Hellships: Trying to Reconnect Memories
 

On December 13, 1944, Japanese POW transport Hellship, the Oryoku Maru, departed from Manila with 1,619 POWs packed in its cargo holds.  Only one fourth of the POWs would come home alive after surviving  the voyage to Japan on two more Hellships, the Enoura Maru and Brazil Maru.   (More about this voyage is here.)

The Oryoku Maru was also carrying about 700 Japanese civilians who were heading back to Japan.

The late Mr. Duane Heisinger, whose father did not survive this voyage, wrote in his book, Father Found, about a Japanese mother and her little daughter who were aboard the Oryoku Maru. He quoted from a memoir by one of the survivors:

Very few of the people paid any attention to us, but one very nice and intelligent looking Japanese woman stood by the rail at the head of the gang plank holding her two year old daughter.  For the half hour that I saw her, she could not keep her eyes, friendly ones by the way, off the prisoners… I heard her tell the child to say, ‘Hello Americans.’

Duane felt that he needed to reach out to those who were near his father during the war and reconnect their memories. He wanted to find out and understand how his father lived and died. He also tried to find episodes by which he could reaffirm the goodness of human nature, however rare they might have seemed. 　(Duane's essay is here.)

The history of Hellships is still not well known to people in Japan and the United States.

Mr. John Glusman, acclaimed author of CONDUCT UNDER FIRE, is now writing a book on the Hellships. He is interested in speaking with any Japanese survivors of the Oryoku Maru, Enoura Maru, and Brazil Maru, as well as another tragic Hellship, the  Arisan Maru.

Mr. Glusman can be reached at johnaglusman@yahoo.com