What a negative post, it seems awfully naive about conditions and what intelligence was available.
What seems “negative” is that it seems like there was an intentional policy to destroy Japanese merchant shipping to disrupt their war effort, regardless of intelligence about POWs or civilians aboard. Even if and when the laborers being forcibly transported to Japan were allied POW’s. As was my father’s best friend who survived the Bataan Death March, sea transport, and years in a Japanese POW labor camp.
As the author of this study on Japanese “ hell ships” concludes, the intelligence was there. But the overriding mission was destruction of the Japanese ships.
So I was probably wrong about “ intel failure”.
Almost 20,000 died on the hell ships because they were accepted as war casualties.
QUOTE
Japanese treatment of Allied POWs was deadly in and of itself, Allied sinkings of hell ships notwithstanding. Even in a case like that of Oryoku Maru, with so many survivors, a prisoner’s chances of making it to the end of the war were slim.
Conclusion
The sinking of Oryoku Maru was the result of intercepted Japanese radio transmissions that would have revealed some information about POWs on board. Whether that information made its way down to the theater commanders is unclear. At any rate, there is no evidence to suggest that commanders at sea had any knowledge of the presence of POWs on Japanese ships.[23]
The issue of culpability is complicated and disquieting. As yet, no historian has taken it on directly. Gregory Michno, who has done more than anyone to uncover and make sense of the history of hell ships, offers a most sobering explanation: “War is hell, and hell is relative. The fatal Ultras were sent. Axis and Allies died together.”[24]
—Adam Bisno, Ph.D., NHHC Communication and Outreach Division, November 2019