Death on the Hellships. Gregory F. Michno
May and began loading. They were divided into three battalions of about 1,000 men each. The first, under Lt. Col. G. E. Ramsay of 2/18 Battalion, boarded Celebes Maru. The second, in command of Maj. D. R. Kerr of the 2/10 Field Regiment, and the third, under Maj. Charles B. Green of 2/4 Machine Gun Battalion, boarded the 7,031-ton cargo ship Toyohashi Maru.
Ken Williams, a corporal in the 27th Brigade, stood in line. He was already thirty-six years old, had a wife and two children, and probably shouldn’t have joined the army. The Depression, though, had hit him hard, especially working as a blacksmith for forty-eight shillings a week. By 1940, with the number of motorized trucks on the increase, Ken had decided that blacksmithing had no future. He joined the Australian Imperial Forces (AIF). And what did they need, but a blacksmith! Talk was that the force moving north was not to be a working party, so there was no need to take medical supplies or equipment. Waiting to board, however, Williams began to have second thoughts as he saw hundreds of picks and shovels being loaded.
“Holy Hell,” exploded one soldier who used to work the Fremantle docks and was familiar with Celebes Maru. The single-screw freighter of 5,824 tons, built by Kawasaki in 1917, was 385 feet long, with a top speed of thirteen knots and a cargo capacity of about 2,000 tons. The soldier called the maru “old blue-bottle” and complained, “If we are to go aboard that thing we’ll be in sheep pens. Pre-war, I helped load thousands onto that old bucket and the poor old sheep had barely enough room to stand.”
The “bucket,” however, was to be their new home. While waiting for hours to load, a few Aussies managed to purloin some edibles from a nearby godown (warehouse). They were bashed with rifle butts or hung up by their thumbs. The prisoners loaded through the day, slowly crawling up rope ladders, and did not finish until 0100, 15 May. One lad fell from deck level and broke his leg. He was sent back to Changi—one of the lucky ones.
True to the former dockworker’s word, Celebes Maru contained sheep pens. About 640 men were put in the largest aft hold, and the remaining 360 were put in the forward hold. The air was fetid. When they were fed, the sweat from bodies on the upper levels dripped down into the men’s rice below. Those afflicted with dysentery fouled themselves, but not until Lieutenant Colonel Ramsay pleaded for them to be allowed to use the two, three-hole “toilets.” Even so, it was not enough; the deck was fouled, and the returning users spread excrement from stem to stern. It was so hot below decks that Ramsay again pleaded to the ship’s captain to have a windsock rigged to funnel some air into the holds. They thus made their way to Sumatra.24
On 9 May, before A Force was collected, groups of Allied POWs on Sumatra were being gathered on the south coast at Padang. The British Sumatra Battalion, a group of 498 British and 2 Australian officers, all under Maj. Dudley Apthorpe, joined 1,200 Dutch troops and began the journey. They went north by road and rail, through the mountains and past the beautiful Lake Toba district. On the twelfth, trucks carried them to Medan on the north coast, and they were placed in the Uni Kampong Camp, which was then occupied by Dutch civilians. On the fifteenth, they hiked the last miles to the port of Belawan and boarded the ironically named England Maru, a 5,038-ton cargo ship built in 1919 and owned by Yamasita Kisen Company. In the holds they packed into a four-foot-high wooden tier that had been built around the hull to accommodate troops. The Dutch climbed on the 5,493-ton Kyokusei Maru, a former Canadian ship built in 1920.
After one false start, the ships returned to Belawan to await the arrival of the two ships from Singapore. On the sixteenth, 350 Japanese troops boarded the heavily laden Celebes Maru. They were joined by a minesweeper, and the five-ship convoy headed north through the Strait of Malacca. The weather remained hot, and below decks men became seasick, adding to their misery. Constant protests by the officers finally resulted in groups of 50 men being allowed on deck for twenty minutes at a time. The fresh air, plus a brief hose down with salt water, was almost heaven. On England Maru the officers were segregated from the men, but Major Apthorpe went down to see them, and on one occasion passed some stolen Japanese cigarettes to a Sergeant Pearce. The next day, Apthorpe was beaten for stealing cigarettes. Pearce sought out the major and said he was sorry for what happened.
