The Hell Ships

by The Indo Project

Between 1942 and 1945, more than 130 Japanese ships carried Allied prisoners of war (POW) and Asian forced laborers (romusha) across Southeast Asia, packed into overcrowded holds without food, water, or air. Survivors gave them a name that stuck: hell ships. Several of these voyages ended in death tolls higher than the Titanic, one of them, the Junyō Maru, killed nearly four times as many people in twenty minutes as the Titanic did in its entire sinking. Most people have never heard of any of them.

This is the story of what the hell ships were, who was on them, why so many people are only now learning about them, and why, eighty years later, new wrecks are still being found and new war graves are still being identified.

What Was a Hell Ship?

After Japan overran the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies in early 1942, it needed labor to build the railways, airfields and mines feeding its war effort. Hundreds of thousands of Allied POWs and Asian civilians were shipped to work sites across Japan, Formosa (Taiwan), Manchuria, Korea, Burma, Sumatra and the Moluccas.

The vessels were ordinary cargo ships, hastily converted and never marked as carrying human cargo. Because they also carried Japanese troops and military supplies, they were legitimate military targets, and Allied submarines and aircraft, unaware of the prisoners below deck, sank dozens of them. More than 130 ships made over 150 voyages, transporting roughly 125,000 Allied POWs and hundreds of thousands of romusha.

Conditions on board were brutal, and often lethal by neglect as much as cruelty. Men were crammed into airless holds with barely room to sit, given almost no food and often only a cup of water a day in tropical heat. Toilets were crates lashed to the railing, or nothing. Dysentery, starvation, heat stroke and suffocation killed men before the ships even reached open water; some went mad from the heat and dark. And for those who survived the conditions, there was still the chance of being sunk by their own side, since the ships flew no flag that would tell an Allied periscope who was inside.

The scale, ship by ship, is staggering. The Junyō Maru killed an estimated 5,620–5,640 people in 1944, most of them Javanese romusha. The Lisbon Maru killed roughly 828 British POWs the same year. The Rakuyō Maru killed 1,159. The Montevideo Maru took 1,054 Australian POWs and civilians down with it. The Oryoku Maru and the two ships that followed her, the Enoura Maru and Brazil Maru, killed well over a thousand Americans between them. Dutch sources put the toll even higher: the Marinemuseum estimates 22,000 to 27,000 deaths across more than 220 hellship voyages. Among the romusha, historians believe the true toll is several times that, no one will ever know for certain, because so many were never formally registered as having been taken at all.

The Romusha: The Forgotten Majority

Most people who know the term “hell ship” picture Allied soldiers. That is only half the story, and the more invisible half is the larger one.

The Japanese occupation forced somewhere between four and ten million Indonesians into labor of some kind. Of these, the Marinemuseum estimates some 300,000 were transported by sea from Java, to Sumatra, Burma, Thailand, the Moluccas, to build railways and airfields, dying at a rate far higher than Allied POWs experienced. Only a fraction ever returned. When the Junyō Maru sank, an estimated 4,000 of the roughly 4,200 romusha aboard died, near-total loss, against “only” two-thirds of the Allied POWs on the same ship.

Romusha rarely left written accounts, and the oral culture that carried their stories broke under the weight of what happened. Their history survives mostly in shared victim lists and the memories of a dwindling few. Any honest account of the hell ships has to treat them as the majority of the dead, not a footnote to the POW story.

Voices From Our Community

The Indo Project has published stories over the years in which the hell ships surface, sometimes as the central event, sometimes as one leg of a longer journey.

• Undaunted by the Night: Surviving the 10th Battalion Massacre — Edward Frietman’s father was crammed aboard the Tacoma Maru with 1,700 Dutch POWs; dysentery broke out within a day.
• Willy Welcker – The Indo Centenarian — a Burma Railroad survivor whose story connects, at a California commemoration, to two women who had each lost family on the Junyō Maru.
• American Prisoners of War of Japan — a Congressional testimony naming the hell ships and calling for a memorial at Moji, Japan, where so many ships once unloaded their dying.
• Book Review: The Sun In His Eyes — Claude Belloni’s ship to Nagasaki was torpedoed in June 1944; he survived, only to later survive the atomic bombing from two kilometers away.
• Exploring the Collective Trauma Integration Process (CTIP) — Astrid Berg on her father’s hell ship voyage to Nagasaki, and how that history still surfaces in the body two generations later.

