Japanese Sailors lined up to watch men die among the sharks There did not seem to be much of a chance for young Denton Isaac and his 55 shipmates. Torpedoes from a Japanese submarine had sunk their ship 200 miles from land. Then the submarine drove straight at their boat, there was just time for everybody to jump for it before the smash came. Lined up on the moonlit deck, the Japs waited for the sharks to come, the sharks that had been swarming around for days. But the spectacle they had arranged never happened. No sharks came. Instead, there was the hum of an R.A.F. reconnaissance plane, and that Japanese submarine crash dived. Within a few hours rescue speedboats had picked up the survivors of the British ship. Denton Isaac, a 22 year old fourth engineer came home safe to Woodside, avenue, Newcastle on Tyne. Here he filled in for a newspaper reporter the details of his 1,000 to one escape from Japanese ingenuity. "We’d been sailing in the tropics for several days," he said, and nearly all the time the sharks were following us, hundreds of them. "After the torpedoes, our ship didn’t float long, but most of us got into the boat. The captain and two others were missing. Crew Lined Up “Our minds were pretty well pre-occupied with those sharks. But… they’d gone! I suppose they had been scared away by the explosions and torpedoes. Then the fun began. The submarine surfaced. In a few moments the crew lined up on deck. They were wearing their whites. We wondered what was going to happen… The submarine swung round to make speed, and then came straight at our boat, a great bow wave curling from her foot. One of our officers shouted, ‘We’ll have to jump.’ We did. The submarine, smashed our boat to pieces, and all the time the flat faced Japs stood there watching. As we swam about we could see them scanning the sea for sharks. They could have machine gunned us, but, that wasn’t their Idea It was the sharks they wanted. We stuck it nearly two hours but it couldn’t have gone on much longer. It was almost dawn when we heard the distant hum of a plane. Long before we spotted it, the Jap crew scrambled below and the submarine crash dived. We saw it was one of our planes. Then the pilot circled round and made off at top speed. We got another shock just afterwards. Not far away we saw what looked like the periscope of a second submarine. Soon in better light, we saw that it was our captain with the two other missing chaps on a raft. We all got on to the raft, 56 of us, not a casualty. Within a few hours two black and yellow speed-boats bearing the red, white, and blue rings of the RA.F. came thundering across the water to the raft.” Soon the 56 men were on the way to land at more than 40 miles an hour. The R.A.F. Air-Sea Rescue Service had pulled off another scoop. “The funny thing was," said. 4th Engineer Isaac, “none of us had the faintest idea that the R.A.F. had air, sea rescue stations out there. It was the biggest surprise of the lot.” Daily Mail: 02/01/1943
I don't know if the tale about the sharks is true as we all know how newspapers work, but if the ramming of the boat is true i believe this to more of a crime that the above. Some terrible things happen in wars, some can't be helped, but the crimes like above are needless and done by evil people who deserved their sentences after the wars end.
