Tom Tallerico

“Beneath the waterline, they were also able to hear, at a distance, the turbulence of a strengthening typhoon. At twenty knots, the captain steered directly toward the storm, and the rest of the little fleet followed, in a desperate effort to render targeting by the submarines impossible by driving straight into the storm’s towering waves. Of Baxter’s estimated thirty ships that started out from Java, soon only five remained, en route to what was rumored to be a work-to-death coal mine somewhere on mainland Japan. During the storm, prisoners actually heard, through the hull, ships being sunk by wind and waves and imploding before they dropped just a few hundred feet below. They heard large deck structures torn off their own ship and washed over the side. The shifting piles of caustic bauxite kicked up immense quantities of dust and threatened to suffocate them if the stench of uprooted makeshift latrines did not do so first. Baxter tried to console his companions by remarking, “Somewhere, there is always someone worse off than ourselves.”
― Charles Pellegrino, Ghosts of Hiroshima