What the Navy Did With Six Million Japanese Still Stranded Overseas When the War Ended

Two large passenger ships came through the war  still afloat. On the tenth of September 1945,   one of them lay at Maizuru on the Sea of Japan  with her wards empty and the red crosses still   painted along her sides. She was the Hikawa Maru,  built at Yokohama in 1929 for the Seattle run,   taken by the navy a fortnight before Pearl  Harbor and fitted out to carry the sick.

She had struck mines three times in four years  of war and had come home on each occasion,   saved by hull plating thicker than the  yards were building into anything else. That morning she took on stores and stood out  to sea under orders written eleven days earlier.   Six and a half million Japanese were outside  Japan, and somebody had to go and fetch them.

About half of that number wore uniforms,  standing down on atolls, in the hills of Luzon,   along the Yangtze, in Manchuria, in Java. The  rest were farmers and clerks and schoolteachers   and their children, scattered across an empire  that had taken fifty years to assemble and eight   days to lose. None of them could walk home.

Every  one of them had to cross salt water in something,   and the something did not exist. There  was paperwork before there were ships:   reception ports were named that autumn,  quarantine duties allotted, and one of the   names on the list was Uraga, a small town  on a peninsula at the mouth of Tokyo Bay. Seventeen days out, the Hikawa Maru  anchored off Mille in the Marshall Islands.

The garrison there had been bypassed in 1944  and left to itself, out of reach of its own   supply and never worth the cost of an assault.  Its men had spent a year and a half growing what   they could eat in coral sand and listening to  aircraft that had stopped bothering to attack   them. She loaded and sailed the same day.

On the  seventh of October she put her passengers ashore   at Uraga, where a Marine regiment stood  on the wharf and watched them come off,   and by the end of the month she was at Wake,  and after Wake at Kusaie, and after Kusaie at   Wewak and Rabaul and Morotai and Halmahera  and Manado, atoll to island to anchorage,   down a list that looked like a table of  contents for the whole Pacific campaign.

The war had been over for six weeks  and the islands were still full. In   the Southwest Pacific alone the surrendered  garrisons ran to hundreds of thousands of   men who had been written off as beaten two  years earlier and were now, all at once,   an administrative problem with a  shipping requirement attached to it.

Not everyone liked it. American troops waiting  on their own passage back to the United States   complained that hulls were going to the  people they had been shooting at in August.   Officials answered that Asia would not  settle while the garrisons sat in it,   and that leaving them where they were would  keep more Americans overseas rather than fewer.

The ship’s file number under the new arrangement  was H-022, and she carried it stenciled on her   for the next two years. The arrangement itself  had a title so flat it barely registers as one:   the Shipping Control Authority for the Japanese  Merchant Marine, stood up under American naval   command that October.

Its first task  was to establish what Japan had left,   and that turned out to be harder than it sounds,  because the Navy Ministry had burned most of its   files in the last week of the war. The tally had  to be built by going port to port and asking local   officials what was tied up where, and the officers  doing the asking noted with some surprise that the   answers held up.

The ministry had destroyed  its papers to keep them from the Americans,   and then had to tell the Americans what had been  in them. The count found afloat and undamaged   one fleet carrier, one light carrier, a pair  of light cruisers, about thirty destroyers,   and more submarines than anything else. It came  out on the fourth of December as a printed list   of every surviving hull worth the fuel, and  that list is where the whole operation starts.

Merchant shipping was worse. What survived  amounted to splinters and small craft,   thousands of wooden coasters and harbor  boats under a hundred tons, almost none of   which could take a load of people across an  ocean and land them alive at the other end. The Navy’s answer was to give the fleet back.

