During World War II, 70,000 or more Allied prisoners of war and conscripted Asian laborers were moved in Japanese merchant ships across the vast expanse of the occupied East. These vessels were called 'hell ships, and with good reason. POWs and slave laborers were crammed into stinking holds, filthy with coal dust, congealed sugar syrup and horse manure left over from previous voyages. Without water, or nearly so, sick, abused and neglected, they baked in unimaginable heat inside their steel prisons.

Many died. Some went mad. Others were murdered. Some of the cruelty they experienced was extraordinary even for prisoners of the Japanese. On one ship jammed with prisoners in blazing heat, the water lowered into the holds was far too little and, one POW remembered, foul and polluted, covered with a thick, greenish scum. Two more containers sent down from the deck contained only seawater and urine. You are bred like rats, the ship's interpreter sneered, and you will die like rats.

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Something on the order of 62,000 prisoners were moved by 56 ships. As many as 22,000 perished from murder, starvation, sickness and neglect–or were killed unknowingly by their friends, since Japanese prison ships did not display the red cross required by the Geneva Convention when prisoners were being transported. That callous act made the jammed freighters targets for any Allied aircraft or submarine, and no pilot or sub skipper could know that his quarry carried men of his own or Allied nations. Arisan Maru, for example, was torpedoed east of Hong Kong in October 1944 by an American submarine–either Snook or Shark (neither boat returned from that patrol). Of about 1,800 POWs on board Arisan Maru, only eight survived, five of whom, naked and emaciated, managed to find their way to freedom in China.

Oryoku Maru was bombed and sunk by American aircraft off the Philippines' Bataan Peninsula in mid-December 1944. On board were more than 1,600 American POWs, about 1,340 of whom lived through the ordeal. The survivors were then split up between Brazil Maru and Enoura Maru, which carried about 1,000. Both ships sailed for Japan via Takao Harbor, Formosa, where they were attacked again by U.S. planes. Enoura Maru went down, taking with her a large, undetermined number of prisoners.

Fuku Maru was sunk by U.S. Navy aircraft in Subic Bay, in the Philippines, during September 1944, killing more than 1,200 British and Dutch prisoners. Sixty-three men survived, but for them there was more horror to come: They were transferred to the ill-fated Oryoku Maru. Two more prison ships, known to history only as PS 3 and PS 4, were sunk by Allied forces, the first bombed in Manila Bay, the second torpedoed between Hong Kong and Formosa. Between them, some 2,700 prisoners were killed.

Kachidoki Maru, torpedoed by USS Pampanito off Hainan Island, took about 400 British POWs to the bottom with her, and an unknown number more died when HMS Truculent sank Harukiku Maru in the Strait of Malacca. A total of 1,159 American and British prisoners perished when USS Sealion sent Rokyo Maru to the bottom near Hainan Island in September 1944, and USS Paddlefish sank Shiniyo Maru off Mindanao in the same month, killing nearly 700 more Americans. Prisoners trying to escape from the sinking Shiniyo Maru were shot by the Japanese guards as the Americans struggled from the holds or in the water. And Lisbon Maru, torpedoed by USS Grouper in October 1944, went down with another 846 POWs, the only bright memory being an unarmed rush by men of the Middlesex Regiment, who overran and killed several Japanese sentries assigned to keep the prisoners cooped up in the holds of the sinking ship.

As tragic as the losses were on board Arisan Maru, Shiniyo Maru and the others, as ugly as Japanese indifference and cruelty were on those vessels, they were not the worst tragedy among the thousands of POW deaths from friendly fire. That distinction belongs to the sinking, in October 1944, of Junyo Maru.

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