Invasion Rabaul (36 page)

Now, after sixteen years on the high seas, the vessel showed a few wrinkles. Routine maintenance under naval control had become almost nonexistent, due mainly to the enormous workload imposed on the merchant fleet, and the ship was in need of cosmetic repairs at the very least. Not that its outward appearance mattered to the POWs: their journey was guaranteed to be unpleasant. They were not passengers, but human cargo.

The
Montevideo Maru
boasted five holds, though the Numbers 4 and 5 holds aft were partially occupied by large tanks of fuel oil which fed the twin Mitsubishi-Sulzer diesel engines. Additional space was taken up by the tunnels for the port and starboard propeller shafts. The three remaining holds—one amidships and two forward—were likely fitted with wooden ‘tween decks to accommodate troops. The Imperial Army crammed soldiers by the thousands into its crudely equipped transports, and the troops were expected to endure days or even weeks of excessive heat and unsanitary conditions without complaining. They called it
chomansai
, extreme overload. For them, it was just another element of army life.

A
FTER STRUGGLING UP THE
M
ONTEVIDEO
M
ARU
’S GANGWAYS, THE PRISONERS
were directed toward ladders that descended into the dark holds. There is no way to know with certainty which of the compartments they went into—perhaps all five—but logic suggests that they occupied the two forward holds at the very least. With slightly more than five hundred men in each, the conditions would be terribly cramped yet still considered
luxurious by the standards of the Japanese army. A detachment of naval guards was assigned to provide security, a task that would be greatly simplified by confining the prisoners in two holds.

Among those who watched the POWs file aboard was Jiro
Takamura. Unlike most of his countrymen, he had developed an appreciation for the Australians and was actually sorry to see them go. Although well aware of the “insufficient food” situation, he nonetheless enjoyed spending time with the POWs who worked in his shop. He was also proud of their accomplishments. “They repaired 5 cars, more than 20 telephones and about 10 radios,” he wrote in his diary. “It is a wonder that only 6 men could do so much work in a little over a month’s time. This is not all. Spiritually we have gained a lot from them. They never left a job unless it was completed.”

Takamura observed that the hatches were battened down after the prisoners disappeared into the holds. He quietly honored them by remaining at the wharf until the
Montevideo Maru
departed. Later that evening he wrote: “Saw them off, and watched the ship until it disappeared over the horizon.” Two days later he noted that the ship was bound for Hainan, an island off the south coast of China, thereby confirming what some of the prisoners had been told.

A
FTER EIGHT FULL DAYS AT SEA AT AN AVERAGE SPEED OF ALMOST FIFTEEN
knots, the
Montevideo Maru
was three thousand miles from Rabaul. The captain had elected to stay east of the Philippines rather than plowing straight across the Celebes Sea—which was both tricky to navigate and a popular hunting area for submarines—but the longer route had required extra time. Reaching the eastern entrance of the Babuyan Channel on the night of June 30, he put on extra speed for the five-hour dash through the chokepoint. Once clear of the channel, it was just two days to Hainan across the South China Sea.

Inside the holds, the prisoners knew almost nothing about their destination except its name. Awaiting them on Hainan Island was a camp for hard labor. The POWs there built roads under extremely harsh conditions—not as evil as the infamous “death railway” camps in Burma and Thailand, perhaps, but a dreadful place nonetheless. Considering the lack of medical attention and the starvation diet forced upon the POWs by the
Japanese at Hainan, the men aboard the
Montevideo Maru
faced long, grim years of hardship. The odds of surviving the entire war under such conditions were not favorable.

And yet the prisoners would have gratefully accepted those odds, if only to get out of the dark, slimy holds of the
Montevideo Maru
. Two more days inside that floating oven would be an eternity. The heat and humidity within the steel hull must have been unbearable, and it is highly probable that some of the sickest men had already perished during the first eight days of transit.

