A U.S. military dive team has begun pulling artifacts from the floor of Subic Bay, where a Japanese prisoner transport ship sank in December 1944 with more than 1,600 Allied prisoners of war packed in its holds.
The recovery is part of what the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency has called the most complex underwater operation in the history of its missing-personnel program. A 15-person dive team began work in February from the salvage vessel USNS Salvor, targeting the wreck of the Oryoku Maru, where the agency believes more than 250 unaccounted-for Americans still remain.
The wreckage now rests in 90 feet of water, about 550 yards from the Philippine shoreline.
A Forgotten Atrocity
The Allied captives who lived through the Pacific war used the term "hell ship" for the unmarked Japanese merchant vessels that ferried them to slave labor across the empire. The Naval History and Heritage Command, drawing on research by historian Gregory F. Michno, counts 134 such ships and roughly 156 voyages that moved an estimated 126,000 Allied POWs.
The death toll was massive. National Archives researcher Lee A. Gladwin, writing in the agency's Prologue Magazine, found that up to 21,000 Americans aboard hell ships were killed or wounded by friendly fire from U.S. submarines and aircraft. The Naval History and Heritage Command describes the holds as airless compartments without sanitation, light or sufficient water, where beatings and summary executions also took place.
The incident has been overshadowed in American memory by the Bataan Death March, the loss of the USS Indianapolis and other Pacific War tragedies. The Arisan Maru, torpedoed by a U.S. submarine in October 1944, killed roughly 1,780 American prisoners and is widely cited as the worst single loss of American life at sea, yet it has no place in popular history. The Hellships Memorial at Subic Bay, dedicated in January 2006, remains one of the few major monuments to the victims.
The Oryoku Maru itself began as a Japanese passenger liner before Japan's navy commandeered it after Pearl Harbor. Roughly 1,619 Allied prisoners were forced into its holds at Manila on Dec. 13, 1944. By that point, most of the men had spent two and a half years in Japanese custody, having survived the fall of Bataan and the death march that followed.
The next day, planes from the U.S. carriers Hornet and Cabot found the unmarked vessel as it approached the naval base at Olongapo. The aircraft struck repeatedly over the course of three days. The crippled ship withdrew into Subic Bay and sank. Hundreds of prisoners were killed in the attack. Roughly a thousand jumped overboard and tried to reach shore.
For the survivors, the ordeal was far from over. They were placed aboard the Enoura Maru and the Brazil Maru and sent on toward Japan. The Enoura Maru was itself bombed in Takao harbor in January 1945, killing another 300 POWs.
Of the 1,619 men taken aboard at Manila, only about 425 reached Japan alive, and 161 died within a month of arrival, according to research published by Brigham Young University's Religious Studies Center.
By the end of the war, U.S. authorities could account for only 128 survivors of the original group.
The Recovery Efforts
The wreck sits about 35 miles northwest of Manila, in shallow water near the outflow of the Kalaklan River.
DPAA Director Kelly McKeague told reporters in an April 1 virtual briefing that the agency spent three years mapping the site with autonomous underwater vehicles before sending divers down, building a three-dimensional model that allowed planners to identify where prisoners likely came to rest, the Daily Tribune reported.
He said the team believes the remains are confined to a small number of compartments, which is where divers are concentrating their work.
The wreck was demolished after the war to clear shipping lanes, leaving a knot of broken steel that complicates each dive. McKeague said unexploded ordnance still litters the area, along with decades of fuel and chemical residue.
Artifacts recovered from the wreck are being routed to the DPAA laboratory at Pearl Harbor, where forensic anthropologists will examine any remains the divers bring up. The director said DNA work is being run through Defense Department laboratories in Delaware, and that artificial intelligence is being used to reanalyze wartime aerial imagery.
Capt. Barrett Breland, the Army officer leading the recovery team, said in the agency's Feb. 24 release that the work is intended to give families a complete accounting of what happened to their relatives.
The first phase of operations is scheduled to run through April. The full effort is expected to take years and will likely require multiple deployments. Filipino partners include the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the National Museum of the Philippines, which previously surveyed the wreck and has been involved in Subic Bay archaeology for roughly three decades.
The DPAA estimates more than 250 Americans remain in the hold. Identifications, if they happen, will be the first tied to the wreck since the ship went down 81 years ago.
