LOST JAPANESE “HELLSHIP” HŌFUKU MARU FOUND IN THE PHILIPPINES

Sadly, war graves are not just confined to land areas and the stories relating to ''hellships'' seem to be cropping up all the time. One of the saddest parts, relating to the history of these particular ships, are the missing/in-complete/never completed manifestos listing those POWs who were on board during the time of the sinking.


LOST JAPANESE “HELLSHIP” HŌFUKU MARU FOUND IN THE PHILIPPINES – JOSH GATES AND TEAM MAKE HISTORIC WWII DISCOVERY


Wiki article here: Hōfuku Maru - Wikipedia


Historian Gregory Michno, in Death on the Hellships, estimated that over 126,000 Allied POWs were transported on 134 Japanese hell ships and that more than 20,000 died at sea, mostly when unmarked transports were sunk by Allied submarines and aircraft that did not know POWs were aboard.

LEST WE FORGET​

Tony Buckley... .....www.asiawargraves.com ......contact via; nt872b(at)hotmail.com

 

It is said the ship will not be dug up. Good news for the local scrap metal dealers who also removed the Dutch and British war ships from the Java sea…

 

Good morning. I was the person who found the Hofuku Maru on June 5, 2025, but we have been prevented from posting anything by NDAs with the UK and Netherlands governments, and with the Discovery channel until now. Below is what I posted on my hometown Facebook page

We look forward to now being able to roll out all the information we have about the Hofuku Maru in the coming weeks in our Facebook page which anyone can access.

- John Duresky

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The WWII hellship Hofuku Maru which I found on June 5, 2025, has finally been announced by the Discovery channel and will be broadcast on Expedition Unknown on June 24. Expedition Unknown took our information from the Hellships Memorial Foundation in January of this year and used it to produce the program, but we had no chance to view the show and so do not know how it will be presented.
https://www.showbizjunkies.com/.../expedition.../amp/ The Netherlands government which we contacted in July 2025 has now also made their announcement about the discovery https://www.cultureelerfgoed.nl/.../japans-vrachtschip-de...

With these announcements, we are no longer held back by any NDA , so will begin to put out a number of reports that relatives of the men will find very interesting. Follow us on our Facebook page PHILIPPINES MIA SEARCH AND RECOVERY PROJECT

Hellships were any ship which Imperial Japan might use to transport POWs from POW camps to Japan or elsewhere to be used basically as slave labor. The were unmarked and ranged from horse freighters to converted luxury liners. To attacking planes or submarines they looked like an ordinary ship in a convoy, and they had no idea they held hundreds or even thousands of POWs or prisoners in them
I helped write the book RELENTLESS HOPE - A True Story of War and Survival, by David Britt with my friend Dave whose father, Army 1Lt Chester K Britt, fought on Bataan and was on the Bataan Death March. Chester was also on another series of three hellships, the Oryoku Maru, Enoura Maru and Brazil Maru.

Dave’s mom, Grace, was evacuated back to La Crosse, Wisconsin, prior to the war, and on September 21, 1941, their first son, Chester Jr, was born. Fast forward to September 21, 1944, and Chester and other POWs were working in a field when they saw American planes overhead for the first time since the fall of Bataan and Corregidor in early 1942. The crazy coincidence of this September 21 date has been locked in my head since 2019 when Dave and I first started work on the book, along with Vickie Graham who edited it. Dave Britt, Vickie and I are 1967 Logan High School graduates. Chester was a 1933 Logan graduate and Grace was a 1934 graduate. Chester Jr was a 1959 graduate, and middle brother Don was a 1964 graduate.