At  a conference in Tokyo on the seventh of December,   the recommendation went up that surplus American  shipping be handed to the defeated enemy outright,   crewed by the enemy, and worked under American  control until the job was done. Nobody had   tried anything of the kind before, and there  was no legal machinery sitting ready for it. What arrived was a hundred and six Liberty ships  and a hundred landing ships, the flat-bottomed   kind with the doors in the front end, every  one of them already marked for scrapping or   for laying up in some backwater. Eighty-five  of the landing ships stayed on the run home

and the rest went to work supplying Korea.  Japanese yards cut them about for passengers,   building bunks into cargo spaces and washing  arrangements onto the decks. Instruments and   hatch markings were redone in kanji so  the new crews could make sense of what   they were looking at. Converted ships went  into service at about twenty-five a week.

Six of the Liberties were rebuilt as floating  hospitals with more than a thousand beds apiece,   and American officers ran training for  the crews who would take all of it over,   teaching a merchant service that had been sunk  out from under itself how to work ships built   to another country’s drawings.

By the end of  March the authority had enough capacity of its   own that the Seventh Fleet was released from the  work altogether and went back to being a fleet. Crews were the other half of the problem,  and the answer there was to stop the clock.   The Navy Ministry held thousands of its own  sailors back from demobilization so the ships   would have somebody aboard who understood them,  which meant that the men who carried the enemy   home were the same men who had been fighting a  fortnight before.

What remained of the Imperial   Japanese Navy went back to sea with the guns  taken off. The carriers Hosho and Katsuragi,   two of the handful that survived the  bombing, ran as ferries. Destroyers ran   as ferries. So did submarines that had  been disarmed and could no longer dive,   sent out on short daylight hauls where  nobody would have to sleep aboard.

Something else was moving in the  opposite direction. More than a   million people inside Japan, Koreans and Chinese  and Formosans brought there for wartime labor,   were waiting to leave, and they went out on  the same hulls that were coming in loaded. The American voyage home got a name, Magic  Carpet, and a place in every account of the   period. This one ran for two years under an  acronym and has never had either.

Prying out   the operations that were never given a  name is most of what this channel does,   so subscribe if that seems worth  having, and press like on the way past. The rising sun ensign had been abolished,  which left the question of what these ships   were supposed to fly. The answer came out of  the international signal book.

Hulls owned in   Japan and crewed by her sailors flew a blue and  red pennant taken from the flag for Echo. Hulls   owned by the United States and crewed the same  way flew red and green triangles taken from Oscar,   so that any Allied ship or aircraft could tell at  a glance which was which. Tokyo fed and supplied   the crews.

Fuel had to be bought through American  authorities, which kept a hand on the throttle   of the entire operation without anybody having to  give an order. Cargo hulls stayed out of the lift   on purpose, because a country with no food coming  in could not spare the few ships that were feeding   it. When a pair of these ships put into Hawaii for  repairs, the men aboard were not permitted ashore.

Then there was the water itself. General Order  Number One, issued the day the surrender was   signed, dissolved Japan’s armed forces and in the  same breath instructed her government to keep its   minesweeping organization in being, because the  approaches to the home islands were a killing   ground and everybody involved knew it.

B-29s  and American submarines had laid better than   ten thousand mines in those waters. Japan had  laid many times that number defending herself   and had cleared almost none of it. From November  the sweepers came under an American task group   and worked to a plan for the first time since  the surrender: ten thousand former navy men and   a few hundred small vessels under a mine warfare  specialist named Tamura, exempted from the purge   of officers because there was nobody else who  could do the job.

That work ran for years and   it killed men the whole way through. Ships kept  going down a few hundred yards off shore, in sight   of the people waiting for them. One ship struck  a mine near the China coast with four thousand   three hundred aboard, and twenty were lost, which  given the circumstances counted as a good day. The routes multiplied through the winter.

Ships came off the Pacific islands, out of   Shanghai and Canton, down from Keelung, and by  spring the northern routes were opening as well. Then, in April, a ship out of Canton  reached Uraga with cholera aboard,   and she was inside the harbor before anyone knew  it. Twenty ships were held at anchor offshore with   something like seventy thousand people aboard  them, near enough to the shore to make out the   hills behind it. About four hundred died out  there without setting foot in Japan.

