Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• The Hellship Memorial Foundation led the search for the Japanese freighter Hofuku Maru.
• The Hofuku Maru was one of more than 130 cargo ships the Japanese converted to serve as floating concentration camps for Allied prisoners during World War II.
• Detailed Japanese military records helped locate the lost ship.

On the morning of September 21, 1944, more than 1,200 British and Dutch prisoners of war were packed into two stifling cargo holds below the deck of the Hofuku Maru. The men were so tightly crammed that they took turns lying down. They received three-quarters of a pint of water per day. Many had already spent months building the Burma-Thailand “Death Railway,” and now they were being ferried north toward Japan in a ship painted to look like a warship. It was invisible to the outside world as a vessel carrying human beings.

The Hofuku Maru was one of more than 130 Japanese “hellships,” cargo freighters and passenger liners converted into floating concentration camps to shuttle Allied prisoners between forced labor sites across South Asia. The ships bore no markings identifying their human cargo. To Allied pilots flying overhead, they looked like legitimate military targets.

That morning, roughly 40 U.S. carrier-based aircraft from Task Force 38 descended on the Japanese convoy off the western coast of Luzon. A torpedo struck the Hofuku Maru and split the freighter in two. It sank in less than three minutes. More than 1,000 Allied prisoners were still trapped in the holds. Fewer than 300 survived, some by swimming to shore, only to be recaptured by Japanese forces.

And then the Hofuku Maru vanished from history.

Postwar records were fragmentary and contradictory. Japanese operational logs had been scattered or destroyed. Allied strike reports gave only approximate coordinates. Survivor testimonies, shaped by trauma and the chaos of the attack, disagreed on basic details. For eight decades, the families of more than 1,000 dead servicemen had no grave to visit, only memorials and symbolic remembrance. The Hofuku Maru became one of the largest undiscovered hellship wrecks of World War II, its resting place a question mark on the map of the Pacific.

The answer, it turned out, had been sitting in a digitized Japanese military document all along.

In 2025, researchers from the Hellships Memorial Foundation, an organization founded by retired naval officer Randy Anderson, uncovered a record written by officers aboard the convoy’s lead ship. It included a timeline, a map of the attack, and a detail no one had previously noticed: the Hofuku Maru was the second vessel in line when it was hit. Cross-referenced with an aircraft action report from the USS Bunker Hill, which described sinking an auxiliary cargo vessel during the same strike, the evidence pointed to a location more than 30 miles south of where historians had long believed the ship went down.

“We were absolutely stunned that Japanese sources had information on where the convoy was attacked and what ships were hit,” Anderson said. “This was a smoking gun.”

Armed with new coordinates, a dive team—joined by television explorer Josh Gates and underwater imaging specialist Evan Kovacs—deployed sonar off the Philippines’ Zambales province and found an uncharted wreck 160 feet below the surface. Five deepwater dives followed. Volcanic ash from the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo had blanketed parts of the site, but the team captured hundreds of images and built a detailed 3D photogrammetry model. The wreck’s dimensions, mast positions, and cargo hold arrangement matched the original 1918 shipyard blueprints of the Hofuku Maru. And, critically, the hull was broken cleanly into two sections, exactly as both American and Japanese accounts described.

“The pieces all fit,” said researcher Tim Beckensall. “The vessel is the right size, in the right place, and from the correct period. I am convinced this is the Hofuku Maru.”

The site is now classified as a war grave and cannot be disturbed. Divers reported encountering human remains on parts of the wreck but did not enter the cargo holds. The exact location has not been made public.

The hellships were notorious for brutally inhumane conditions. Officials believe roughly 20,000 Allied servicemen died aboard them during the war. More than 125,000 prisoners were transported on the vessels, sometimes confined for months at a time.

“The story of the hellships is a chapter in the history of WWII that demands to be brought to light,” Gates said. “The research and dives that led to this groundbreaking discovery can hopefully offer closure to the families of more than a thousand servicemen who made the ultimate sacrifice.”