I speak and read enough Japanese to get around, and so on June 5, 2025, I was in the Japanese language online JACAR archives looking for something else entirely. Then I spotted a Japanese after-action report about an attack on a convoy by American planes, and when reading it I realized it was showing the sinking of the hellship Hofuku Maru on September 21, 1944. The wreck is holding about 800 UK and Dutch POWs, lost since WWII. It is 30 miles south of where it was thought to have been sunk since WWII. I found the Japanese report only because of that coincidence of the September 21 dates of father and son from La Crosse, and now this hellship wreck. After that initial discovery, our Hellships Memorial Foundation team of myself, Randy Anderson and Tim Beckensall did a tremendous amount of research and then the Discovery Channel helped starting in January of this year. Tim and I are on this page, and Randy is on the Media page, in the upper left film https://www.hellshipsmemorial.org/blog

Following up on the Hofuku Maru discovery, I did more digging and am just finishing up a research mission to the Philippines, along the northwest coast of Mindanao. We are searching for another hellship, the Shinyo Maru which is holding about 600 American POWs including two 1940 West Point classmates of Chester Britt. I’ll be back here in mid-July to help with the search for the actual wreck with the equipment needed to find and document it. This is happening because of the Hofuku Maru discovery and was made possible by the sponsorship of the PMG Foundation of La Crosse.

I expect the next two years will be very busy searching for the wreck sites of at least six more hellships, with many more trips to the Pacific around the Philippines, Taiwan and Japan. These other ships are holding the remains of about 10,000 POW heroes and civilian prisoners from the opening months of combat in the Philippines and other places in the Pacific.

After being gone for a month, I will finally be back home to our little slice of heaven at 104 Red Rock Rd, High Rolls, NM, 6600 feet up in the mountains of New Mexico. While I've been gone, my wife Judy has taken care of our vacation rental and the cats. I'll be happy to be home and able to pitch in again.

 

''Many Thanks'' for this detailed and superb response.

 

An interesting thread by a Japanese researcher, noting that the Japanese troop losses in sinkings were also very high, as the construction of accommodation and cramming of men into the holds followed the same policy, whether the men were Japanese soldiers, POWs, or slave labourers.

hush (@hush-ndb.bsky.social)

All the best

Andreas

 

This is what I posted on our Facebook page today PHILIPPINES MIA SEARCH AND RECOVERY PROJECT

I would ask anyone interested in the Hofuku Maru to follow that Facebook site, and please forward this on to anyone you know who might be interested. Thanks, John Duresky


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In the coming weeks and months, there is a great deal of information which the Hellships Memorial Foundation will be rolling out about the hellship Hofuku Maru (aka Toyofuku Maru). https://www.hellshipsmemorial.org The information will be of interest to relatives, researchers and historians and others. For this detailed work, we ask your patience as we do it as accurately and thoroughly as possible so that the story of the brave men in that ship becomes fully known. Everything below will be greatly expanded with far more details in the coming months of reports.

The Hofuku Maru voyage began ironically on July 4, 1944, America's Independence Day, and ended under the waves on the morning of September 21, 1944, sunk by American carrier-based pilots who did not know the ship held POWs from England as well as the Netherlands. However, the story of the Hofuku Maru men includes death and tragedy between July 4 and September 20, and continues on after the sinking with the survivors in POW camps in the Philippines, Taiwan, Japan and Manchuria, and survivors who went later in other hellships with more deaths, until the fortunate survivors were finally liberated.

Below are some key pieces of information which after 82 years will finally let the families of these men know how they were found, what happened to them, and where they been since that day.

The Hofuku Maru is lying in about 150 feet of water, at coordinates 15° 00.920'N, 120° 01.922'E about 2 nautical miles west of La Paz, Zambales Province, Philippines, as provided by the Sea Scan Survey team. It is split in half by at least one torpedo hit from an American plane, buried in silt up to the top deck, a mangled and torn up wreck with almost everything collapsed onto the deck or in the silt around it. By our estimates after reviewing a variety of POW statements, the Japanese records, and the records of the American pilots, the Hofuku Maru was hit by two torpedoes and at least one bomb. These mangled ship sections are the sacred Maritime Graves holding the remains of hundreds of UK, Netherlands and Japanese men.

That location is only about 250 yards from the location given on the backs of the POW death cards of the men killed in the sinking. See attached example of a POW card, this one recording the death of Gunner Ernest Goodland from Exeter England, who served with 135 Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, and a Google Earth screen capture showing some key locations. Sadly, there are about 800 such cards with those coordinates marking the final moments of UK and Netherlands heroes.

