ANNOUNCING THE HELLSHIPS RESEARCH COMMUNITY

The Hellships Memorial Foundation is pleased to announce the launch of the Hellships Research Community—a new online forum bringing together POW families and descendants, historians, researchers, museums, veterans' organizations, maritime researchers, and everyone interested in preserving the history of the Japanese Hellships and the Allied prisoners of war who endured them.

This is not intended to be simply another place to talk about history. Our goal is to build a collaborative research community where people can ask questions, share discoveries, exchange photographs and documents, help identify POWs, reconstruct individual POW journeys, investigate POW camps, and contribute to continuing research into the Hellships and their wrecks.

WE NEED YOUR PARTICIPATION

A research community only becomes valuable when people participate.

Were your father, grandfather, uncle, or another relative a POW?

Are you researching a particular Hellship or POW camp?

Do you have wartime photographs, letters, diaries, military records, POW documents, maps, or family stories that others may never have seen?

Are you trying to discover what happened to a particular POW?

Perhaps you are a historian, researcher, diver, maritime archaeologist, sonar specialist, archivist—or simply someone interested in this history.

We invite you to join us.

The forum already includes areas devoted to POW & Family Research, individual Hellships, POW Camps, Archives, Documents & Photographs, and Maritime Archaeology & Wreck Research, along with a growing collection of research questions and historical discussions.

One of our most important goals is helping POW families.

If you know only your relative's name and a few details, that is enough to begin. Post what you know. Another member may have encountered that name in a POW roster, camp record, transport list, photograph, diary, or archival document.

And if you have been researching the Hellships or POW history for years, we especially encourage you to share your knowledge. A document sitting in one researcher's files may contain the answer another family has been seeking for decades.

JOIN THE HELLSHIPS RESEARCH COMMUNITY

https://hellshipsmemorial.discourse.group/

Registration and participation are free.

Please join, introduce yourself, tell us what brought you to this history, and make your first post or reply.

Our hope is that, over time, this community will become more than a forum. We want it to become a living historical research archive—connecting families and researchers while preserving information for future generations.

Connecting Families. Preserving History. Advancing Research.

They are no longer forgotten.