Divers have found the Japanese Hellship from WWII in the Philippines
After years of historical research, archival investigation, and field surveys, the Hellships Memorial Foundation has identified the wreck of the Japanese merchant freighter Hōfuku Maru, one of the most tragic Hellships of World War II
On 21 September 1944, the Hofuku Maru was sailing as the second ship in a Japanese convoy off the western coast of Luzon. On board were more than 1,000 British and over 200 Dutch prisoners of war, many of them already weakened after being forced to work on the so‑called Burma–Thailand “Death Railway”.
The ship carried no markings to identify it as a prisoner transport.
When aircraft from Task Force 38 of the US Navy attacked the convoy, they fired their torpedoes at what, to them, was a legitimate military target. One torpedo struck the hull of the Hofuku Maru.
The ship broke in two and sunk in less than three minutes. Of the 1,289 prisoners on board, 1,047 died. Those who managed to swim to shore were recaptured by Japanese forces.
More than 130 Japanese cargo vessels and passenger liners were converted to transport prisoners. Of the more than 125,000 Allied prisoners shipped on these vessels, around 20,000 died during the crossings.
The prisoners themselves called them Hellships. This story remains one of the least known episodes of the Second World War.
The document that changed everything
For eight decades the wreck remained undiscovered. Post‑war records were fragmentary and contradictory, Allied action reports gave only approximate coordinates, and survivors’ testimonies differed on basic details.
In 2025 researcher John Duresky, a collaborator of the Hellships Memorial Foundation, came across a digitised Japanese document that no one had examined closely. Written by officers on board the convoy’s flagship, it set out a timeline and a map of the attack .
The team concluded that the wreck had to be more than 50 kilometres south of the area where historians had searched until then.\ Confirmed the location of the wreck off the coast of San Narciso, Zambales, Philippines.
The wreck was found broken in two – or in three sections, according to some team members – which tallied with both American and Japanese accounts of its sinking.
The site is now recognized as a protected maritime war grave. No artifacts were removed. Human remains were documented but left undisturbed.
The Hellships Memorial Foundation will begin contacting the families of the dead.
FiveHellships wrecks are still unaccounted for.