Salvaging History

These coordinates lie in the sea near Dongji Island, off the coast of Ningbo, a port city in East China’s Zhejiang Province. It is where 82 years ago, during World War II, a tragedy unfolded. On the ocean floor lies a sunken ship, 828 forgotten men and 1,816 untold stories.　

On October 1, 1942, the Lisbon Maru, a Japanese cargo ship transporting 1,816 British prisoners of war from Hong Kong to Japan, was torpedoed by a US submarine off the coast of Dongji Island. The incident escalated into a calculated mass-murder as the Japanese army intended to let all the prisoners die with the sinking ship. Yet in acts of heroism, dozens of Chinese fishermen from Dongji Island rowed fishing boats back and forth to rescue as many drowning soldiers as they could, saving 384 lives, while 828 souls perished in the deep sea.　

The wreck remained undiscovered for over 70 years, until Fang Li, a film producer, scriptwriter and geoscientist, decided to find both the wreck and the truth behind the forgotten history.　

Fang documented his six-year odyssey to find the wreck and the truth behind the tragedy in his documentary feature The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru, released on September 6. Deeply moving, humane and poignant, the film became China’s most acclaimed domestic production so far this year.　

“Everybody knows about the Titanic, but how many people know about the Lisbon Maru? None,” Fang told NewsChina. Just as Chinese fishermen rescued hundreds of British soldiers over 80 years ago, now Chinese filmmakers are rescuing a history.

In October 2016, Fang took a marine exploration team to search around Dongji Island. Two weeks later, their sonar detected a wreck. The shape of the wreck, 140 meters long and 18 meters wide, was consistent with the structure of the Lisbon Maru.　

In September 2017, Fang conducted an ultra-low altitude aeromagnetic survey using drones, which indicated that the sunk ship they found was made of 7,000 tons of steel – this figure was identical with that of that historic wreck. Through sonar imaging, they found the physical property of the steel and that of the Lisbon Maru were identical. Fang was convinced he had found the right ship.　

In 2017, Fang interviewed 94-yearold fisherman Lin Agen, who as a young man was part of the rescue effort. He knew it was important to document the incident. “One of the most urgent reasons to use my camera to restore this history was that Lin’s memories were fading,” Fang told NewsChina. Lin died in August 2020.　

In April 2018, Fang went to the UK to find and interview survivors and families.　

He paid for full-page advertisements in three British newspapers for a few weeks, appealing for relatives of the POWs on the Lisbon Maru. More than 300 families got in touch, with 240 agreeing to be interviewed. Fang has already visited more than 110 families and weaved these interviews into the documentary.　

He interviewed Dennis Morley, then 98, who was a 22-year-old in the Royal Scots regiment when he was on the Lisbon Maru in 1942. During his visit to the UK, Fang received an email from a man in Canada, who said his father, William Beningfield, was a survivor. Then 98, Beningfield was in the First Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment and later lived in Quebec.　

In 2018 and 2019, Fang and his team also went to the US and Japan to interview the descendants of Garfield Kvalheim, a machinist on the USS Grouper, the submarine that fired the torpedo that sank the Lisbon Maru, and the children of Kyoda Shigeru, captain of the Lisbon Maru. Fang also interviewed British and Japanese scholars.　

Tony Banham, a British historian and expert on the Lisbon Maru who has lived in Hong Kong for 35 years, has given Fang vital academic support. Banham has researched the tragedy for three decades, interviewing many survivors and their families, publishing The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru: Britain’s Forgotten Wartime Tragedy in 2006.　

Banham described the incident as a “three-act tragedy” and that it “had all the elements you want for a story.”　

“When I started talking with the people who survived the event, they felt that the story was going to be forgotten and they wanted it to be remembered. So although it was too emotional very often for these POWs to talk to their families about such horrific experiences, they were very happy to work with me, because I was an outsider. These old men, in their 70s or early 80s, wanted to tell their stories and have them documented. So I sat down for a couple of years interviewing them as many as I could and their families,” Banham said in an interview with CGTN in June.

In addition to the POWs, the vessel carried 778 Japanese troops, 25 guards and a crew of 77.　

According to international law, ships transporting POWs in wartime should fly the Red Cross flag to inform enemy combatants. But Japan’s practice of transporting British POWs was a violation of the Geneva Convention, and thus the Japanese did not fly the flag.　

On the early morning of October 1, the USS Grouper spotted the Lisbon Maru. At 7:05 am, it fired four torpedoes. The last hit the ship in the stern.　

After the attack, the Japanese crew battened down the hatches of the holds to prevent prisoners from escaping. Below deck, there was neither food nor light. “They [the Japanese soldiers] panicked. We were sealed in. We couldn’t get out anyway. The water was pouring in. The bastards were going to drown us,” Dennis Morley told Fang.　

Most Japanese personnel on the ship were evacuated, leaving the guards and the crew. On the morning of October 2, the desperate POWs, who sensed the ship was going to sink, broke open the hatches, but when they reached the deck, the remaining five Japanese guards began shooting at the unarmed men. Men poured onto the decks and overpowered the guards, jumping into the sea under a hail of bullets, to swim to the islands they had seen. The Japanese used machine guns to slaughter them in the water.　

Hope came like miracle. The desperate soldiers suddenly saw Chinese fishers in small boats who reached their hands out to save them.　

