Let your heart be not faint

Now the journey’s begun;

There is One who still beckons to you.

—Joseph Fielding Smith, “Does the Journey Seem Long?”

At this point in the story, it is helpful to note two developments in the war in the Pacific during 1943 and 1944 that had important consequences for POWs in the Philippines. From the beginning of the war in 1942, the Japanese had been transporting POWs to Japan to work in Japanese industries, but in 1944 there was an extraordinary increase in the movement of POWs from the Philippines.

By 1944, the war wasn’t going well for the Japanese, and the Americans were preparing to launch their invasion of the Philippines. Not only did the Japanese continue to need the POWs in Japan due to the increasing labor shortages at important industrial facilities; they also wanted to avoid the liberation of these POWs by the advancing US forces.[1] They may have also wanted them as hostages in the event of an Allied invasion of Japan. In 1944 the Japanese began mass evacuations of POWs from the Philippines.[2] The Latter-day Saint POWs at Dapecol would be swept up in these mass evacuations.

To transport the POWs to camps in Japan or camps closer to Japan, such as in Korea or Taiwan (Formosa), the Japanese herded the POWs by the hundreds into old merchant vessels, typically old bulk cargo vessels. In some of the ships, crude wooden ledges had been added in the cargo holds to increase the capacity for this human cargo.[3] These POW transport ships justifiably earned the epithet “hell ships.”

Most of the Latter-day Saint POWs had endured voyages on Japanese transport ships previously, either on the route from Cabanatuan to Davao or for those from Camp Casisang along the Mindanao coast to Davao. While those voyages were clearly miserable, what these prisoners would now endure was truly horrific. POWs, including those who had endured the Bataan Death March and the deprivations of Camp O’Donnell, Cabanatuan and Dapecol, described the ordeal in the hell ships as the worst experience of the war.[4]

POWs by the hundreds were squeezed into the holds of these ships, where they would remain for days with no food or water, crammed together in almost complete darkness with little air and in extreme heat. Not surprisingly, especially when deprived of water and oxygen, some began to go crazy. A survivor of a hell ship voyage later reported, “The prisoners had been so crowded in these other holds that they couldn’t even get air to breathe. They went crazy, cut and bit each other through the arms and legs and sucked their blood. In order to keep from being murdered, many had to climb the ladders and were promptly shot by guards. Between twenty and thirty prisoners had died of suffocation or were murdered during the night.”[5]

Sergeant Arthur Baclawski, Brown’s former tent mate from Fort Bliss, described the scene in the hold of these hell ships: “Men were yelling and screaming. It was a seething mass of men moving around like Jell-O. Some climbed the walls and hung on the struts. One preached all night. In the morning, when they pulled the canvas off, a lot were unconscious. Eight were dead.”[6]

Many, if not most, of the POWs were sick, often with dysentery, which further exacerbated the situation. Their only latrine was a five-gallon bucket sitting in the middle of the hold. When circumstances and the Japanese permitted, the prisoners pulled it up once a day to be emptied. For sick POWs with uncontrollable bowels, crawling over others crammed in the holds in order to try to reach the bucket, often unsuccessfully, was an especially difficult and degrading experience, in addition to the filth and discomfort of the disease.[7]

For perspective, about fifty thousand POWs were transported on those hell ships, and about twenty-one thousand of them died, a staggering death rate of more than 40 percent. In comparison, during the entire war in the Pacific, about twenty thousand US Marines died. As one author noted, “Clearly, it was deadlier to be a POW on a Japanese ship than to be a U.S. Marine fighting them.”[8] The greatest danger to these POWs aboard these hell ships, however, was not the horrific conditions; the absence of adequate food, water, air, and basic sanitation; disease; or even the brutality of the Japanese guards. Rather, their greatest danger was the US Navy.

A major objective of the US war effort was the destruction of Japanese merchant shipping, the marus, as the Japanese merchant and transport ships were called. Over the sea, the marus carried Japanese men and weapons to the fighting front and brought back from the “Greater East Asia Co Prosperity Sphere” essential raw materials, making the marus Japan’s essential life support system.[9] In the early years of the war, US attacks on Japanese shipping had been largely ineffective. Yet, by late 1943, US Navy submarines were then having extraordinary success in attacking the Japanese merchant fleet.[10] How could that be possible? What had changed?

