Families of British POWs ‘murdered at sea’ by Japan WWII military still seeking apology, answers

More than 80 years after the sinking of the “hell ship” the Suez Maru off the coast of Java, Jacquelyn Frith-Crofts is demanding to know why one of the worst war crimes of World War II was not prosecuted and eventually covered up by successive British governments.

Frith-Crofts, whose great uncle Jack and hundreds of Allied prisoners of war aboard the ship were shot in the water by their Japanese captors, says she and other victims’ families are horrified by the British government’s decision shortly after the war to allow the Japanese perpetrators to go free despite having more than enough evidence for a war crimes trial.

Earlier this month, the archaeology research postgraduate at the University of Liverpool delivered a petition signed by 320 relatives of the dead men to Downing Street, the latest in a long series of approaches since 2002 demanding answers to the government’s handling of the conflict and failure to inform the victim’s families about the true fate of their loved ones.

Dealing with the British government has been “frustrating”, Frith-Crofts tells This Week in Asia, as she waits for a response to her February 9 petition. Her great uncle Jack had been a gunner in the Royal Artillery until he was captured.

“There are many questions that have not been answered. Or even acknowledged,” she said.

Yet, the facts of the Suez Maru sinking are today not in doubt.

Launched in 1919, the Suez Maru was a 4,645-ton passenger-cargo ship that was requisitioned by the Japanese government at the outbreak of the war in the Pacific. On November 25, 1943, it took on 547 POWs from Ambon, in what is today Indonesia, bound for Surabaya in East Java.

The Suez Maru was one of many “hell ships”, a term that describes the vessels used by the