General Discussions
This is the place to discuss general issues related to the U-boat war or the war at sea in WWII.
Re: Italian subs machinegun survivors
Posted by:
J.T. McDaniel
()
Date: July 07, 2003 11:46PM
<HTML>Some times, unfortunately, Blair isn't the best source. There's an interesting article on this incident in the new (July 2003) USNI Proceedings. Dick O'Kane said that the order was to destroy the lifeboats, not to kill the men in the water or the boats, though you'd obviously expect some of that to happen in the process. O'Kane stated that no one was deliberately shot.
The 10,000 figure was off by an order of magnitude. Buyo Maru carried 1,126 men, most of them, even more unfortunately, not Japanese troops, but Indian POWs captured at Singapore. The actual toll was 195 Indian troops and 87 Japanese lost. The rest were rescued, though the Japanese troops would have lost most of their equipment in the sinking. That total, by the way, includes the men killed when the ship was torpedoed, those who went down with her, and some who were killed in fights between the prisoners and the Japanese after the ship was sunk.
There was no condemnation of Morton's actions at the time, since it was presumed that any enemy troops who survived would have gone on to fight against our own men. Morton was also a very successful commander, and one of the most aggressive submariners the U.S. Navy produced during the war. (How much of that success was actually attributable to his XO, O'Kane, who was on the periscope during the attacks, and who would go on to become the most successful American commander of the war before losing his own boat, Tang, to a circular running torpedo, will probably never be known.)
J.T. McDaniel</HTML>
The 10,000 figure was off by an order of magnitude. Buyo Maru carried 1,126 men, most of them, even more unfortunately, not Japanese troops, but Indian POWs captured at Singapore. The actual toll was 195 Indian troops and 87 Japanese lost. The rest were rescued, though the Japanese troops would have lost most of their equipment in the sinking. That total, by the way, includes the men killed when the ship was torpedoed, those who went down with her, and some who were killed in fights between the prisoners and the Japanese after the ship was sunk.
There was no condemnation of Morton's actions at the time, since it was presumed that any enemy troops who survived would have gone on to fight against our own men. Morton was also a very successful commander, and one of the most aggressive submariners the U.S. Navy produced during the war. (How much of that success was actually attributable to his XO, O'Kane, who was on the periscope during the attacks, and who would go on to become the most successful American commander of the war before losing his own boat, Tang, to a circular running torpedo, will probably never be known.)
J.T. McDaniel</HTML>
