Though like the wanderer,

The sun gone down,

Darkness be over me,

My rest a stone,

Yet in my dreams I’d be

Nearer, my God, to thee.

—Sarah F. Adams, “Nearer, My God, to Thee”

Davey had anticipated that if his letters were delivered, it meant his worst fears had been realized. But that was not quite true. Although Davey had experienced the Bataan Death March, the deprivations of several POW camps, and the brutality of his captors, as well as the miserable voyage on the Yashu Maru to Manila and starvation at Bilibid, this voyage would be worse. The Japanese hell ships are infamous among World War II historians and, when recounting the horrors of those ships, the voyage of the Oryoku Maru is considered the most horrific.[1]

Davey was among the 1,619 POWs that boarded that ship on December 13, 1944, for Japan.[2] Of those POWs, only about 425 would survive the voyage to Japan; of the survivors, 161 would arrive in such poor health that they would die within thirty days of their arrival. In other words, of the 1,619 POWs who boarded the ship in Manila, only 264 survived the ordeal with any chance of returning home.[3] With faith and prayers, and as foreseen in a dream, Davey would be among those survivors.

Voyage of the Oryoku Maru

Late in the morning of December 13, Davey and the other POWs, including Dapecol POWs Dwayne Alder, Joseph Webb, Carlyle Ricks, and James Wilstead from Utah, were marched about four kilometers through the bombed-out remains of Manila to Pier 7. As they looked out across the bay, they could see the results of the destruction they had only heard about in the walled prison—a ghostly scene of once-great warships and transports now just wrecked hulks littering the bay, listing and half submerged. There were doubtless more unseen below the surface.[4]

The Allied bombing had stopped for a few weeks, and the Japanese had been able to bring in a transport ship. At first glance, the ship they were to board was an encouraging sight. It was not the typical old, slow freighter; this ship, the Oryoku Maru, was a smaller and faster former luxury passenger ship. Although crowded, the ship could accommodate the 1,619 POWs in the first- and second-class passenger areas of the upper decks.[5] That, however, was not where these POWs were headed.

The Japanese were also evacuating hundreds of civilians and diplomatic personnel and their families. These were loaded into the upper decks.[6] The POWs were crammed thirty feet down into the cargo holds of the ship. Forced down a steep ladder, the POWs were met at the bottom by four guards, one with a sword and the others with brooms, who pushed the POWs back tighter and tighter into the hold. Ledges had been constructed out from the sides of the hull to increase capacity. With the ledges added, the hold could accommodate about 250, but with each barely having room to lie down simultaneously. The Japanese, however, were now stuffing about 800 men into that hold.[7]

Not only cramped and claustrophobic, the hold was also hot—about 120 degrees—and made worse by the body heat of the crowded, sweaty men. There was no ventilation other than the hatch at the top when it was open. They were enclosed on all sides by thick-plated steel, heated by the outside sun and creating for the POWs the sensation of being trapped in an oven. The POWs were also without food and, more importantly, water. Late that afternoon, the ship finally left the dock and headed cautiously out of the bay.

That night was, for Davey and likely every other POW on that ship, the worst night of their lives. The air in the hold was stagnant with insufficient oxygen. Vision was impossible in the absolute darkness. Sounds were amplified, and fights broke out. When men were deprived of water and then oxygen in these dark and claustrophobic conditions, they reacted in different ways. Some drank their own urine. Others passed out asleep, and others went insane. Throughout the night, men were crying out hysterically for water and air and at each other.[8]

In his official report, one colonel wrote of the hellish conditions aboard that ship, “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.”[9]

It wasn’t until the dim light of the next morning that the POWs could fully appreciate what had happened that night. Fifty had died during the night, most from the heat and suffocation. Some died from being trampled. Some had been killed by fellow prisoners who in their oxygen- and water-deprived lunacy had decided to quench their thirst with someone else’s blood. Some were killed by fellow POWs to keep them from killing others in their frenzy.[10]

Davey had a strong but not overly aggressive personality, which actually served him well on the ship. He managed to slip to the back of the hold, away from the hatch. Near the hatch, the only source of fresh air, was the favored place and where most of the commotion was occurring. But in the back of the hold, Davey avoided being caught up in the hysteria, and while away from the commotion, he was better able to stay calm, reducing his body’s need for oxygen. In addition, at the back, he was able to lick condensation from the sides of the hold, providing little—but nonetheless precious—hydration.[11]

That next morning, as the Japanese convoy with the Oryoku Maru emerged from Manila Bay and cautiously sailed along the Bataan coast, the POWs heard a sound they had not heard for the last two weeks: the sound of attacking American planes.[12] Intelligence alerts from Operation Magic had gone out advising US ship commanders to watch for enemy ships coming out of Manila Bay.[13] Although the Oryoku Maru was not hit by American bombs, it was strafed and its antiaircraft guns were destroyed. It also lost a steering rudder. The ship took shelter in Subic Bay, on the west coast of Luzon, where it was run aground.