There was good reason why the
Montevideo Maru
, like all the other Japanese vessels employed as POW transports, was considered a “hellship.” Throughout the war tens of thousands of POWs and slave laborers were shipped between Japan’s territories aboard dozens of different ships, and in each case the conditions were utterly despicable. If the journey was supposed to be short, food and water were sometimes withheld. On longer trips, only small portions of moldy rice and containers of filthy water were passed down into the holds by the guards.

There were no sanitation facilities down below except a few buckets, the only toilets being topside. These were crude wooden
benjos
, suspended precariously over the side rails, and to use them the prisoners had to be strong enough to climb the ladders to the main deck. Even then, the facilities were only available during daylight hours, as the holds were locked at night for security. Not that it mattered to the men who were sick with dysentery or even simple diarrhea: too weak to move, they defecated where they lay, which in turn caused outbreaks of bacterial disease. On top of that was seasickness, a virtually endemic problem that only grew worse as the air within the enclosed holds became increasingly foul. After just one or two days of accumulating excrement, urine, and vomit in the holds, the stench was indescribable; after eight days inside the
Montevideo Maru
, the prisoners knew the definition of hell.

The ship carried no special markings that identified it as a POW transport, and was therefore indistinguishable from the legitimate targets being hunted by Allied aircraft and submarines. Therefore, no one should have been surprised that an American submarine lurked west of Luzon on the night of June 30, waiting for the next ship that passed through the Babuyan Channel in the moonlight.

A
T
2216,
A LOOKOUT ABOARD THE
S
TURGEON
SIGHTED A SHIP RUNNING
alone with no lights. It first appeared to be on a northward course, but after Bull Wright observed it for a few minutes, he concluded that it was a cargo-passenger liner headed west, and fast. He ordered all four diesels on line, and the submarine surged forward at flank speed.

The
Sturgeon
was supposedly capable of making twenty-one knots on the surface, but it could barely keep up with the ship. “For an hour and a half we couldn’t make a nickel,” Wright later reported. “This fellow was really going, making at least 17 knots and probably a bit more, as he appeared to be zig-zagging.”

Wright needed to get well ahead of the ship in order to set up a proper attack, but he could draw no closer to the speeding liner than eighteen thousand yards—approximately ten miles. Nevertheless he held on like a determined terrier, and shortly past midnight his persistence was rewarded. The ship abruptly slowed to twelve knots, allowing the
Sturgeon
to close the distance quickly. “After that,” Wright noted, “it was easy.”

An interception point was plotted along the ship’s projected path. For the next hour and a half the
Sturgeon
raced ahead, and at 0146 on July 1, Wright took the sub down to periscope depth. Then, deciding to make his attack using the stern tubes, he turned
away
from the target. It was a simple matter of efficiency. One of the bow tube doors still did not function, and the torpedoes in the four aft tubes were fitted with the largest warheads currently available.

Watching through the periscope as the ship drew closer in the moonlight, Wright judged its heading to be “slightly left of west.” This would bring it no nearer than five thousand yards to his current position, so he maneuvered the
Sturgeon
with the electric motors, narrowing the gap by a thousand yards. He then began relaying periscope information to Lieutenant “Chet”
Nimitz, who stood before the torpedo data computer (TDC) console.

Four aiming points were calculated using a method known as “divergent shifting points of periscope aim from aft forward.” As Wright called out data from the periscope, Nimitz twisted knobs on the TDC panel to set the target’s estimated length, speed, and angle off the stern. A position keeper then tracked the target and predicted its location at the point of impact based on constant updates from the
Sturgeon
’s navigational
equipment. The assorted information was fed into the angle solver, which automatically determined the proper settings for each torpedo’s internal gyroscope. The solutions were passed verbally to the men in the aft torpedo room, who dialed them manually into the weapons.

At 0225 the first torpedo was fired at a range of four thousand yards—almost two and a half miles. Three more torpedoes followed at eight-second intervals, and then Wright ordered a full-rudder turn to bring the bow tubes to bear. Lieutenant Nimitz didn’t think the maneuvering was necessary. “We won’t have to use any more,” he said aloud. “One of those will get him.”

