Sinking
The Allies intercepted a message about the Shinyo Maru and, thinking it was carrying enemy soldiers, the USS Paddle attacked it on September 7, 1944 off the coast of Mindanao. There were 750 American prisoners of war aboard. Some Japanese guards shot prisoners as they struggled from the holds or were in the water; 688 died when the ship sank, leaving only 82 survivors; 47 of 52 Japanese guards died.
A December 1944 annotation in US military records indicates that an intelligence failure helped contribute to the mis-target of the Japanese transport ship filled with US POWs by the US submarine. " note was added to the message of September 6 that Fleet Radio Unit Pacific (FRUPAC) interpreted as ""SHINYOO MARU (750 troops for Manila via Cebu." In pencil was written: "FRUEF (31 Dec '44) gets 750 Ps/W"! FRUPAC misinterpreted this crucial part of the message with fatal consequences."
On September 7, 2000, 14 survivors gathered at Jacksonville Naval Air Station for the eighth, and final, formal survivors reunion.
Read more about this topic: Shinyo Maru
Famous quotes containing the word sinking:
“We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying, even to someone opposite, what we think, then how little we are able to convey! The phantom is through the mind and out of the window before we can lay salt on its tail, or slowly sinking and returning to the profound darkness which it has lit up momentarily with a wandering light.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“I consider that that “that” that worries us so much should be forgotten. Rats desert a sinking ship. Thats infest a sinking magazine.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“We ask for no statistics of the killed,
For nothing political impinges on
This single casualty, or all those gone,
Missing or healing, sinking or dispersed,
Hundreds of thousands counted, millions lost.”
—Karl Shapiro (b. 1913)