Wow. Simply amazing the hell people went thru for this Country and to defeat evil.
This is a part of WW2 history most Americans know nothing about. I knew about it when I was sixteen(I’m now fifty-nine). I knew of it from reading John Toland’s excellent book “The Rising Sun’’.
There’s a book called “Return from the River Kwai” about a group of Australians who had built the Death Railway, then were sent to Saigon to board a transport ship which was later torpedoed by American subs. The book mentions how one of the subs, the Pampanito, with a crew of 80 packed in like sardines, rescued 80 Australians and made them as comfortable as possible while bringing them to Hawaii or some other friendly port.
How they were able to fit 80 extra men in the sub is something I still haven’t figured out, but some of the crew slept in torpedo tubes.
So I checked to see what ever happened to the Pampanito, and come to find out she’s alive and well and berthed next to the Jeremiah O’Brien liberty ship at Pier 45 in San Francisco.
bfl
Must read.
My father had the misfortune to be a 20 year old sergeant with the 60th Coastal Artillery (AA), on Corregidor. He was on the ‘hell ship’ Totori Maru, which took him from Cabanatuan No. 3 to Hoten Camp in Mukden, Manchuria for the duration of the war. He was always pretty close-mouthed about the experience, but his description of the conditions on the ship are consistent with the article. The Totari Maru was attacked by an American submarine, and the captains evasive maneuvering of the ship caused the torpedoes to miss.