The Public   Health and Welfare Section under Crawford Sams,  an Army doctor who had spent the previous autumn   arguing that Japan’s prewar quarantine stations  had lapsed during the war and needed rebuilding   before the sailing season, got his stations.  Ships out of infected Chinese ports went to   Uraga and Sasebo, and later Hakata, the three  places where facilities could be made to work.

Uraga earned its place because it sat on  a small peninsula and could be sealed off   from everything around it, which was the right  answer for disease and the wrong one for weather:   the anchorage was open, and the ships waiting in  it took the sea broadside for weeks. Laboratory   equipment able to handle thousands of cultures  a day was assembled at Uraga inside a few weeks,   and detention sheds went up beside it.

On  the wharves, every arriving passenger and   every piece of baggage got a dusting of DDT  powder, which is why the photographs from   those months show people standing in a white  haze with their arms held out from their sides. Formosa was its own kind of trouble. Hundreds  of thousands of Japanese civilians there had   been born on the island and had never seen  Japan, and most of them wanted to stay.

The Chinese authorities intended to keep  the useful ones and were charging the rest   for their passage and their inoculations, both of  which the United States was providing at no cost,   which produced a run of American  objections that went nowhere. The northern half of the map was worse and  slower.

Soviet troops had gone into Manchuria   in the last week of the war and showed  no interest in moving anybody out of it.   Not until they began pulling back in May  1946 could the lift up there start at all,   and when it did it ran on American shipping  through a single port, Huludao on the Manchurian   coast. People reached that port on foot.

Some  had walked from near the Soviet frontier,   better than a thousand miles, and had been living  rough through a Manchurian winter before there   was a ship in existence to take them off. On the  Japanese end the traffic came ashore at Hakata,   Senzaki, Sasebo, Uraga, Maizuru, Kagoshima and a  scatter of smaller places, each with its sheds,   its dusting station and its own bridge built  out over the water for people to walk down.

Who was actually running the shipping  authority is not settled in the American files.   The Pacific Fleet’s own report of February  1946 names Rear Admiral Donald Beary as its   administrator. The Navy’s biographical file  on Charles Momsen says that he was ordered to   that same post after the surrender and served in  Japan from November 1945 to October 1946.

A later   account splits the difference and puts Beary  in command with Momsen as his chief of staff.   The three do not reconcile, and nobody at the  time seems to have thought it worth sorting out. It was Momsen who put the number on paper. The  first reckoning had the job running until July   1947, which everybody treated as reasonable for  an operation that had begun with two serviceable   liners and a fleet of coastal junk, and in March  1946 he wrote that it would be finished that May.

He was near enough. Within a year of  that memorandum more than six million   people had been landed in Japan, and the  ships had also brought back the exhumed   remains of thousands of Japanese war dead from  islands nobody was ever going to visit again,   which the government in Tokyo had  asked for and had not expected to get.

The Hikawa Maru finished her last  government voyage in January 1947.   She went back to hauling cargo through  the lean years, then to passengers,   ran the Seattle line again in the fifties, and  came out of service in 1960 when people stopped   crossing the Pacific by ship.

She is tied  up at Yamashita Park in Yokohama today with   schoolchildren walking her decks, the last big  Japanese liner of her generation still in one   piece, and there is nothing aboard her that tells  anybody what she was doing in the autumn of 1945. The forecast came with one  exception written into it,   and the exception outlived everything else in the  file.

The people in Soviet hands were not coming,   whatever schedule the Navy drew up for  them. Manchuria, Sakhalin, the Kuriles,   then the camps, and men were still stepping onto  the bridge at Maizuru in 1958. The citation for   that year’s work credits its author with something  no other American officer of the war could claim,   “the safe and expeditious return of millions  of displaced persons to their homes.

” The man   who spent the 1930s working out how to pull  thirty-three sailors out of a sunken submarine   got six million people off a continent in eight  months, and the only part of his arithmetic that   ever failed was the part he had flagged  himself as the part he could not reach.