A
T
0229,
VIRTUALLY THE SAME TIME THAT THE INVASION OF
R
ABAUL HAD
begun exactly 158 days earlier, a warhead containing the equivalent of seven hundred pounds of TNT detonated against the
Montevideo Maru
’s starboard hull. The blast ripped open the fourth and fifth holds, and moments later a secondary explosion occurred in the fuel oil tank. The first explosion was heard clearly throughout the submarine, and Wright confirmed the hit. Observing through the periscope, he saw the bright flash of an explosion approximately one hundred feet aft of the single stack. The ship’s lights came on briefly, and then flickered out. From his brief glimpse of the illuminated vessel, Wright made an educated guess that it was the
Rio de Janeiro Maru
or a “very similar type … he was a big one.”

Wright could also clearly see that the ship was listing to starboard and settling rapidly by the stern. Nimitz was correct: one torpedo had been enough.

A
BOARD THE
M
ONTEVIDEO
M
ARU
,
THE CREW AND NAVAL GUARDS SCRAMBLED
for their lives. Those not on duty had been jolted awake in the darkest hour of the night by explosions and alarms; now they groped along passageways in absolute darkness, searching for exits. The lights had come on for only a minute or two after the torpedo struck, and then oil from the ruptured tank spilled into the engine room, forcing the engineers to deliberately shut down all power.

Some of the crewmen made it to the lifeboat stations—there were three on each side of the superstructure and two more along each side of the aft deckhouse—but because the ship was listing so rapidly
and
going
down by the stern, only the three lifeboats on the starboard side of the superstructure had a prayer of being launched. The sailors weren’t quick enough. Within six minutes the ship’s bow had risen high out of the water, and all three lifeboats capsized from their davits, with one sustaining major damage.

There is no evidence that any of the hatch covers were unfastened during the eleven minutes that the
Montevideo Maru
remained afloat. The Japanese were concerned only about saving their own lives. Dozens got safely into the water, but twenty crewmen and guards were either killed by the explosions or drowned. The surviving Japanese righted the capsized boats and climbed aboard. One boatload headed west; the other two remained more or less stationary until daylight, and then headed east toward Luzon.

For the prisoners down in the pitch-black holds, those last eleven minutes were measured quite differently. If any men were confined in the aft two holds, they did not suffer long. Those not killed outright by the exploding torpedo were knocked senseless by its concussive effects, and then quickly drowned as tons of seawater rushed in.

The truly unfortunate victims were those in the forward holds. Before the end came, they endured eleven minutes of mind-bending terror. No one could see what was happening; they could only feel the ship canting steeply, and their ears were assaulted by the screech of collapsing bulkheads and painful pressure changes as air was forced from flooded spaces. Some men probably attempted to reach the hatches, but as they groped upward they found no escape. The effects of adrenalin gave them strength only for a short time. Then, as their black world tilted ever more crazily, they slid aft and piled up against the lowest bulkhead. Under the crush of filthy bodies, those at the bottom quickly lost consciousness.

The panic that surely accompanied those final minutes can only be imagined. Sentimentalists would like to believe that some of the prisoners calmly faced their impending death, but the circumstances strongly suggest that a contagious, mass hysteria swept through the black holds. And who could blame the victims: in the middle of the night they were plunged into an unfathomable nightmare, each second filled with the tormenting sounds of water rushing in and the ship breaking apart. As the minutes wore on, the men who were still conscious would have instinctively tried
to claw their way upward, their shouts and screams only adding to the freakish pandemonium.

The terror mercifully ended at 0240. With a final hiss of foul-smelling air, the bow of the
Montevideo Maru
slid beneath the waves.

Wright waited ten minutes before bringing the
Sturgeon
to the surface. He had no inkling of the tragedy that had just occurred, and thus made no attempt to maneuver the boat among the floating debris to search for survivors. Instead, satisfied with the knowledge that he had sunk a large enemy ship, he called for an eastward course toward Cape Bojeador.