While not diminishing the courage, skill, and heroism of the submarine crews or the importance of the improvements in tactics and the accuracy and reliability of the US torpedoes, it was actually quite easy. The United States simply listened while the Japanese unknowingly told them where the ships were and the routes they were going to take, along with the number of ships in a convoy, their names, cargo, and escorts.[11] In other words, in 1943 the United States had cracked the Japanese secret code used for the marus, and the Japanese were unaware of it.[12]

Intercepting the secret radio communications, decoding the messages, and managing all the information obtained about Japanese merchant ships and their convoys was part of a massive, but largely unseen, intelligence operation code-named Magic.[13] The intelligence operation and the information obtained in that operation were closely guarded secrets. Japanese messages were intercepted, translated, and transmitted to submarine commanders within minutes. However, historians combing through old submarine reports and logbooks find no indications of such. Captains had been ordered to remove any mention of such intelligence information in their diaries, reports, and logs.[14]

The ability to understand an enemy’s secret coded communications is, of course, an advantage of inestimable importance, but only as long as the enemy does not know—and the United States and its allies were careful and discriminating in the use of this intelligence so as not to tip off the Japanese.[15] Nevertheless, by 1944, nearly every US submarine operation in the Pacific was conducted with aid of intelligence obtained from Operation Magic, and on some nights, every submarine was engaged in missions based on such information.

With a truly unfortunate convergence of events, the year 1944, the high point of this mass transfer of POWs in the hellish holds of these aging Japanese marus, coincided with the time when US submarine attacks on such Japanese merchant ships were at their peak. It was a time one author described as the “massacre of the marus.”[16]

While immensely valuable to the Allies in defeating Japan, these intercepted messages, sadly, also spelled death for thousands of POWs. The Japanese military provided no identification of the POW ships, and the ships usually also held supplies, fuel, or ammunition, making them appear legitimate targets for US submarines and dive-bombers.[17] In addition to enduring the dark, sweltering, filthy, and claustrophobic conditions of these holds, these Latter-day Saint POWs from Dapecol would face the terror of their ship being attacked by Allied forces while helplessly trapped in those hellish holds.

Notes

[1] Michno, Death on the Hellships, 173.

[2] As early as October 1942, the Japanese had begun shipping POWs north to Manchuria and Japan, but the mass evacuation from Philippines came later. Cave, Beyond Courage, 288, 291n5.

[3] Michno, Death on the Hellships, 296–98.

[4] Michno, Death on the Hellships, 305–6.

[5] Lee A. Gladwin, “American POWs on Japanese Ships Take a Voyage into Hell,” Prologue Magazine 35, no. 4 (Winter 2003). The US National Archives and Records Administration, http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2003/winter/hell-ships-1.html (quoting John M. Jacobs). Such occurrences were reported on nearly every hell ship and were attributed to the lack of oxygen, causing the men to become crazed and unable to control their actions. Cave, Beyond Courage, 296n9.

[6] Cave, Beyond Courage, 295.

[7] Sneddon, Zero Ward, 81.

[8] Michno, Hellships, 282–83.

[9] W. J. Holmes, Double-Edged Secret: U.S. Naval Intelligence Operations in the Pacific during World War II (Annapolis, MD: United States Naval Institute, 1979), 129.

[10] Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese, 275.

[11] Ronald Lewin, The American Magic: Codes, Ciphers and the Defeat of Japan (New York City: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), 218–19.

[12] The Japanese used three major coding systems for secret communications. One, called Purple, was used for diplomatic messages. A second, called JN25, was used for military communications, and a third, called the maru code, was the code used for merchant shipping. The US effort to break the Japanese codes was based in Hawaii and led by a group known as the Fleet Radio Unit, Pacific, or FRUPac. Before the war, the United States had cracked the Purple diplomatic code and by 1942 had cracked the important JN25 code for military communications, but it wasn’t until early 1943 that they cracked the maru code. Holmes, Double-Edged Secrets, 126.

[13] See Gladwin, “American POWs on Japanese Ships.” For example, during January and February 1944, approximately 3,700 index cards were created in the ongoing effort to identify, describe, and locate the ships.

[14] Lewin, American Magic, 220; Michno, Hellships, 295–96.

[15] Holmes, Double-Edged Secrets, 128–29; Lewin, American Magic, 218; Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese, 285–86.

[16] Lewin, The American Magic, 213, 224–25; see Clark and Kowallis, “Fate of the Davao Penal Colony,” 111–12; Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese, 286.

[17] Michno, Hellships, 292–95. At times the Japanese did mark a ship as a POW transport, but they did so to protect their own troops then loaded on the ship. Springgay, “Davey,” 52. For its part, the United States had decided on unrestricted submarine warfare—attacking merchant ships without warning. Also, some argue that the United States did little through its spies on the waterfront and among guerillas in the hills to track the movement of POWs or to identify the ships on which POWs were loaded. Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese, 296–97.