Hellship

The pack-jammed convict ships which once plied between Britain's jails and the prison pens of Botany Bay had nothing on the destroyer Yoizuki. She was a hell-ship to match the worst of them. Sailing from Sydney last week, the reconditioned 3,000-ton Jap warship had room for only about a third of the 1,005 homeward-bound Formosans, Filipinos and Jap P.O.W.s crammed aboard her. In the hot, fetid holds there was little air, no toilets and barely enough water.

At the Sydney dockside where the Yoizuki loaded, bewildered men, women & children sobbed and pleaded as young Aussie officers, with no taste for the job, forced them aboard. One desperate passenger tried suicide.

The appalling scene sent newsmen scurrying from the wharf to fill luridly indignant columns. For four days the story raged. High Army brass seemed to think it was all a teapot-tempest. "Conditions," they said, "are no worse than the Japs accustomed others to." At Canberra the Government seemed to share this eye-for-an-eye philosophy. Officials turned their faces resolutely away from a blizzard of protesting telegrams, tried vainly to shift the blame to the Jap authorities, MacArthur, the Chinese or anyone else handy. Complained one M.P.: "The Government should have forbidden the press to cover the story."

On her third day out, in response to a plea by MacArthur, the Yoizuki put into a New Guinea port. Authorities considered transferring her 400-odd women, children and "heads of families" to a hospital ship.

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