Researchers discovered In the South China Sea, the wreck of the Japanese ship Montevideo Maru, which was sunk by the US Navy with 1,060 prisoners during WWII. This was announced by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Saturday, April 22. TASS.
“Finally a resting place for lost souls [и судна] Montevideo Maru found.
Of the 1,060 prisoners on board, 850 were Australian soldiers whose lives were cut short. hope news [о находке обломков] bring comfort to loved ones,” Albanese tweeted.
The ship’s wreckage was found off the northwest coast of Luzon by a team of researchers affiliated with the non-profit Silentworld Foundation, after 12 days of intense searches near the place where Montevideo Maru died, off the Philippines. .
As the Australian Ministry of Defense stated, the debris will not be moved and no work is planned to take it deeper than 4,000 meters.
Australia’s worst maritime disaster
The Montevideo Maru was a Japanese auxiliary ship sunk by the United States Navy in July 1942. As a result, 1,060 people, both prisoners of war and civilians, who were transferred from Rabaul to Hainan, drowned. Of these, 979 were Australian citizens (850 military personnel and 129 civilians).
This tragedy is considered Australia’s worst maritime disaster. In memory of their victims, two military monuments were erected in the country – in Melbourne and Ballarat (Victoria).
Before the war, the Montevideo Maru operated primarily as a passenger and cargo ship navigating between Japan and Brazil, carrying Japanese immigrants. With a displacement of 7,267 tons, the ship was built at Mitsubishi Zosen Kakoki Kaisha shipyard in Nagasaki and launched in 1926.
The 130 m long and 17 m wide ship is equipped with two Mitsubishi-Sulzer 6ST60 six-cylinder diesel engines producing a total power of 4,600 horsepower and giving it a speed of 26.9 km/h.
This ship participated in the invasion of Makassar in February 1942. It completed a series of transport missions before it sank.
On 22 June 1942, a few weeks after Rabaul was captured by the Japanese, many Australian POWs were sent to Montevideo Maru. The ship was en route to the Chinese island of Hainan, unaccompanied, to meet an escort of two destroyers. On June 30, it was spotted by the American submarine Sturgeon off the northern Philippine coast.
Unaware that the ship was carrying Allied POWs and civilians, Sturgeon fired four torpedoes at the Montevideo Maru before dawn on 1 July, sinking the ship in just 11 minutes.
“There were more POWs in the water than crew. The POWs held pieces of wood and used larger pieces as rafts. They sang in groups of 20-30, maybe 100 in total. “Auld Lang Syne” (“Good Old Times”) to commemorate their deceased colleagues. I was especially impressed when they began to sing ” – “socialbites.ca”).
Looking at it, I learned that Australians have a big heart,” said ruined crew member Yoshiaki Yamaji in October 2003.
Of the 88 bodyguards and crew on board, about 20 are known to have survived. It took 70 years to determine the exact death toll.
Thus, in 2010, Australian Defense Minister Alan Griffin stated that “there is no definitively approved list”. But in 2012, the Japanese government handed over thousands of POW documents to Australian authorities. Among them was the Montevideo Maru manifest, which listed the names of all Australians on board.