Down in the holds, the POWs could hear the chaos and confusion among the Japanese up on deck. The American doctors and medics were summoned up to care for wounded Japanese. There they saw a macabre scene of hundreds of Japanese soldiers and civilians dead; more were wounded. While the Allied bombs had missed the ship, the Allied planes had mercilessly strafed the ship. The POWs, crammed below in the bowels of the ship, were largely protected from the strafing fire. There was no such protection in the upper decks. Scores of Japanese civilians who had been lodged in the first-class section were found huddled together, dead.[14] The voyage had lasted less than twenty-four hours and had gone nowhere.

The Japanese civilians and troops were offloaded. The POWs were left on the ship and spent another harrowing night in the holds. As anticipated, the carrier planes attacked again the next morning. Hearing the sound of the approaching American planes, the Japanese ordered the POWs on deck to be seen by the American planes. Seeing the white Americans wearing only G-strings and waving frantically, the American pilots pulled out of their bombing dives, dipped the wings of their planes in recognition, and flew past without bombing the ship.[15]

On December 15, 1944, aircraft from the USS Hornet attacked the Oryoku Maru. This is a US Navy photo taken from a reconnaissance plane shortly after the attack. The splashes in the water below the burning Oryoku Maru are surviving POWs swimming to shore. Courtesy of the United States Navy.

The disabled ship had been run aground about a mile or so off the coast. Eventually, the Japanese told the POWs to disembark—meaning they had to take a thirty-foot plunge off the deck to the water below and swim to shore. Davey was one of the last to climb out of the hold and onto the deck. Rather than immediately jumping off the ship, he took some time to look around for food. At that time, food was more important to Davey than quickly getting off the ship, even though the vessel was on fire and potentially about to explode. While he didn’t find much food, he found some extra canteens. The additional canteens would provide Davey the ability, when water was available, to get more to use later. He tied the canteens to a belt around his waist and swam to shore.[16]

Once on shore, those POWs who had managed to make it to land were herded onto a tennis court, which was used as a stockade to hold them. Again, they were crowded, and only through careful coordination and planning were all POWs able to lie down. They had little clothing. They suffered from the tropical heat and sunburns throughout the day on the hot concrete court and then suffered from the cold at night, when the hard concrete turned cold. The Japanese provided little food or water, and men continued to die one or two at a time from malnutrition, wounds suffered in the bombings, and disease. The Allies bombed the area several times, and the POWs watched in wonderment as the bombs fell from the sky, not knowing whether the bombs would land on them.

After five scorching days and freezing nights on the tennis court, the POWs were loaded into trucks and taken north to San Fernando, Pampanga, where some were put in a jail and the rest in a fenced-in yard. They received more food at San Fernando, and the condition of some started to improve. There were still many who were critically ill, however. The Americans pleaded with the Japanese to at least move them to a hospital. Finally, the Japanese relented and asked them to identify the fifteen sickest POWs. These fifteen were then taken, the POWs believed, to the hospital at Bilibid. However, in the war crimes trials after the war, it was shown that these sick POWs were not taken to a hospital but to a nearby cemetery, where they were beheaded and dumped into a mass grave.[17]

Voyages of the Enoura Maru and Brazil Maru

After three days in San Fernando, the POWs were marched through the town to a train station and loaded into small boxcars. For POWs like Davey, who had endured the Bataan Death March, this was a surreal moment. They knew this place. They had been here two and a half years before. They had walked here on that march and had been stuffed into those cars to be taken to Camp O’Donnell, where thousands had perished.

Despite their misery and an uncomfortable feeling of déjà vu, they were generally in good spirits. It was evident to all that the Allies were winning the war. The Allies had unchallenged control of the air, and all around them was evidence of the destruction of the once-powerful Japanese war machine. The POWs concluded that surely the Japanese would now give up on trying to transport them to Japan and instead leave them on Luzon, where the Allies would soon rescue them. Sadly, this hope, like so many others, was soon crushed.