The location has been wrongly identified since 1947 as being about 30 miles further north up the coast. This error was primarily due to the fact that the surviving men simply didn't know where they were. They perhaps knew the geography around Singapore and the Dutch East Indies, but they knew little or nothing of Philippine geography. In post-liberation interviews, they gave the sinking location in places as distant as 30 miles to the east and 100 miles to the north. Then it seems someone in 1947 gave the official location in a spot about 30 miles north of where it actually sank, maybe it seemed like a reasonable guess based on all the conflicting locations given by the former POWs. This is the 1947 report detailing all the Imperial Japanese warships, freighters and tankers sunk during WWII In there it shows the Hofuku Maru sunk at 15-25N, 119-50E ( 15°25'0.00"N, 119°50'00.00"E ) That is 27 Nautical miles from where it lies. Other sources give it as sinking around Masinloc which is 33 nautical miles from the sinking location. If you scroll through the list, the sheer number of sunken ships the committee had to record is beyond belief, and it is easy to see how mistakes could be made. https://www.history.navy.mil/resear...nese-naval-merchant-shipping-losses-wwii.html
How it was found by the Hellships Memorial Foundation is a three-part story.

PART ONE begins on September 21, 1941, when Grace Britt of La Crosse, Wisconsin, gave birth to Chester Britt, Jr. She had been evacuated from the Philippines in May 1941 and returned home. On Grande Island in Subic Bay, remained her husband, Army 1Lt Chester K Britt. Chester fought on Bataan, was on the Bataan Death March, and spent over two years in POW camps in the Philippines. Then on September 21, 1944, Chester and other POWs saw the first American planes overhead since the fall of the Philippines in 1942. The odd coincidence of the September 21 date tied to these two father-son events was cemented in my brain. I learned of these dates while helping my 1967 La Crosse Logan High School classmate and friend Dave Britt, the youngest son of Chester and Grace, write his book about his parents and their lived before, during and after WWII, entitled RELENTLESS HOPE - A True Story of War and Survival, by David Britt, for which I was the main researcher. The book was published in August 2021.

My interest in the Philippines and that important period of WWII for American had continued to increase and I became part of a group working with Randy Anderson, the founder of the Hellships Memorial. I was continuing to do research for the Hellships Memorial Foundation working from my home in High Rolls, New Mexico, 6600 feet up on a mountain and 600 miles from the Pacific. Randy Anderson, Tim Beckensall, Kevin Hamdorf, and Rhonie Dela Cruz of the Hellships Memorial Foundation were then in the Philippines. Tim and Kevin are Aussies so they go back and forth to the Philippines. Randy is a permanent resident of the Philippines. Rhonie is Filipino and operates the Bamban WWII Museum.
One goal of the Foundation was, and still is, to locate Navy pilot Lt John Frank Thompson, shot down in Subic Bay when attacking the hellship Oryoku Maru on December 14, 1944. On June 5, 2025, saw an image underwater that looked interesting, possibly another ship, and asked John to investigate it in the online Japanese-language JACAR archives. John studied, lived and worked in Japan for a number of years and so can read just enough Japanese to get the gist of things, and then dig more if need be.

I began looking for documents online in JACAR. I didn't find the ship in question, but a report of an attack on a convoy jumped out at me because of the date, September 21, 1944.

As I read it, I realized that I was looking at an attack on a convoy the same morning Prisoner of War Chester Britt was watching planes overhead about 70 miles away from the site of the convoy attack. As I read further, I realized it was the Japanese after-action report by kaibokan (frigate) CD-1 of the attack on convoy MATA-27 and it showed the sinking of the hellship Hofuku Maru. You can see the report here https://www.jacar.archives.go.jp/das/image/C08030592000#1 Scan down to page 24 to see a key page. Attached is that page marked up and in the lower right-hand section you can see the report by CD-1 of the sinking of the Toyofuku Maru/Hofuku Maru.

Some quick online checking also showed it was sunk 30 miles away from where it had been reported sunk since 1947 when an Army-Navy commission did a full report of all Japanese ships sunk during WWII as noted above.

