On September 21, 1944, a Japanese cargo ship called the Hōfuku Maru was sailing off the coast of the Philippines as part of a military convoy when American warplanes spotted it from above. What the pilots did not know could not have known was that the ship's dark, stifling holds were packed with over 1,200 British and Dutch prisoners of war, many of them survivors of the brutal Burma-Thailand Death Railway. A single torpedo cut the vessel in half. It went under in less than three minutes, taking more than 1,000 men with it. For over eight decades, the wreck sat undisturbed on the seafloor, its exact location lost to conflicting records, forgotten archives, and the fog of war. In 2026, a digitised Japanese document changed all of that.
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