While it seemed to make no sense to the POWs, they were not being taken back to Camp O’Donnell or anywhere else in the Philippines, but back to the coast to be loaded onto ships to Japan.[18] It was a dangerous train trip. American planes were patrolling, and it was unlikely that moving rail traffic would not be detected and bombed. The Japanese, therefore, put the sick and wounded POWs on the tops of the cars and told them to wave their bandages if American planes appeared. The trains took them north to the Lingayen Gulf, where they arrived on Christmas morning 1944. They were marched down to the beach and, two days later, were loaded onto two ships. Davey and about 1,070 others were loaded onto the Enoura Maru, and the remaining 236 were loaded onto the Brazil Maru.[19] They then set sail as part of a convoy for Taiwan (Formosa).

Although the convoy was attacked, the Brazil Maru and the Enoura Maru managed to escape and arrived at the Takao harbor in Formosa on New Year’s Day 1945. While they had avoided death from the American submarines and bombers, the POWs trapped in the holds of the ships had continued to die, a few each day, from sickness and starvation.[20] Earlier, the tropical heat in the Philippine camps and in the ship holds had been their enemy. Now the cold from the more northern climate was the source of their affliction. Still wearing little clothing, usually only a G-string, the POWs had little protection from the cold. Pneumonia, not some tropical disease, was now a primary killer.[21]

This photo taken by US Navy aircraft of the Takao Harbor area shows in the lower right two vessels targeted in the US attack: a Japanese tanker and the Enoura Maru. They were moored to the same buoy. Captain Davey was on board the Enoura Maru but survived the attack. Courtesy of the United States Navy.

They remained at this harbor for several days, during which Davey experienced another small miracle. The POWs on the smaller Brazil Maru were transferred over to the Enoura Maru and, as a result, some POWs on the Enoura Maru were to be moved to a different hold. In preparation for this change, the Japanese asked for volunteers for a detail to clean one of the holds. Davey, now healthier than he had been at Dapecol, always volunteered for these details because it was a chance to get extra food and water. Once they had completed their task, they were to return to their original hold. However, the Japanese, perturbed about the time the POWs were taking to get back to their hold, ordered them back down into the hold they had been cleaning. As a result, Davey was not where he was supposed to be.

At this same time, General MacArthur’s forces were preparing to land on Luzon at Lingayen Gulf—the place from which this group had left the Philippines about three weeks earlier. To prepare for that landing, General MacArthur had ordered air strikes on Japanese ships in southern Taiwan, as those Japanese ships could be used to attack the US ships during that landing. The ships at anchor at Takao, including the Enoura Maru, were among the primary targets of those air strikes. On January 9, 1945, bombers from the USS Hornet attacked the Takao Harbor. There were several hits on the Enoura Maru, and some bombs fell directly on the forward hold, killing more than four hundred prisoners. That was the hold Davey was supposed to have been in but was not.[22]

Hundreds of the POWs on the Enoura Maru died or were wounded in the attack. The surviving POWs remained trapped in the ship’s holds without food or water for days. The Japanese did nothing. The wounded continued to die from shock, loss of blood, and infection. Bodies of the dead began to bloat and smell. Finally, on January 12, 1945, permission was given to remove the dead and assist the wounded. For weak and emaciated POWs, removing more than four hundred dead bodies from the lower holds of a ship that had been bombed was not an easy task. Using a large cargo net, fifteen to twenty bodies at a time were lifted out of the hold and, according to one author, “taken to shore on a barge where they were stacked with wood and set on fire.”[23]

The surviving POWs, including Davey, were then all loaded onto the Brazil Maru, which joined a convoy for Japan. The convoy took a roundabout course, hugging the Chinese coastline to avoid US submarines operating in the open ocean. The POWs in the holds continued to suffer from the cold and lack of food, water, basic sanitation, and medicine. Getting weaker, sicker, and increasingly demoralized, prisoners were dying by the dozens.[24]

Dysentery broke out, and two of Davey’s closest friends died of it. One was Dwayne Alder from Midvale, Utah, who had been with Davey at Dapecol. Alder died on the Brazil Maru around January 24, 1945, just a few days before the ship’s arrival in Japan. Although not named by Davey, the other was likely Joseph Webb from Salt Lake City, another officer who had been with Davey in Dapecol. Webb died two days after the Brazil Maru arrived in Japan. Davey had managed to trade a fountain pen for some sulfa tablets, but it was not enough to save them. Davey later wrote to one of the widows, “It was really hard to have both your very best friends sick and not to be able to do more for them. Medicine, food and water were almost nonexistent at this time and the Japanese would not or did not have any to give us.”[25]

