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A Chinese film-maker wants to raise
a Japanese ship that was sunk in 1942 with hundreds of British prisoners of war
on board. Some of the victims' families back the idea, but one of the survivors
says it's a war grave, and should be left where it lies.
"We knew we'd been hit by a
torpedo. And the ship started listing. That was it," says Dennis Morley,
now 98 but then a 22-year-old in the Royal Scots regiment.
"It was at that time they
battened us down. They meant us to go down with the ship - drown."
On 1 October 1942, Morley was one of
more than 1,800 British prisoners of war being taken from Hong Kong to labour
camps in Japan in the hold of a cargo ship, the Lisbon Maru.
 |
| Dennis Morley - now |
Conditions were appalling. At the
bottom of the hold, Morley remembers being showered by the diarrhoea of sick
soldiers above him, "swimming in excreta, virtually". After the ship
was torpedoed they were given no food or water - and once the hatches were
covered by planks and canvas they sat in the dark, running short of air to
breathe.
They still assumed they would be
taken off the ship before it sank, as the 700 Japanese troops accompanying them
had been. But after a day and a night the hull gave a "sudden drunken lurch", as one of the POWs
wrote later, and a frantic escape effort began.
"Well, one chap, he was in the
Middlesex Regiment, he was a butcher and the Japanese allowed him this knife,
which he was able to put through the planks. He got through to the canvas and
cut the canvas, eventually - the whole lot. The canvas could be lifted out the
way and the planks moved which is how we got out," Morley says.
"A bit of a panic started
because everyone was trying to rush up to this ladder and everybody was
fighting to get on this ladder. Consequently, you're getting so far up and
falling down into the bottom of this hold - until this officer, Capt
Cuthbertson of the Royal Scots, stopped the panic and got them to quieten down.
So you could go up that ladder one by one.
"Eventually I went up, and by
the time I got up the rear end had gone down and it was just the bows. And
then… slide off the side, get in the water, lay on your back and float, just
make sure you get away from the ship."
The first POWs to reach the deck
were fired at by a few remaining Japanese guards, but they were quickly
overcome. Those, like Morley, that made it into the water were targeted by
machine guns on other Japanese ships. However, once Chinese fishermen started
coming to the British soldiers' aid, the Japanese also began to gather them up.
The most harrowing scene occurred
when the ladder broke in one of the three holds containing POWs, leaving dozens
of men of the Royal Artillery trapped inside. Survivors reported hearing them
singing "It's a long way to Tipperary" as the ship sank.
In total 828 POWs died either on
board or in the waters nearby, according to Tony Banham, author of The Sinking
of the Lisbon Maru, Britain's Forgotten Wartime Tragedy.
Especially tragic was the fact that
the ship had been sunk by an American submarine, the Grouper, whose crew were
completely unaware there were allied POWs on board until they picked up a radio
signal several days later, Banham says. At first sight it had looked like any
other troop transport ship.
Chinese film-maker Fang Li first
heard this story four years ago, from a ferry captain in the Zhoushan
archipelago, 100 miles (160km) south-east of Shanghai, where the ship went
down.
He was surprised that he had never
heard about it before and started investigating. Two years later he carried out
a survey of the area and captured sonar images of a wreck 460ft (140m) long and
140ft (40m)wide, which he is certain is the Lisbon Maru.
"While I was doing this I was
totally touched by those young boys, the age of my son. So many of them lost
their lives there," he says.
"One hundred of them are
actually still inside the holds, so in every sense you feel you're connected. I
was only 30m [100ft, the depth of the wreck] away from those boys who got
killed there."
News coverage of the discovery
prompted family members of the dead to get in touch with him, including Amanda
Christian, whose father was seven when his own father died on the Lisbon Maru.
The family commemorated Amanda's grandfather with a gravestone, even though his
body was far away in the East China Sea.
"I would visit the grave often
- on poppy days and Christmas, but that's not good enough. He's not there,
there's just a stone, there's nothing there," she says.
"If you send a man to war, you
should bring him home, dead or alive. This is his home."
Fang Li has begun shooting a
documentary on the subject. He has located a fisherman who helped rescue
British soldiers in 1942 and last week he placed an advertisement in The Times,
in the hope of tracing more relatives of the British POWs.
But he also wants to raise the
Lisbon Maru from the seabed, in the hope that it will be possible to return the
remains of the dead to their families. For this initiative he has the support
of Amanda Christian, but Dennis Morley - thought to be the last survivor still
alive in Britain - is opposed.
One other survivor, William
Beningfield, First Battalion the Middlesex Regiment, now lives in Canada.
"Oh God, how many hundred went
under? Could be 1,000-odd. I don't know. It's no good getting them out. They're
all dead. They are probably bleached bones now," Morley says.
"It's wartime and a lot of
horrible things happened during the war. They're in peace. Leave them in peace…
It is a war grave and should be left as a war grave."
Fang Li says he accepts that a
sunken warship may be regarded as a sacrosanct war grave - the battleship
Arizona, for example, which was sunk by the Japanese in Pearl Harbor a few days
before the Lisbon Maru POWs were captured in Hong Kong.
But the crew members of the Arizona
remain on their own ship, he points out, and in US waters, while the Lisbon
Maru, as he puts it, was "a jail".
"All those boys were detained
there against their will, that's why I feel so sad today - they are still
detained on the sea floor," he argues.
"In my personal opinion they
are on the Chinese sea floor in a Japanese jail. Shouldn't we free them, and
send them home?"
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So, there's the argument from the Chinese film maker, Fang Li, which of course, has the added incentive of possibly making a buck for him....
Our feeling at Maritime Maunder is leave the wreck and the bodies (skeletons) where they are; it's a war grave and should be considered sanctified ground.
Until next time,
Fair Winds,
Old Salt