What the Navy Did With Six Million Japanese Still Stranded Overseas When the War Ended – YouTube

Transcripts:

Two large passenger ships came through the war  still afloat. On the tenth of September 1945,   one of them lay at Maizuru on the Sea of Japan  with her wards empty and the red crosses still   painted along her sides. She was the Hikawa Maru,  built at Yokohama in 1929 for the Seattle run,   taken by the navy a fortnight before Pearl  Harbor and fitted out to carry the sick.

She had struck mines three times in four years  of war and had come home on each occasion,   saved by hull plating thicker than the  yards were building into anything else. That morning she took on stores and stood out  to sea under orders written eleven days earlier.   Six and a half million Japanese were outside  Japan, and somebody had to go and fetch them.

About half of that number wore uniforms,  standing down on atolls, in the hills of Luzon,   along the Yangtze, in Manchuria, in Java. The  rest were farmers and clerks and schoolteachers   and their children, scattered across an empire  that had taken fifty years to assemble and eight   days to lose. None of them could walk home.

Every  one of them had to cross salt water in something,   and the something did not exist. There  was paperwork before there were ships:   reception ports were named that autumn,  quarantine duties allotted, and one of the   names on the list was Uraga, a small town  on a peninsula at the mouth of Tokyo Bay. Seventeen days out, the Hikawa Maru  anchored off Mille in the Marshall Islands.

The garrison there had been bypassed in 1944  and left to itself, out of reach of its own   supply and never worth the cost of an assault.  Its men had spent a year and a half growing what   they could eat in coral sand and listening to  aircraft that had stopped bothering to attack   them. She loaded and sailed the same day.

On the  seventh of October she put her passengers ashore   at Uraga, where a Marine regiment stood  on the wharf and watched them come off,   and by the end of the month she was at Wake,  and after Wake at Kusaie, and after Kusaie at   Wewak and Rabaul and Morotai and Halmahera  and Manado, atoll to island to anchorage,   down a list that looked like a table of  contents for the whole Pacific campaign.

The war had been over for six weeks  and the islands were still full. In   the Southwest Pacific alone the surrendered  garrisons ran to hundreds of thousands of   men who had been written off as beaten two  years earlier and were now, all at once,   an administrative problem with a  shipping requirement attached to it.

Not everyone liked it. American troops waiting  on their own passage back to the United States   complained that hulls were going to the  people they had been shooting at in August.   Officials answered that Asia would not  settle while the garrisons sat in it,   and that leaving them where they were would  keep more Americans overseas rather than fewer.

The ship’s file number under the new arrangement  was H-022, and she carried it stenciled on her   for the next two years. The arrangement itself  had a title so flat it barely registers as one:   the Shipping Control Authority for the Japanese  Merchant Marine, stood up under American naval   command that October.

Its first task  was to establish what Japan had left,   and that turned out to be harder than it sounds,  because the Navy Ministry had burned most of its   files in the last week of the war. The tally had  to be built by going port to port and asking local   officials what was tied up where, and the officers  doing the asking noted with some surprise that the   answers held up.

The ministry had destroyed  its papers to keep them from the Americans,   and then had to tell the Americans what had been  in them. The count found afloat and undamaged   one fleet carrier, one light carrier, a pair  of light cruisers, about thirty destroyers,   and more submarines than anything else. It came  out on the fourth of December as a printed list   of every surviving hull worth the fuel, and  that list is where the whole operation starts.

Merchant shipping was worse. What survived  amounted to splinters and small craft,   thousands of wooden coasters and harbor  boats under a hundred tons, almost none of   which could take a load of people across an  ocean and land them alive at the other end. The Navy’s answer was to give the fleet back.