The Brazil Maru finally arrived at Moji, Japan, on January 29, 1945.[26] On February 4, 1945, five days later, US forces arrived at Manila and liberated the Bilibid Prison. On arriving in Japan, Davey was at first placed in a prison camp in Fukuoka, Japan. To Davey, Japan was a lovely place, with beautiful trees and land.[27] While he could not have known it at that time, the worst was finally behind him, and he had survived.

When Davey left Bilibid, he left his letters with Lieutenant William A. Montgomery, who was very sick and, therefore, not likely to be taken to Japan. As Davey had anticipated, Montgomery was not taken to Japan but remained at Bilibid until rescued by the Americans. Davey’s letters were then passed on to the Red Cross, who saw to it that they were delivered to his family in Salt Lake City, where they were thankfully received by his sister and brothers. The letters were later published in the Deseret News.[28]

However, the family’s joy was tempered by another item of news they received about the same time—that the ship Davey was on had been bombed by the Americans and that more than five hundred had died.[29] The faith and hope of his family remained resolute, but nonetheless they could not have avoided weighing the mathematical odds against their brother’s survival.

Notes

[1] See, for example, Michno, Death on the Hellships, 260; 332n78. Judith Pearson provides a specific account of the horrific voyage of the Oryoku Maru in Judith L. Pearson, Belly of the Beast: A POW’s Inspiring True Story of Faith, Courage, and Survival Aboard the Infamous WWII Japanese Hell Ship Oryoku Maru (New York City: New American Library, 2001).

[2] James W. Erickson, “Oryoku Maru Roster,” west-point.org. http://www.west-point.org/family/japanese-pow/Erickson_OM.htm (listing Davey among the POWs on the Oryoku Maru).

[3] Lawton, Some Survived, 212, 214 (Lawton notes that others put the number of survivors at 435); see also Davey, “Last Talk,” 5 (states that of the approximately 1,600 original POWs, less than 500 survived the voyage, and of those survivors, 153 later died in various camps before the others were transferred to Korea); Michno, Death on the Hellships, 265 (puts the number of survivors of the voyage at 450).

[4] Lawton, Some Survived, 153–54.

[5] Lawton, 154.

[6] Michno, Death on the Hellships, 258.

[7] Lawton, Some Survived, 155.

[8] Lawton, Some Survived, 207–9; Michno, Death on the Hellships, 260–61; Davey, Talk Transcript, 4.

[9] John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945 (New York City: Random House, 1970), 601.

[10] Lawton, Some Survived, 160; Michno, Hellships, 260–61.

[11] Conversation by author with Marilyn Springgay, Davey’s daughter, in November 2016.

[12] Lawton, Some Survived, 160; Michno, Death on the Hellships, 260.

[13] Michno, Death on the Hellships, 258.

[14] Lawton, Some Survived, 162.

[15] Lawton, Some Survived, 163.

[16] Davey, “Last Talk,” 5.

[17] Lawton, Some Survived, 178.

[18] Lawton, Some Survived, 178.

[19] Michno, Death on the Hellships, 262. Davey, in his writings after the war, does not identify the name of the ship he boarded, but his description of the ship and a later bombing suggest it was Enoura Maru.

[20] See Lawton, Some Survived, 188.

[21] Lawton, Some Survived, 201, 207, 215.

[22] Davey, “Last Talk,” 6–7; Cave, Beyond Courage, 314–15; Lawton, Some Survived, 192–93; Michno, Death on the Hellships, 264.

[23] Michno, Death on the Hellships, 264; see Lawton, Some Survived, 196.

[24] Lawton, Some Survived, 200–2.

[25] Springgay, “Davey,” 52.

[26] Michno, Death on the Hellships, 265; Lawton, Some Survived, 211.

[27] Springgay, “Davey,” 53. Carlyle Ricks and James Wilstead, two other Utah POWs from Dapecol, were also among the survivors.

[28] “Faith Sustains Interned Mormon Captain,” Deseret News, March 24, 1945.

[29] “Faith Sustains Interned Mormon Captain,” Deseret News, March 24, 1945, “Captain Davey Evacuated to Japan.”