Tragedy of the Montevideo Maru, The (ATOM Study Guide)

The Tragedy of the Montevideo Maru (David Napier, 2009) is a 75-minute documentary film about Australia's worst ever naval disaster – the death of 1053 prisoners of war and interned civilians, nearly all Australian, in the Japanese ship Montevideo Maru.

In 1941, thousands of Australian troops and nurses were stationed in Malaya, and at Ambon, Timor, Papua and Rabaul. Their task would be to fight Japan if it entered the war – which it did in December 1941.

22,000 of these troops were quickly captured during the first Japanese invasions of the area. Many of the men who had attempted to escape from Rabaul were murdered in the Tol plantation massacre. Most of those captured were being sent to work as slave labour on Hainan. The ship carrying the men – the Montevideo Maru – was not identified as being a prisoner of war ship. A United States submarine tracked it, and when it slowed down to rendezvous with naval escorts, the submarine sank it.

The prisoners, crowded below decks, suffered as the torpedoes struck and none of those who escaped the sinking ship survived.

The film also looks at the sinking of another Japanese POW ship, the Rakuyo Maru, carrying prisoners from Singapore to Japan. This ship was also torpedoed but amazingly there were prisoners who were rescued, after several harrowing days clinging to wreckage.

The film tells a little-known part of the Australian story, and in doing so raises issues about behaviour in war that are relevant today.

The film includes archival photographs and footage, interviews with survivors of the Rabaul POW experience, and reconstructions of both combat situations, the Tol massacre, the conditions aboard the Japanese hell ships, and the struggle for survival and eventual rescue of some of the POWs from the Rakuyo Maru.

CURRICULUM APPLICABILITY

The Tragedy of the Montevideo Maru is an appropriate resource for students in middle–senior secondary classes in:

• History/SOSE/HSIE (Australia and World War Two)
• English (the theme of war)