Lin Agen told Fang about that cloudless hot day. The islanders rowed their boats, which could only hold a few people, back and forth dozens of times, conducting their rescue mission for as long as they could late into the night.　

Despite the risk of attack from Japanese troops, the islanders rowed 46 fishing boats out 65 times, rescuing 384 British troops.　

Dennis Morley said the Chinese fishermen had actually saved more people. “After the fishermen came to the rescue, the Japanese eventually stopped shooting because they knew that the news would go around the world,” Morley said.　

“I think the Chinese fishermen risked their very own lives to rescue us. The Japanese could have destroyed their little villages,” he added.　

Fearing that the mass POW deaths would lead to international condemnation, the Japanese began to rescue the captives, ultimately saving 589 men. Nevertheless, 828 British soldiers still perished, either from drowning or being shot.　

The islanders, who lived in poverty, did their best to accommodate the British soldiers they had saved. They sheltered most survivors in a temple and a few in their homes, and provided them with the best food they could.　

However, on the morning of October 3, more than 200 Japanese soldiers landed in search of the POWs, threatening to bomb the villages if the locals kept sheltering the captives. The British POWs took the initiative to reveal themselves one by one. Of the 384 plucked from the sea, 381 were retrieved and sent to another Japanese ship.　

At the critical moment, the islanders hid three British POWs – James Fallace, William Charles Johnstone and Bill Evans – in a small cave under the seaside cliffs. All had been civilians before joining the reserves in Hong Kong. On October 9, the three men were transferred by boat to the mainland where they were assisted by Chinese guerillas to get to the wartime capital of Chongqing in December 1942. At the British embassy, they told of their experiences via radio broadcast and revealed the atrocities of the Japanese army.

But positive word-of-mouth effect saw a box office boost, and by October 14, the film had earned 42.3 million yuan (US$5.9m). Maoyan raised its forecast to 44.6 million yuan (US$6.3m), roughly 29 times its initial prediction.　

The film has a remarkable score of 9.3/10 on media review website Douban, the highest rating for a domestic release so far in 2024.　

“I think it’s the best domestic film I’ve watched this year. A very great documentary. It reminds me of many works I’ve watched, such as Titanic, Dunkirk, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and Titanic the Musical. But documentaries have a stronger power of realism that can directly reach to your heart. Fang Li is a remarkable man. As a documentarian, he can tell a story in a much better and intriguing way than many commercial directors,” Hu An, a Beijing-based freelancer, told NewsChina.　

“What I liked about this documentary was that the majority is actually focused on human’s innate kindness. The most striking example was the Chinese fishermen. They saw people in danger and they rushed toward it in order to save them. They did so at immense personal risk. […] I left the movie feeling very uplifted, with a sense in the intrinsic power and desire of humans to do good if only we make correct choices to do so,” commented James Mead, a Shanghai-based British influencer on video-sharing platform Bilibili.　

The stories of the POW’s families touched millions of hearts. “Most of the time, the film shows in rich detail the suffering of the POWs, their regret, nostalgia and love for home and family, the lifelong traumas of survivors and the family members’ undying memories for the loved ones they’ve lost. The emotional impact of these stories is so strong that I seem to have immensely experienced hundreds of partings myself,” Douban user Mai Mai commented.　

Fang told NewsChina that one of the most unforgettable moments during his meetings with survivors and their families was a meeting with Ken Penny and his brother Simon Penny in West Sussex, southern England. The two brothers took out a letter kept by their deceased father Gerald Penny.　

The note was from their uncle Richard Penny, who was 17 years older than Gerald. Before he was sent to the Lisbon Maru, in the POW camp in Sham Shui Po, Richard wrote a short letter to his 5-year-old brother Gerald. In the letter, the 22-year-old, who seemed to have a sense of foreboding, asked his brother to take care of their mother. The letter only consisted of a dozen words, all written in capital letters.　

“That was almost the man’s last will. It was so heartbreaking,” Fang told NewsChina. The strong feeling of wistfulness, homesickness and yearning affected the director so deeply that he burst into tears while reading the letter over and over again. “I have a younger brother as well. I can understand that feeling,” he said.　

Gerald Penny kept the letter in his wallet for more than four decades. He named his oldest son Ken Richard Penny in memory of his brother.　

Richard Penny’s story has a follow-up. Visiting the National Army Museum in London, Fang saw an account of Penny’s last moments. On October 2, 1942, Penny managed to escape the hold and dodge the Japanese bullets. He fell overboard, and was last seen clinging to a wooden plank, according to an account in a notebook from a survivor, which is preserved in the museum.　

“I’ve seen and heard so many stories. I saw the fates of these soldiers and felt the lingering pains of their families that still hurt so much. I can’t help myself from sharing these stories with a wider audience, to help the world understand and remember what these young men had once been through. The strong emotion I’ve felt within myself is not a kind of pressure, but a keen urge,” he told NewsChina.　

Dennis Morley, William Beningham and Lin Agen, the three surviving interviewees, died in 2020 and 2021. They had no chance to see the film, but they had already recorded their stories.　

For Fang, preserving the history of the Lisbon Maru is more than just making a film. Among the 240 families of the POWs willing to be interviewed, there are still 130 families Fang intends to visit. He said he plans to build an online memorial to gather all his research and interviews, which he hopes will bring a great sense of meaning.　

“This is a hope of a great many people. We all hope that the world remembers this moving story,” he told NewsChina.