Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [173]
The tragedy of the POWs on the doomed hell ships Rakuyo Maru and Kachidoki Maru must rank among the saddest of the Pacific war. Unknown to the subs that hunted them, they embarked thirteen hundred and nine hundred Allied prisoners, respectively. As the Rakuyo Maru took on water, her decks became a battlefield of sorts. Panicked prisoners rushed the ladders. The Japanese crewmen, holding them at bay with makeshift weapons, took all ten of the ship’s lifeboats and made good their escape. The unlucky crew remaining on the sinking ship were left to contend with their prisoners. As a tanker in the convoy erupted nearby, brightening the predawn darkness, the prisoners seized the opportunity to settle old business. They set upon the Japanese crewmen and beat many of them to death by hand in one of the uncommon instances in the Pacific war when Allied prisoners rose up en masse against their captors. The ship disappeared beneath the waves around 5:30 p.m. that afternoon.
In the water as on board the ship, the Australian and British survivors were left to their own devices once again when Japanese ships—two frigates and a merchantman—apparently responding to an SOS, reached the sinking site and organized the rescue of their countrymen in the lifeboats, leaving the Allied survivors behind. The Growler and Pampanito chased down the remaining ships that night. The Growler torpedoed and sank a Japanese frigate, the Hirado, incidentally killing a number of prisoners in the water with the explosions. The stunned survivors piled into some abandoned lifeboats and began paddling west toward the China coast, some 220 miles distant, splitting into two groups on the way. Three days into their race for shore, the men in the smaller of the two groups—four boats commanded by an HMAS Perth survivor named Vic Duncan—could see the other group of six boats hauling along nicely about six miles away. Then a sailor called out to Duncan, “Smoke on the horizon.”
It was a trio of Japanese corvettes. The men in Duncan’s group watched as the other group was surrounded by the corvettes. Then, in helpless horror, they listened as the mad-woodpecker sound of distant machine-gun fire reached them over the water. The men in Duncan’s group were approached next and asked if they were Americans; responding negatively, they were not shot but were taken prisoner and held in various camps in Japan.
What precipitated the slaughter of the other lifeboat group is beyond knowing. What is certain is that after leading A Force through the worst of the Burma railway construction, after parleying nose to nose with Colonel Nagatomo through every abomination his men were forced to endure, after keeping a secret diary that would document the story of his men’s experience in intimate detail, the commander of the doomed lifeboat flotilla, Brig. Arthur Varley, had well earned a fate other than this. After the three Imperial corvettes finished with them and moved on, none of the men on those six boats, including Varley, were ever seen again.
For the American wolf packs operating in Convoy College, September 12 appeared to be a banner day. Three days later, however, the mood changed. When the Pampanito surfaced on the afternoon of September 15, the crew was stunned to find themselves in the midst of a large debris field dotted with men clinging to wreckage. Some were ill and many were wounded; all were fouled by bunker oil and ravaged by more than three days adrift without rations or water. They were friendlies,