Death on the Hellships: Prisoners at Sea in the Pacific War

Rating:
Summary: Man's Inhumanity to Man
Review: Author Michno covers a subject that has been neglected in World War II history, namely prisoners of war held on Japanese ships on the Pacific Ocean. The book is over 300 pages of the depressing conditions that POW's faced at the hands of the Japanese on their hellships. Prisoners who were deprived of water, food, and sanitary conditions and subjected to executions by their captors make for a very hellish read. It appears that those who survived were those who developed an intense hatred for their captors. Those who felt sorry for themselves were not among the survivors. This is a subject that has apparently been neglected in World War II history and the author says the Japanese continue to deny or cover up their atrocities. I found it difficult to continue reading such horrific treatment of human beings for over 300 pages, but, nevertheless, this is a story that has been needed to be told.

Rating:
Summary: Man's Inhumanity to Man
Review: Author Michno covers a subject that has been neglected in World War II history, namely prisoners of war held on Japanese ships on the Pacific Ocean. The book is over 300 pages of the depressing conditions that POW's faced at the hands of the Japanese on their hellships. Prisoners who were deprived of water, food, and sanitary conditions and subjected to executions by their captors make for a very hellish read. It appears that those who survived were those who developed an intense hatred for their captors. Those who felt sorry for themselves were not among the survivors. This is a subject that has apparently been neglected in World War II history and the author says the Japanese continue to deny or cover up their atrocities. I found it difficult to continue reading such horrific treatment of human beings for over 300 pages, but, nevertheless, this is a story that has been needed to be told.

Rating:
Summary: A sobering, comprehensive, superly written & accurate survey
Review: Death On The Hellships: Prisoners At Sea In The Pacific War is a sobering, comprehensive, superly written and accurate survey of life and death as an Allied prisoner of war aboard the Japanese submarines, under conditions as hellish as any concentration camp. More that 126,000 prisoners were transported on these hellships with more than 21,000 fatalities, due to beatings, starvation, disease, and worst of all, friendly fire. The statistics lead author Gregory Michno to conclude that it was more dangerous to be a prisoner on Japanese hellships than to be an active U.S. marine in the campaign. Disturbing in its detail, Death On The Hellships is a vivid and unforgettable reminder of the horrors of war and an invaluable contribution to 20th Century military history collections.

Rating:
Summary: A harrowing history of a maritime Dante's Inferno
Review: Gregory Michno's "Death on the Hellships: Prisoners at Sea in the Pacific War" is a harrowing account of one of the nearly forgotten stories of World War Two - the experiences of Allied POW's aboard Japanese transport ships. These prisoners, most of them captured during the early months of the war in the Pacific, passed through nearly unimaginable horrors, brutally mistreated by their captors, subjected to starvation, beatings, and deprivation of water, and held in crowded, grossly unsanitary conditions. And they often fell victim to Allied torpedoes and bombs. More than 20,000 Allied POW's died at sea, most of them when the transport ships carrying them were attacked by U.S. submarines and aircraft. Although Allied headquarters often knew of the presence of POW's aboard vessels targeted for attack through radio interception and code breaking, the general policy was to sink the ships anyway, evidently on the basis that the interdiction of critical strategic materials was more important in the long run than the deaths of prisoners-of-war.

"Death on the Hellships" is a veritable Dante's Inferno at sea, the tragedies chronicled month by month. Michno's research into previously classified records and with survivor first-hand accounts far surpasses that of anyone who has touched upon this topic before, and he deserves great credit for rescuing this important story before it was lost forever in the fog of the past. It is not a tale for the faint-hearted. Although the subject covers too broad a time and geographical area to permit in-depth narratives of every prison ship voyage, Michno does provide a wealth of survivor stories illustrating the experiences of these unfortunate men and women. Anyone who reads the history of this tragic episode of modern war will not soon forget it.

Rating:
Summary: Evil of the Japanese- well documented
Review: The hellships of the title were the Japanese transports that carried western prisoners around the Pacific. But a casual reader might be excused for thinking they were American submarines, especially since it's a sub on the cover, not a maru. Worse, the author makes the flat statement that most of the PW fatalities were the result of submarine attack, and that if the friendly-fire casualties were taken out, the death rate of Japanese captives was no higher than that of those held by the Germans. Nonsense. His own figures disprove it.

I think what happened here is that he uncovered documents about the sub attacks and was so impressed by its novelty that he warped his book to fit the new stuff. (For example, he devotes a couple of pages to Richard O'Kane's attack on a maru, but evidently doesn't know that O'Kane himself was taken prisoner shortly after.) It's a cruel distortion, because those PWs wouldn't have been at hazard if the Japanese hadn't moved them about as slave labor, if the Japanese hadn't violated the norms of warfare by putting PWs on the ships carrying war materiel, and if they hadn't made it a policy to murder the prisoners in the event of attack.

That aside, it's an effective and cumulatively horrific book about the Japanese mistreatment of their captives in the Pacific War. -- Dan Ford