PART TWO is where Randy took over. I wrote this to Randy, Tim, Kevin and Rhonie that day, "....This is the date Chester Britt and other POWs finally again saw American planes while they were working in a field near Cabanatuan. If I'm correct, Kevin you may have the hell ship the Toyofuku/Hofuku Maru lying below the water a short distance from your home....." Randy's reaction came as a surprise when he stated he knew of a wreck in that area. His friend Matt Gillan, owner and operator of the MOPE resort and dive shop on the shore of La Paz, Zambales, had found a wreck about 10 years earlier. https://www.facebook.com/MOPEbeach/ Matt told Randy it was split in half and terribly damaged, with little sticking up above the sand. Matt had thought it was just a routine wreck, and not a particularly interesting one. He had some photos and videos he took of the wreck. Matt also said there were no other wrecks in the area.

PART THREE is where Tim took over. Tim said he knew of a group, Sea Scan Survey - Commercial and Technical Diving team, which had made a sonar image of the wreck after Matt found it showing it in two large sections and with the GPS location. See attached 2016 sonar images from Sea Scan. https://www.seascansurvey.com/commercial-technical-diving.htm

So, in a matter of a few days, we had the Japanese report of the attack, sketches of the attack done by the Japanese escort ship kaibokan (frigate) CD-1, confirmation of the wreck where we expected it to be, damage like we expected, and a sonar image showing it laying in two pieces.
Then within a month we had acquired high-quality photos of the attack on the convoy and the Hofuku Maru from the U.S. National Archives. See the attached example, which is the only known photo of an entire Japanese convoy under attack with a hellship in it. The Hofuku Maru is the second one the convoy. CD-1 is the lead kaibokan which made the after-action report. Within a few minutes of this photo the Hofuku Maru was sunk and the men were either dead or fighting for their lives as they tried to stay afloat. There are more photos, but to understand this please wait for that part of the rollout as each photo requires a great deal of explanation. After some delay, Japanese ships saved and recaptured as many as they could in the sea, others were recaptured after the swam ashore near La Paz.

We also found the original attack records by pilots from the USS Bunker Hill (CV-17) and USS Intrepid (CV-11) which attacked the Hofuku Maru with torpedoes, bombs, and machine gun strafing. All of this happened during a period of about seven minutes, from first attack to sinking. During this time an American pilot and his radioman in the back seat were shot down and killed about a mile west of the convoy. See attached key page from the USS Bunker Hill pilots about those attacks. Later we will give both complete reports with explanations.

What has ensued since the original discovery in June 2025 has been months of exhausting and painstaking research to learn about (1) the first part of the voyage from July 4 to September 20, 1944, which had a good deal of horror attached to it before the sinking, (2) the events of the day of the sinking on September 21, 1944, and (3) to learn what happened to the men that survived the sinking.

This was a ship filled with true heroes who deserve to be remembered and honored. We will do our best to help make that happen. Despite all we have learned about Convoy MATA-27 and the hellship Hofuku Maru and the men in it, we know there is much more to be learned.
We sincerely thank the governments of the UK, Netherlands and Japan, Expedition Unknown of the Discovery Channel, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute for their incredible help and support. There will be many more people and organizations to thank as this story comes out.
On June 24 the Discovery Channel will broadcast the Season Premier of Expedition Unknown filmed on location where the wreck of the Hofuku Maru lies. You can read about it here https://press.wbd.com/us/media-release/lost-japanese-hellship-hofuku-maru-found-philippines-josh-gates-and-team-make?language_content_entity=en

"....The discovery of the Hōfuku Maru is documented as part of EXPEDITION UNKNOWN’s two-part season premiere, Hunt for the Hellships. Gates and his team will also be featuring the groundbreaking efforts of the US Military’s DPAA (Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency) to recover POW remains from another previously identified Hellship, the Ōryoku Maru, which sank in Subic Bay, Philippines. The season premiere of EXPEDITION UNKNOWN premieres Wednesday, June 24 at 9PM ET/PT on Discovery Channel...."

To the families of these men, we can only say you have a great deal to be proud about for them and their actions in combat and as POWs.

Future updates will be posted on our Facebook page PHILIPPINES MIA SEARCH AND RECOVERY PROJECT

Respectfully, John Duresky and everyone in the Hellships Memorial Foundation team