After the Burma-Thailand Railway was completed in October 1943, the Japanese wanted to find other ways to exploit the surviving POWs to help their economy and war-effort. Prisoners were crammed into unmarked “Hellships” and sent across the South China Sea to Japan and other conquered territories. The POWs were usually locked into overcrowded holds with inadequate sanitary arrangements, and very little food or water. Many died of illness or heat exhaustion.
The sea-lanes were patrolled by Allied submarines but the Japanese had no choice but to “run the gauntlet”. The Japanese made no attempt to mark the ships with a Red Cross, to indicate that there were POWs on board.
Unaware of their human cargo these convoys were attacked by submarines and destroyed. Dozens of Hellships were sunk and thousands of POWs were drowned. Those who survived the torpedoes were often abandoned by the Japanese and left to die in the open ocean.
One such ship was the freighter RAKUYO MARU which was torpedoed on 12th September 1944. Most of the prisoners survived the torpedoes and were able to abandon ship which stayed afloat for a few hours. The Japanese ships rescued their own men but then left the scene, leaving hundreds of prisoners floating in the oil-covered ocean. Some men were able to board lifeboats but most were left floating in the sea, clinging to whatever wreckage they could find.
The “Hellship” Rakuyo Maru
Over the next few days many men slipped beneath the waves or went mad with thirst or the effects of drinking sea water or their own urine.
Four days later, USS Pampanito, one of the submarines that were responsible for the attack passed through the area where the survivors were miraculously clinging to the wreckage and, with help of three other submarines in the area, was able to rescue 149 men, forty nine of them British.
POWs Being Rescued by the American Submarine USS Pampanito
Over 1,100 men died but the survivors were rushed to the American naval base at Saipan for medical treatment, rest and recovery. Within a couple of weeks the forty-nine British survivors were sent by sea to San Francisco, by train across America to New York and finally by sea across the Atlantic, arriving at a cold and wet naval base in Greenock, Scotland on 9th November 1944.
Amongst the rescued men were Private GEORGE WARD of Jacksdale, Derbyshire and Gunner SIDNEY SIMPSON of Hinckley, Leicesershire.
Private George Ward, 1/5th Battalion,The Sherwood Foresters.
Gunner Sidney George Simpson, Royal Artillery
When the two men finally made it home, Hope visited each of them in turn to ask if they had met her husband and to find more general information about conditions in their camp.
She knew that even small details about medical access, food, mail, recreation and morale provided relief to those in complete darkness about these facts.
She was keen to let other families have access to this information but was a little hesitant in case it breached the Official Secrets Act. However, when the Secretary for War, Sir James Grigg, made a statement to the House of Commons about the camps, she took this a green light to publish her own findings in order to “cheer people up.”
Her report took the form of a 2000-word pamphlet entitled “Life as a Prisoner of War in Thailand” which she published on the 29th November 1944.
Wall Poster “The Escape and the Pamphlet”