Sunken wreck of WWII ‘hell ship’ used to transport POWs discovered after more than 80 years

By Katie Hunt, CNN

(CNN) — A Japanese ship was in a convoy steaming through the South China Sea on September 21, 1944, with around 1,200 British and Dutch prisoners of war crammed in its holds. US warplanes, mistaking the unmarked ship for a military cargo vessel, dropped four torpedoes.

One struck the ship. The vessel split in two and sank within minutes, dooming most of the Allied prisoners trapped below deck. Only about 200 of the weakened, sick POWs survived, and the exact location of the wreck was lost to the deep.

Now, some 80 years later, researchers have uncovered the servicemen’s final resting place. The team scoured documents buried in Japanese and US military archives before conducting sonar surveys and technical dives. These efforts ultimately located the wreck of the Hōfuku Maru near Zambales province, off the western coast of Luzon, the largest island in the Philippines.

The Japanese military used 56 unmarked vessels dubbed “hell ships” to transport more than 62,000 POWs during World War II. Allied fire sank 19 of these vessels. The location of five of those wrecks remains unknown.

“We’re talking about a dark hold that’s metal. It stinks, it’s boiling hot. There’s no sanitary conditions. They’re not being fed properly, if at all. Hardly any water,” said Tim Beckensall, a World War II historian and the search director for the Hellships Memorial Foundation. “It’s about the worst set of conditions you could design.”

The Hellships Memorial Foundation, with support from the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands and the Discovery Channel, found the wreck of the Hōfuku Maru. The quest is documented in a two-part season premiere of “Expedition Unknown” that will air June 24 on Discovery Channel. (Discovery Channel and CNN are both part of Warner Bros. Discovery.)

“The most surprising part of this investigation is actually the story itself — the tragic legacy of the Hellships is a chapter of World War II that many people have never heard of,” said explorer Josh Gates, who presents the show.

“But it’s vital history; the men who died aboard these ships made the ultimate sacrifice and have been waiting 80 years to be found,” he said via email.

Finding the wreck

Official records detailing Hōfuku Maru’s sinking were incomplete and inconsistent, Beckensall said. Japanese records were fragmented, and Allied strike reports provided only approximate locations.

However, in June 2025, Beckensall’s colleague John Duresky discovered a digitized Japanese document written by officers on board the convoy’s lead ship. The document included a timeline and map depicting where the convoy was struck; it stated that the Hōfuku Maru was second in line when it was hit and split in two, according to Beckensall.

The researchers were then able to cross-reference some of the details with an “aircraft action report” from the USS Bunker Hill aircraft carrier, which documented the sinking of an AK vessel, an abbreviation for auxiliary cargo, that was the second ship in its convoy. The site was more than 30 miles (48 kilometers) from where the ship was assumed to have been lost. Beckensall also spoke to local fishermen who said they had long known of what appeared to be a large wreck at the location.

“It was the Japanese document that started the whole thing, and it was the smoking gun that really led to all the others,” Beckensall said.

Beckensall, based in Manila at the time, shared the archival findings with the British Embassy, which arranged a meeting with the Dutch and Philippine military attachés, where Beckensall and Hellships Memorial Foundation founder Randy Anderson presented the evidence found so far.

The Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands then agreed to fund an initial sonar survey and a preliminary dive mission to the site, which took place this past December and January.

To the researchers’ relief, the divers discovered some kind of wreckage at a depth of around 164 feet (50 meters) right where they had hoped. However, volcanic ash that washed into rivers and the sea during the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo is slowly engulfing the wreck. Because of the extremely poor conditions, identifying any distinguishing features has been nearly impossible.

The Discovery Channel got involved in early 2026 and recruited Calvin Mires, a maritime archaeologist for Marine Imaging Technologies, who has worked on many World War II wrecks. Mires, along with underwater imaging specialist Evan Kovacs, took hundreds of images of the wreck.
The duo used specialized computer software to turn them into a 3D model via a technique known as photogrammetry.