At  a conference in Tokyo on the seventh of December,   the recommendation went up that surplus American  shipping be handed to the defeated enemy outright,   crewed by the enemy, and worked under American  control until the job was done. Nobody had   tried anything of the kind before, and there  was no legal machinery sitting ready for it. What arrived was a hundred and six Liberty ships  and a hundred landing ships, the flat-bottomed   kind with the doors in the front end, every  one of them already marked for scrapping or   for laying up in some backwater. Eighty-five  of the landing ships stayed on the run home

and the rest went to work supplying Korea.  Japanese yards cut them about for passengers,   building bunks into cargo spaces and washing  arrangements onto the decks. Instruments and   hatch markings were redone in kanji so  the new crews could make sense of what   they were looking at. Converted ships went  into service at about twenty-five a week.

Six of the Liberties were rebuilt as floating  hospitals with more than a thousand beds apiece,   and American officers ran training for  the crews who would take all of it over,   teaching a merchant service that had been sunk  out from under itself how to work ships built   to another country’s drawings.

By the end of  March the authority had enough capacity of its   own that the Seventh Fleet was released from the  work altogether and went back to being a fleet. Crews were the other half of the problem,  and the answer there was to stop the clock.   The Navy Ministry held thousands of its own  sailors back from demobilization so the ships   would have somebody aboard who understood them,  which meant that the men who carried the enemy   home were the same men who had been fighting a  fortnight before.

What remained of the Imperial   Japanese Navy went back to sea with the guns  taken off. The carriers Hosho and Katsuragi,   two of the handful that survived the  bombing, ran as ferries. Destroyers ran   as ferries. So did submarines that had  been disarmed and could no longer dive,   sent out on short daylight hauls where  nobody would have to sleep aboard.

Something else was moving in the  opposite direction. More than a   million people inside Japan, Koreans and Chinese  and Formosans brought there for wartime labor,   were waiting to leave, and they went out on  the same hulls that were coming in loaded. The American voyage home got a name, Magic  Carpet, and a place in every account of the   period. This one ran for two years under an  acronym and has never had either.

Prying out   the operations that were never given a  name is most of what this channel does,   so subscribe if that seems worth  having, and press like on the way past. The rising sun ensign had been abolished,  which left the question of what these ships   were supposed to fly. The answer came out of  the international signal book.

Hulls owned in   Japan and crewed by her sailors flew a blue and  red pennant taken from the flag for Echo. Hulls   owned by the United States and crewed the same  way flew red and green triangles taken from Oscar,   so that any Allied ship or aircraft could tell at  a glance which was which. Tokyo fed and supplied   the crews.

Fuel had to be bought through American  authorities, which kept a hand on the throttle   of the entire operation without anybody having to  give an order. Cargo hulls stayed out of the lift   on purpose, because a country with no food coming  in could not spare the few ships that were feeding   it. When a pair of these ships put into Hawaii for  repairs, the men aboard were not permitted ashore.

Then there was the water itself. General Order  Number One, issued the day the surrender was   signed, dissolved Japan’s armed forces and in the  same breath instructed her government to keep its   minesweeping organization in being, because the  approaches to the home islands were a killing   ground and everybody involved knew it.

B-29s  and American submarines had laid better than   ten thousand mines in those waters. Japan had  laid many times that number defending herself   and had cleared almost none of it. From November  the sweepers came under an American task group   and worked to a plan for the first time since  the surrender: ten thousand former navy men and   a few hundred small vessels under a mine warfare  specialist named Tamura, exempted from the purge   of officers because there was nobody else who  could do the job.

That work ran for years and   it killed men the whole way through. Ships kept  going down a few hundred yards off shore, in sight   of the people waiting for them. One ship struck  a mine near the China coast with four thousand   three hundred aboard, and twenty were lost, which  given the circumstances counted as a good day. The routes multiplied through the winter.

Ships came off the Pacific islands, out of   Shanghai and Canton, down from Keelung, and by  spring the northern routes were opening as well. Then, in April, a ship out of Canton  reached Uraga with cholera aboard,   and she was inside the harbor before anyone knew  it. Twenty ships were held at anchor offshore with   something like seventy thousand people aboard  them, near enough to the shore to make out the   hills behind it. About four hundred died out  there without setting foot in Japan.

