Still Entombed: A News Review of the Hunt for America's WWII Hell Ship Dead
Eight decades after American bombs unknowingly sent over 1,600 Allied prisoners to the bottom of Subic Bay, the Pentagon has launched one of its largest-ever underwater recovery operations to bring some of them home. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) announced on February 24 that it had dispatched a team of 15 specialist divers aboard the salvage vessel USNS Salvor to begin excavating the wreck of Ōryoku Maru, a Japanese hell ship sunk in Subic Bay in December 1944.
As many as 250 American POWs are believed to still lie entombed within the wreck, and as Gizmodo's Matthew Phelan reports, the full recovery effort could take "months or years." The mission is a joint undertaking with the Philippine government — a point the Inquirer's Gabryelle Dumalag notes the U.S. Embassy in Manila highlighted prominently, underscoring the diplomatic as well as humanitarian weight of the operation.
The history behind the wreck is devastating. As Stars and Stripes correspondent Seth Robson details, Ōryoku Maru left Manila on December 13, 1944, with 1,600 POWs — most of them Bataan Death March survivors — jammed into its holds, which the U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command describes as "floating dungeons, where inmates were denied air, space, light, bathroom facilities, and adequate food and water."
Two days later, Navy dive bombers from USS Hornet and USS Cabot struck the ship in 17 air attacks across three days, with the pilots unaware that their own countrymen were below decks. The South China Morning Post's Julian Ryall adds grim texture: launched in the 1930s as a luxury liner on Japan–U.S. west coast routes, Ōryoku Maru had been requisitioned early in the war — first as a troopship, then as one of roughly 134 hell ships that transported an estimated 126,000 Allied prisoners. By war's end, only 128 survivors of Ōryoku Maru could be found.
The recovery itself is a formidable undertaking. The wreck sits just 550 yards from shore at a maximum depth of 90 feet — shallow enough to seem manageable, but the site was deliberately demolished decades ago to protect passing commercial vessels, leaving a tangled mass of steel choked with silt from a nearby river outflow.
The DPAA mission is not a salvage operation.
It is a forensic recovery effort—methodical, deliberate, and guided by strict protocols designed to preserve both evidence and dignity.For the families still waiting, the mission is, as the DPAA put it, the beginning of "the fullest possible accounting" — even if that accounting may take years more to complete.
DPAA Director Kelly McKeague, a retired Air Force major general, told Hawai'i Public Radio that the DPAA's laboratory at Pearl Harbor — the largest skeletal laboratory in the world — stands ready to analyze whatever the divers can bring up. The Inquirer further notes that the DPAA had success in recent years identifying POWs from other hell ships such as the Enoura Maru and Brazil Maru, naming four soldiers returned to their families as recently as last year. As Gizmodo's Phelan rightly flags, however, the legal and forensic road ahead is complicated: "commingled group remains" have posed significant DNA challenges in previous missions, and the question of what 80 years of briny decay has left behind remains open.
“This mission represents our solemn commitment to provide the fullest possible accounting to families and the nation,” said U.S. Army Capt. Barrett Breland, DPAA team leader for the Oryoku Maru recovery. “We carry this responsibility with compassion and integrity, and our success depends on strong partnerships and unwavering respect for the fallen.”
The DPAA mission is not a salvage operation.
It is a forensic recovery effort—methodical, deliberate, and guided by strict protocols designed to preserve both evidence and dignity.For the families still waiting, the mission is, as the DPAA put it, the beginning of "the fullest possible accounting" — even if that accounting may take years more to complete.