A Discovery That Reopened the Story

In mid-2026, working from a digitized Japanese convoy document and decades of fragmentary records, the Hellships Memorial Foundation,  with maritime archaeologist Dr. Calvin Mires, imaging specialist Evan Kovacs, and explorer Josh Gates, located the wreck of the Hōfuku Maru in roughly 50 meters of water off Zambales, Philippines. She had sunk on September 21, 1944, carrying around 1,200 British and Dutch prisoners; more than 1,000 died when American aircraft, unaware of who was aboard, hit her convoy.

The site is now a protected maritime war grave; human remains are visible among the wreckage, and nothing has been or will be removed. The discovery has prompted international discussions: the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands and the Hellships Memorial Foundation are working with neighboring nations to establish new, joint diplomatic ways to protect the maritime war graves and commemorate the victims.

Told in Film

De tragedie van de Japanse hellships 1942–1945, by Simone Berger and Armando Ello, is the companion film to their teaching package for Dutch schools, made with the Stichting Herdenking Slachtoffers Japanse Zeetransporten (SHSJZ).

Watch it in Dutch below, or watch the full film on YouTube with English subtitles:
Click the ⚙️ Settings button → Subtitles/CC → Auto-translate → English.

Where the Memory Is Kept Alive

• SHSJZ, Netherlands — organizes the annual Bronbeek commemoration and maintains its monument: a granite figure in a symbolic sea of 181 nameplates, one per identified hell ship.
• Marinemuseum, Den Helder, Netherlands — hosted “Hellships – Gevangen op zee,” which made deliberate room for romusha and native KNIL soldiers alongside Allied POW stories.
• The Hellships Memorial, Subic Bay, Philippines — the physical monument, dedicated in 2006 on the waterfront where many hell ships once passed; now also names the Hōfuku Maru.
• The Hellships Memorial Foundation, US-registered, based in the Philippines — maintains a casualty roster and led the 2026 search for the Hōfuku Maru.
• The National WWII Museum, USA — supports ongoing identification of remains with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA).
• Naval History and Heritage Command and the U.S. National Archives, USA — hold the American military and archival record.
• Mansell.com — a volunteer-built archive cataloguing individual ships, voyages and survivor accounts.
• Joods Monument, Netherlands — has documented the Jewish Dutch victims of the Junyō Maru by name.
• Taiwan POW Camps Memorial Society, Kaohsiung — maintains the Taiwan Hellships Memorial, commemorating the Enoura Maru and other transports through Taiwan’s ports.
• COFEPOW, UK — built the FEPOW Memorial Building at the National Memorial Arboretum, including a dedicated Hell Ship Memorial Garden.
• Rabaul & Montevideo Maru Society, Australia — keeps the memory of the Montevideo Maru, the single deadliest day in Australian military history.
• ADBC Memorial Society, USA — the American Defenders of Bataan & Corregidor, still lobbying for a hell ship memorial at Moji, Japan.
• POW Research Network Japan, Japan — has documented nearly every hell ship individually, from the Japanese side of the archive.

Why This Still Matters

Most people outside this community don’t know about the hell ships. A history this large, this documented, and this recent has still not made it into most classrooms or family conversations. Naming it, teaching it, and connecting it to the people who lived it is itself a form of healing, for the families still carrying it, and for a wider public that deserves to know what happened.

Featured photo: The drawing represents ‘The Sinking of the ‘Nichimei Maru” on 15 Jan. 1943, between Singapore and Moulmein, after bombardment. (on board was a large transport of prisoners of war).  Date: January 15, 1943 – NIOD beeldbank