Battle Submerged by Harley Cope

Author:Harley Cope [Cope, Harley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Mission of Mercy

DURING their initial attacks the Japanese took a great number of prisoners: Americans on Guam, Wake, the Philippines, and British, Canadian, Australian, and Dutch in Hong Kong, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. While riding on the crest of conquest,” the enemy kept many of the prisoners in the locality where they had been captured partly to save the time and expense of transporting them back to Japan and partly for psychological reasons. They served as prima facie evidence to support the propaganda-fed native populations that the much-vaunted power of the white man was an exploded myth, that the real master was the Asiatic. To exploit that idea even further, the captives were forced to labor on tasks formerly performed by the Melanesian and Indonesian islanders when the white man had been their overseer.

But when the first faint etchings of the proverbial handwriting began to appear on the wall, and the Japs had to begin scraping the bottom of the barrel for man power at home, they started shipping Allied prisoners to Japan from every corner of their crumbling empire. Prisoners of war were packed into the holds of their cargo ships and transports like the slave ships of old, to provide labor in the Japanese mines, factories and on the highways.

From the Allied point of view they chose a very unfortunate time to commence the export of prisoners, because in 1944 the Silent Service had at last the number and quality of operating boats it had dreamed of in 1941. For the first time we had enough boats equipped with reliable Mark 18 electric torpedoes with large torpex war heads and superior radar to cut the vital Japanese supply line with the south. Not only were our submarines well-equipped but they were now manned by experienced personnel who were neglecting no part of the many lessons learned during two years of operating in Far Eastern waters.

By international law a combatant can request safe conduct for any ship exclusively carrying prisoners of war, but our submarines had removed so many ships from the Japanese merchant marine roster that the Nipponese refused to send any of their precious ships to Japan without carrying vitally needed loot to their factories and food queues. Perhaps they hoped that when the sentimental Americans learned our targets often carried a hold crammed full of Allied prisoners in addition to oil and supplies, we would spare them the loot rather than chance killing our own men. Actually this was not such a wild assumption. No doubt we would have spared any ship we definitely knew had prisoners aboard. But, of course, we couldn’t give all ships safe conduct just because there was a possibility they might be carrying captive friends. It was just another example of the enemy taking advantage of what they considered our weak-willed concern for human life.

Under such circumstances it was inevitable that some enemy prison ships would fall victim to our torpedoes, especially since they were supplied with an extra heavy escort.

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