Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [113]
The saga of the so-called hell ships would become a grim chapter in the story of Japan’s treatment of its POWs. Ens. Charles D. Smith wrote, “The Japanese method of shipping troops is one man per ton, so on a two thousand ton ship, they transport 2,000 troops or prisoners.” There were three tiers of wooden platforms built all around the bulkheads of the hold. When the holds were jammed full, “the Japs made space,” said Julius B. Heinen of the 131st. “They just took a rifle butt and jammed it at the guy who was closest. Well, his reaction was to try to get away from the rifle butt that was coming at him, so he moved backwards with as much force as he could generate. That left another space where another man could get in.” They were packed in like farm animals, clothes soaked with their sweat and little liquid intake available to replace it. The crowding was so bad that the Japanese merchant captain protested to Army authorities but was summarily overruled. When the rusty old Dai Nichi Maru departed Batavia, it was stuffed with three thousand POWs.
The act of transporting prisoners in unmarked ships carrying war matériel was against the Geneva Convention. As Rohan Rivett was herded by screaming guards into a hold on the Kenkon Maru, he saw that it was full of armored reconnaissance vehicles. Conditions on the ship were unfit for humans. “There had been cattle hauled in that ship, as I recall, and there was straw in the bilge,” said Howard Charles. The ship reeked of its earlier cargo. Down in the hold, the temperatures approached 120 degrees. There was no circulation, no air to breathe, nowhere for a dysentery patient to run ten times an hour. If you opened a porthole, you got as much seawater as air. Enterprising sailors got fresh water by bleeding steam from the engines of the ship’s cargo crane. They had to duck and cover whenever a perplexed engineer came looking to see why his steam pressure had fallen.
The journey out of Batavia was a short one, just three days. Fortunately for the prisoners, the Allied submarine offensive against Japanese merchantmen had yet to reach full fiery bloom. When subs roamed without hindrance later in the war, they would exact a terrible toll on these uniquely vulnerable human cargoes. By day the men roasted inside the stinking enclosure of a hull heated by the unblinking equatorial sun. At night they thrashed through haunted dreams. Those prisoners who had compasses said the ship was headed north and speculated that their destination could be Singapore or maybe even Japan itself. Because the Dai Nichi Maru’s skipper didn’t have charts of the waters north of Java, he sailed only by day. Each sunset he dropped anchor. Perth survivor Ray Parkin wrote, “It was a night of darkness and heat and drugged stupor; of entangled bodies which flung unconscious arms and legs athwart each other so that, on awakening, it was hard to tell which limbs were your own. You were conscious of having far too many arms and legs.” Men with the slightest sense of claustrophobia had raging breakdowns.
On the third morning, those few who got topside to relieve themselves could see all around them a rabble of islands and scattered islets whose rocky shores were garnished with scraggy foliage. The steep red slopes of the mainland lay ahead. The Japanese guards didn’t let them gawk for long. They chased them back down into the hold. But the curious prisoners kept pushing topside, “like froth from a boiling saucepan,” Ray Parkin wrote.
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