AUSTRALIA: 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...

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