The Public   Health and Welfare Section under Crawford Sams,  an Army doctor who had spent the previous autumn   arguing that Japan’s prewar quarantine stations  had lapsed during the war and needed rebuilding   before the sailing season, got his stations.  Ships out of infected Chinese ports went to   Uraga and Sasebo, and later Hakata, the three  places where facilities could be made to work.

Uraga earned its place because it sat on  a small peninsula and could be sealed off   from everything around it, which was the right  answer for disease and the wrong one for weather:   the anchorage was open, and the ships waiting in  it took the sea broadside for weeks. Laboratory   equipment able to handle thousands of cultures  a day was assembled at Uraga inside a few weeks,   and detention sheds went up beside it.

On  the wharves, every arriving passenger and   every piece of baggage got a dusting of DDT  powder, which is why the photographs from   those months show people standing in a white  haze with their arms held out from their sides. Formosa was its own kind of trouble. Hundreds  of thousands of Japanese civilians there had   been born on the island and had never seen  Japan, and most of them wanted to stay.

The Chinese authorities intended to keep  the useful ones and were charging the rest   for their passage and their inoculations, both of  which the United States was providing at no cost,   which produced a run of American  objections that went nowhere. The northern half of the map was worse and  slower.

Soviet troops had gone into Manchuria   in the last week of the war and showed  no interest in moving anybody out of it.   Not until they began pulling back in May  1946 could the lift up there start at all,   and when it did it ran on American shipping  through a single port, Huludao on the Manchurian   coast. People reached that port on foot.

Some  had walked from near the Soviet frontier,   better than a thousand miles, and had been living  rough through a Manchurian winter before there   was a ship in existence to take them off. On the  Japanese end the traffic came ashore at Hakata,   Senzaki, Sasebo, Uraga, Maizuru, Kagoshima and a  scatter of smaller places, each with its sheds,   its dusting station and its own bridge built  out over the water for people to walk down.

Who was actually running the shipping  authority is not settled in the American files.   The Pacific Fleet’s own report of February  1946 names Rear Admiral Donald Beary as its   administrator. The Navy’s biographical file  on Charles Momsen says that he was ordered to   that same post after the surrender and served in  Japan from November 1945 to October 1946.

A later   account splits the difference and puts Beary  in command with Momsen as his chief of staff.   The three do not reconcile, and nobody at the  time seems to have thought it worth sorting out. It was Momsen who put the number on paper. The  first reckoning had the job running until July   1947, which everybody treated as reasonable for  an operation that had begun with two serviceable   liners and a fleet of coastal junk, and in March  1946 he wrote that it would be finished that May.

He was near enough. Within a year of  that memorandum more than six million   people had been landed in Japan, and the  ships had also brought back the exhumed   remains of thousands of Japanese war dead from  islands nobody was ever going to visit again,   which the government in Tokyo had  asked for and had not expected to get.

The Hikawa Maru finished her last  government voyage in January 1947.   She went back to hauling cargo through  the lean years, then to passengers,   ran the Seattle line again in the fifties, and  came out of service in 1960 when people stopped   crossing the Pacific by ship.

She is tied  up at Yamashita Park in Yokohama today with   schoolchildren walking her decks, the last big  Japanese liner of her generation still in one   piece, and there is nothing aboard her that tells  anybody what she was doing in the autumn of 1945. The forecast came with one  exception written into it,   and the exception outlived everything else in the  file.

The people in Soviet hands were not coming,   whatever schedule the Navy drew up for  them. Manchuria, Sakhalin, the Kuriles,   then the camps, and men were still stepping onto  the bridge at Maizuru in 1958. The citation for   that year’s work credits its author with something  no other American officer of the war could claim,   “the safe and expeditious return of millions  of displaced persons to their homes.

” The man   who spent the 1930s working out how to pull  thirty-three sailors out of a sunken submarine   got six million people off a continent in eight  months, and the only part of his arithmetic that   ever failed was the part he had flagged  himself as the part he could not reach.