“It’s really low visibility, and the camera cleans a lot of that up,” Mires said. “The camera sees a lot more.”

Mires said he initially had a “healthy skepticism” but said the “preponderance of evidence” pointed toward the wreck being the Hōfuku Maru.

The team compared the vessel’s size, along with the position of its masts and cargo holds, against blueprints of the Hōfuku Maru, built in 1919. The wreck is split into two pieces, matching both US and Japanese accounts of its fate.

The Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands has reviewed a report Mires, Beckensall and his colleagues wrote about their investigation and issued a statement June 8 that said the wreck was “almost certainly” the Hōfuku Maru.

‘Terrible conditions’

While a majority of the POWs on board the Hōfuku Maru perished, some survived. At least two British servicemen, the late Capt. Nigel Evans and the late Capt. James Gibson, shared harrowing testimony about their treatment on board the ship during war crimes trials held in Singapore by the British shortly after the end of the conflict. Sgt. Maj. Jotani Kitaichi of the Imperial Japanese Army was sentenced to death by hanging as a result.

Most of the captured Allied troops on board the ship had started their journey in Singapore and were destined for Japan, where prisoners toiled in factories and mines to sustain the war effort. The roughly 1,000 British and 250 Dutch POWs crowded into two holds so cramped they had to take turns lying down, according to a court document.

Each man survived on three-quarters of a pint of water each day in sweltering temperatures, the document noted. While there were crude toilets on deck, many POWs were too weak to clamber out to use them and instead had to use “mess tins as bed pans,” Gibson said. The prisoners were at one point given life jackets, but they were later confiscated after guards found them being used as pillows, the court document said.

Evans said things took a turn for the worse in Manila where almost 100 British prisoners died while the ship docked for more than a month after encountering engine problems. The POWs were not allowed on deck.

“Conditions on board became terrible,” he said. “It was a common sight to see prisoners of war eating their meals within six feet of a corpse being prepared for burial. On the day before we sailed over a third of officers and men were unable to walk unassisted and there were a number of mental cases,” said Evans, who managed to board another Japanese ship after the Hōfuku Maru sank and was taken to a POW camp in Taiwan.

Gibson jumped overboard and swam to shore, where he spent five months with Filipino guerillas. “I made complaints during the voyage concerning medical supplies, conditions and food but nothing was done and all I received for my pains was blows from JOTANI,” he said in an affidavit.

Encountering human remains

During their dives to the wreck, Mires and Gates said they encountered human remains on the decks but did not go into the holds. “This ship is a grave, and now that she’s been identified, the governments of the UK, the Netherlands, and the United States have been notified, and they’ll determine the next course of action,” Gates said.

The Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands said the wreck was considered a war grave and would not be excavated out of reverence for the victims and their families.

No remains of American POWs are believed to be on board the Hōfuku Maru. However, the US Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency or DPAA, tasked with bringing home fallen service members, began efforts in February to account for the Americans associated with another prisoner of war transport ship, the Oryoku Maru.

The vessel sank in Subic Bay on the west coast of Luzon in the Philippines in December 1944, a few months after the Hōfuku Maru. Meghan Mumford, the DPAA’s scientific recovery expert for the Oryoku Maru and an underwater archaeologist, described the recovery as “one of the largest, if not the largest, and certainly one of the most complex missions that we’ve executed.”

Earlier this year, Mumford and a team of specialist divers began removing sediment from one of the cargo holds on the wreck where they believed POWs were held. Efforts to identify human remains are underway.

The exact coordinates of the Hōfuku Maru, which lies off the coast of San Narciso, are not being publicly released to protect the site.

The Hellships Memorial in Subic Bay honors the memory of the servicemen who died aboard the Hōfuku Maru, and the Netherlands said it would work with other nations to seek a suitable way to commemorate the victims.

“I have in my career recovered remains and it hits you really hard,” said Mires, who has worked with the DPAA on recovery missions. “The POW ships are really a forgotten part of the battles and the war, and they’re dramatic and horrific and monumental on all levels.”

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