The Pentagon has initiated one of its largest-ever underwater recovery operations—with over a dozen specialist divers—to reclaim the remains of American prisoners who drowned along with the Imperial Japanese “hell ship” Ōryoku Maru during the Second World War.
The remains of as many as 250 U.S. prisoners of war (POWs) are believed to still lie entombed within the Ōryoku Maru, which started its life as a civilian Japanese passenger liner before being requisitioned for troop and prisoner transport and, ultimately, sinking into the sea in 1944.
The Pentagon’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) is coordinating with U.S. Navy sailors onboard the salvage vessel USNS Salvor, where a team of 15 specialist divers dove into Subic Bay, 35 miles (55 kilometers) northwest of Manila in the Philippines, to begin the search last month. This initial phase of the mission, conducted in partnership with the Philippine government, will stretch into April—but the full effort is anticipated to take years.
The DPAA called it one of the agency’s “largest and most complex recovery efforts to date” in an official statement, with a team of forensic anthropologists waiting at DPAA’s laboratory in Honolulu to analyze the recovered remains.
“It is a national priority in the United States,” as DPAA’s director of scientific analysis, John Byrd, told the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
“Significant operational challenges”
The Ōryoku Maru’s wreckage lies just 550 yards (503 meters) off the coastline at a maximum depth of only 90 feet (27.4 meters), but that proximity is deceiving. For starters, the wreck was intentionally blasted apart to keep it from damaging passing commercial ships decades ago. Second, clouds of silt from nearby river outflow have added serious visibility issues to the already gnarled mass of mangled steel that DPAA’s divers will have to work through.
“The recovery effort presents significant operational challenges that will require the team to employ advanced underwater recovery and identification techniques,” according to Byrd.
“Completing an excavation may take multiple missions, sometimes delayed by weather, schedules or other factors,” the DPAA scientist continued, “making it a process that can last months or years.”
The current Ōryoku Maru mission, as the DPAA noted in their press release, “underscores the enduring alliance between the United States and the Philippines,” which has generously collaborated in this recovery from their territorial waters.
“Our success depends on strong partnerships and unwavering respect for the fallen,” DPAA’s team leader for the mission, U.S. Army Capt. Barrett Breland, said in the statement.
Breland added that this mission “represents our solemn commitment to provide the fullest possible accounting to families and the nation,” although it’s unclear what remains are likely to have survived after 80 years of briny decay. Previous work by the agency has proven tricky, with thorny cases of “commingled group remains” requiring DNA analysis and new legal hurdles after a similar mission recovering POW remains from Japan’s Enoura Maru prison ship.
A bloody wreck from a bloody war
American airmen flying from the decks of the USS Hornet and the USS Cabot had no idea they were bombing a floating prison housing 1,556 of their cramped, captive countrymen and at least 60 more Allied fighters, as the SCMP reports. But as the Ōryoku Maru rushed for refuge into Subic Bay, U.S. warplanes ran 17 air attacks over the ship across three days in December 1944—an assault so brutal that it encouraged the attendant convoy of Japanese warships to flee.
Japanese guards indiscriminately mowed down throngs of escaping POWs and, according to the SCMP, some survivors would later recount grisly memories of blood dripping from freshly killed Japanese anti-aircraft gunners down from the decks into the hold below.
One Pulitzer-winning history book covering this episode, John Toland’s The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945, quotes a particularly shocking official report by a colonel onboard the vessel. “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,” the colonel wrote. About 1,290 survivors reached the shore, with the rest unaccounted for to this day.
Roughly 134 Japanese “hell ships,” as U.S. forces colloquially named them, transported an estimated 126,000 Allied prisoners during WWII, according to the U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command.
Watery graves
Decades ago, the discovery of a sunken Japanese military sub in the depths of Pearl Harbor sparked a tricky legal debate on the official ownership of just these kinds of sunken vessels. America’s solution, a little bit of jerry-rigged maritime law, was the passage of the Sunken Military Craft Act (SMCA) in 2004.
According to the SMCA, at least, “sunken U.S. military vessels and aircraft” now enjoy “protected sovereign status and permanent US ownership,” forever. The law applies to nearly 1,700 US military wrecks across the world’s oceans, making it illegal for foreign nations or enterprising adventurers (like you) to go souvenir-hunting from them.
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