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By Root 593 0

to drink their blood. In some cases prisoners trying to escape from the seething mass of hysterical captives were shot by Japanese soldiers guarding the stairways from the holds. Some voyages took weeks with only a handful of prisoners surviving. Men drank their own urine. Sick prisoners were trampled to death or suffocated. The sane murdered the insane and wondered when it would be their turn to go mad. Cannibalism as well as vampirism was not unknown and even Japanese medics were shocked by what they found when the holds were finally opened. In the case of the Oryoku Maru, where insane prisoners killed fellow men for their blood, only 271 men survived out of 1619. The experience of one Dutch group was fairly typical: of 1500 men shipped from Java to Rangoon to work on the Death Railway, 200 died and 450 were unable to walk on arrival in Burma. Nineteen of the fifty-six hellships were sunk by submarines and aircraft and a total of 22,000 allied prisoners died during agonising voyages to the slave camps in Japan and Taiwan.

Down in the sweltering bowels of that ship we suffered for thirty-six hours before we got underway. The Japanese had been assembling HI-72, a tightly packed convoy of around a dozen ships with destroyer protection for the voyage to Japan. Unknown to us there was a second hellship in our convoy: the Rakuyo Maru, carrying around 1317 British and Australian prisoners.

There must have been at least one officer, a warrant officer or a sergeant major somewhere in the hold. But they certainly didn’t make themselves known. Discipline had gone. Everyone, whatever their rank, was in the same situation. All of us just wanted to survive and were prepared to do anything to ensure that happened. It would have taken a very brave man to try and take command of the men in the hold in those conditions. It would have been suicidal.

The heat down in the holds was unbelievable. The longer the hatches stayed shut, the hotter it got. With all of the bodies tightly packed together temperatures quickly reached well in excess of one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. We began losing body fluid awfully quickly and dehydration became a big problem. As did stomach cramp. I was suffering from dysentery and dehydration, which were pretty much perpetual for me. In three and a half years I never really had a proper bowel movement.

I never thought anything could ever match the terror of the railway. Being in the hold was worse. At least while slaving on the railway you could move. And you had fresh air.

Air must have been coming into the hold from somewhere otherwise we would have all suffocated to death, though some men did. It felt like we were breathing in the last of it. When the ship began to move you realised within hours that anything was possible. Maybe we would be sunk deliberately and drowned as the Japanese had done to other prisoners.

Then another dread thought struck me. Submarines. The Kachidoki Maru had no Red Cross markings painted on it. I would later learn that none of the hellships bore any indication that POWs were on board, as they were required to do by the Geneva Convention. Red crosses were, however, painted on Japanese ammunition carriers. My fears that without markings we were a target for our own side were to prove all too justified.

As we sailed out of Singapore harbour on 6 September, in Hawaii signals officers of the US Navy’s Fleet Radio Unit Pacific were listening in to Japanese radio traffic and intercepted messages relating to our convoy and its course. On 9 September orders were issued to three US submarines. Two days later on the night of 11 September, in the shipping lane known to American crews as ‘Convoy College’, the USS Growler broke the calm surface of the South China Sea, south of Hainan Island. As the crew of the Growler checked out the overcast skies that threatened rain on the horizon, the bow of the USS Sealion II was the next to emerge from the depths and sidle alongside the Growler. One and a half hours later the USS Pampanito joined the compact. The wolf pack was formed. The submarines