hold flew back. Daylight flooded the compartment, momentarily blinding the men directly below. A guard reached down, drew his knife and cut the rope escape ladder, dropping the ends into the hold.  The hatch slammed shut and  darkness returned.

Panic ensued and a mass of arms and legs and torsos scrambled over each other to gain purchase. A few prisoners managed to shinny up a stanchion, exit the hold, and find two ropes on the ship’s deck. They lowered one end of each of the ropes into the hold, allowing the prisoners below to reattach the escpe ladder. Shortly, six hundred prisoners made their way out of the hold and onto the deck.

To their surprise and relief, the expected beating or execution from the Japanese guards did not materialize. Most of the crew were nowhere to be seen. The few that remained, although armed, were too busy trying to lower themselves into lifeboats to be bothered with the escaping prisoners.

Soon, the pressure of the intruding seawater forced the hull to expand. With a crack of splitting timbers the stern broke away, but both the stern and the ship’s main section remained afloat. Still, sensing the end was near, a few dozen men chose to enter the water and then swam toward the nearest of the circling Japanese vessels.

The men on deck watched as the Japanese sailors aboard the approaching ship fired shots toward the swimmers, pushed the men away with the butts of long poles, or beat the nearest with clubs. Despite the dire circumstances of their own ship sinking lower in the water with every passing moment and now the realization the circling Japanese vessels would not rescue them, a sense of freedom washed over the prisoners.

In the galley, vats of food the crew had been preparing for their evening meal sat untouched, the aroma calling to the men’s hunger and thirst. They had consumed only a few sips of water and a handful of rice each day in the hold, they stuffed their throats with whatever they could gather by bowl, cup, spoon, or bare hands. They drank as much as they could swallow in large gulps from the vats of soup and the water barrels, slaking weeks of agonizing thirst. Once their initial pangs of hunger subsided, those who could not swim and others who were fearful of entering the water  simply wandered across the crowded deck and peered out at the ships on the sea and the distant and vacant horizon.

The Japanese destroyers Take and Harukaze that had been sailing with the convoy came to avenge the Arisan Maru’s destruction. They found and attacked the Allied submarine they believed had released its torpedoes on the freighter. With the submarine dispatched, the destroyers went about rescuing the men in the water—that is, the Japanese men in the water.

Then the ship sank, forcing everyone into the sea. As darkness fell, men called out to each other or blew their GI whistles. And, weakened by their long captivity, lack of food and water, and wounds, the men in the water began to die.

Soon the calls turned to moans and then to silence save for the sound of the crashing of waves in what was reported as rough and cold seas.  Of all the Americans who had awoken that morning in the hold of the hellship, only nine survived.

Whether it was the USS Snook (SS-279) or the USS Shark (SS-314) that attacked the Arisan Maru is unknown. Regardless, neither submarine was blamed for the tragic loss of life. The hellship, like other hellships, had been sailing without white crosses or other markings to show she was carrying prisoners.

Nightfall brought no relief to the men in the water. The cold wind blew stiffer and the ocean swells continued to chop, buffeting the men, sapping their last ounce of strength, and dashing any hope of survival to which any of them still clung. Most who had gone into the water in the aftermath of the attack on the hellship had by now slipped below the surface.

Men lucky enough to have grabbed a life vest earlier wore them to keep afloat in the high, wind-whipped sea.  The rest of them relied on flotsam scattered across the water, wooden planks from the ship’s deck and sections of storage compartments, hatch covers, bamboo poles, and crates.

Nine men miraculously survived the sinking, four clung to flotsam in the water around them or made small rafts and battled ocean swells and frigid temperatures throughout the night. They were later pulled from the water by the Japanese, only to be transported to Japan and re-incarcerated. The other five found an abandoned lifeboat and sailed for three days toward mainland China. They were rescued by Chinese sailors who helped them reach land and then friendly territory. Their ordeal, journey home, and lives after the war are also described in No Average Day.

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