LIFE AS A FEPOW · HELLSHIPS, 1945

 

The Enoura Maru

 

On 9 January 1945 the Enoura Maru was bombed in Takao harbour while carrying survivors of the Oryoku Maru. Around 350 to 400 Allied prisoners were killed.

 

 

 

From the Oryoku Maru

 

On 13 December 1944 the Oryoku Maru left Manila with about 1,620 prisoners of war. Most were American, but around 50 were British and Dutch. Over the next two days she was attacked by American carrier aircraft and sank near Olongapo in Subic Bay.

 

The survivors were held for days on a tennis court at Olongapo with almost no food or water, then moved to San Fernando. On 27 December they were loaded into two more ships, around 1,000 of them into the Enoura Maru and the rest into the smaller Brazil Maru.

 

 

 

 

The Voyage to Formosa

 

Both ships had carried horses and their holds had not been cleaned. The prisoners were given little more than a handful of rice and a little water each day, and men continued to die on the way north.

 

The ships reached Takao, now Kaohsiung in Taiwan, on 1 January 1945. The men were kept in the holds in the harbour while the ships waited.

 

 

 

 

Bombed at Takao

 

On 9 January 1945 American carrier aircraft attacked shipping in Takao harbour. The Enoura Maru carried no markings to show there were prisoners on board, and the pilots had no way of knowing.

 

A bomb tore open the forward hold. Around 350 to 400 prisoners were killed and many more were badly wounded. For days the dead lay where they had fallen, and the few surviving doctors had almost nothing to treat the injured with.

 

 

 

 

After the Attack

 

The dead were taken ashore and buried in a mass grave on the beach at Takao. The survivors were moved to the Brazil Maru, which sailed for Japan on 14 January and reached Moji on 29 January 1945.

 

On that last voyage, in bitter winter cold, hundreds more died. Of the roughly 1,620 men who had left Manila in December, only about 400 lived to be freed at the end of the war.

 

 

 

 

Remembering the Enoura Maru

 

In 1946 the American Graves Registration Service recovered the remains from the beach at Takao. They could not be identified and were buried as unknowns at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, where a memorial stone was dedicated to them in 2018. Since 2022 their remains have been disinterred so that the men can be identified and named.

 

They were American, British, Dutch, Australian, Canadian, Norwegian and Czech prisoners, and their sacrifice must never be forgotten.

 

Their story is one of many told on our Hellships page.