“Sergeant,” Apthorpe asked, “did you enjoy smoking them?”
“Of course,” Pearce replied, though he added that it did not seem worth the beating.
“Then that’s all that matters,” said Apthorpe. “I enjoyed stealing them, it was just unfortunate that we were caught.”
On 20 May, after a voyage described as “appalling,” the convoy stopped at Victoria Point, at the southern tip of Burma, where the 1,017 Aussies of Green Force were taken off the Toyohashi Maru by barges and the Dutch were unloaded off Kyokusei Maru. They were to work either at the Victoria Point wharves or at the nearby airfield. Next stop was Mergui, where on 24 May the Celebes Maru disgorged Ramsay Force and England Maru deposited the British Sumatra Battalion. They were put to work building an airstrip. Toyohashi Maru carried Major Kerr’s remaining 983 Australians to Tavoy on 26 May, where they came under command of senior officer Lt. Col. Charles Anderson and were thereafter known as Anderson Force.25
The unloaded convoy remained at Tavoy until 1 June, when it sailed back for Singapore without an escort. Patrolling at the north end of Malacca Strait was the British submarine HMS Trusty on her third patrol, under Lieutenant Commander Balston. In the predawn darkness of 4 June, he noticed four ships steaming south, about seventy miles southwest of Phucket, Malaya. Picking out the largest target, the Trusty fired a salvo of torpedoes at the unsuspecting ships. At 0335, two torpedoes hit Toyohashi Maru, striking holds one and seven on the starboard side. Heavy explosions shook her and she flooded quickly. The ship, built by Kawasaki in 1915, owned by the Nippon Yusen Kaisha (NYK) Line, and carrying thirty-five shipping engineers, went down at 0400. Sixteen gunnery force members and one crewmen were killed, while the survivors were picked up by Kyokusei Maru. The remaining three ships quickly headed for Penang, Malaya. The Toyohashi Maru was the first of the hellships to be sunk. Had Trusty found the convoy on its outward voyage, there might have been a disaster for the Allies.26
TO AND FROM SINGAPORE
On the same day Toyohashi Maru was torpedoed another ship was bringing more prisoners to Singapore, among them Frans J. N. Ponder of the Royal Netherlands-Indies Army (KNIL). Ponder, who had been ashamed when General ter Poorten surrendered almost without a shot, had been shifted to a number of camps in Java before ending up in Batavia. On 4 June, he and about five hundred Dutch prisoners boarded Maru Ni (two), an old freighter of about three thousand tons. Most of them were packed into the hold by the liberal use of rifle butts, but Ponder was lucky enough to be given a spot topside.
The maru steamed laboriously out of the harbor, only to be buffeted with strong winds and rough water. Since the toilets were located on deck, those below who became seasick could not climb up in time; many vomited on the ladders or on deck. Said Ponder, “In no time there was an unbelievably smelly mess.” In addition to seasickness, many had diarrhea. Japanese guards were posted to control toilet usage, but it was a losing battle. During the five-day journey to Singapore, a number of POWs died and were buried at sea. When they disembarked on 9 June, the filthy men were lined up on deck and washed down with hoses. The Dutchmen were marched to Changi.27
Not all the parties passing through Singapore went by sea. A group of six hundred prisoners left Changi on 18 June for the Singapore rail depot, where they were packed in boxcars and sent north. They were followed by four more six-hundred-man trainloads at two-day intervals. This was a mixed group of incomplete units, consisting of III Indian Corps, the British 18th Division, Singapore garrison troops, and the Federated Malay States Volunteer Force, a unit consisting of local Europeans. The tired, underfed, dispirited work force of three thousand detrained at Ban Pong, the junction where the rails went either east to Bangkok or west, up the new railway to Burma. Over the next two years, Ban Pong would be the transit camp where thousands of workers would assemble.
Not all the prisoners leaving Singapore were destined for the Burma Railway project. In early July, Yamada Masaharu, a staff officer at Kuching Headquarters in Borneo, visited Changi looking for laborers.