The Repository Last Known Position

Oryoku Maru: 286 Missing POWs and the 2026 Dive

October 24, 2026 · Runtime 12:33 · Watch on YouTube

In December 1944, U.S. Navy carrier planes sank the Oryoku Maru in Subic Bay, in the Philippines, unaware that 1,619 Allied prisoners of war were packed into its holds. The agency that looks for the missing says 286 Americans are still unaccounted for from the ship. In February 2026 it sent divers back down to the wreck.

Chapters

  1. 0:00 The Oryoku Maru
  2. 0:59 1,619 in three holds
  3. 2:13 14 December 1944
  4. 2:59 15 December: the sinking
  5. 3:47 The tennis court
  6. 4:40 Two more ships
  7. 5:49 Yokohama, 1947
  8. 6:14 Where are the dead?
  9. 7:18 The Enoura Maru Project
  10. 8:29 The wreck
  11. 8:58 Three numbers, one agency
  12. 9:33 The 2026 mission
  13. 10:09 Dredge, crane, screen
  14. 10:52 What came up
  15. 11:39 The account
  16. 12:10 Next: a bomber over Germany

Transcript

The Oryoku Maru 0:00

The Oryoku Maru: missing POWs, and a dive in 2026. In December 1944, American planes sank this Japanese ship in Subic Bay. They did not know American prisoners were inside it.

We put every count in the record side by side: how many were aboard, how many died, and how many are still down there. They do not agree, not even inside the agency that is looking for them.

A word on what you are seeing. The diving and barge video is from the 2026 recovery mission, released by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency and the Navy. The black and white film shows other carrier strikes in December 1944, and Navy divers clearing wrecks in Subic Bay in 1951, not this ship. The cemetery and laboratory scenes come from other cases. Two Navy aerial photographs do show this ship. No human remains are shown.

1,619 in three holds 0:59

The Oryoku Maru was a former passenger liner, in the words of a Navy photo caption. On the thirteenth of December 1944, at Manila, the agency says, sixteen hundred and nineteen prisoners of war were packed into three of its holds. Most were American officers, held in the prison camps of Cabanatuan and Bilibid.

Sixteen hundred and nineteen is the agency's number, and the number in a historian's study of the war crimes trial. The same agency slide also says sixteen twenty-one, with an asterisk it never explains. Other counts give sixteen twenty. One report quotes the agency's director saying more than twenty-five hundred.

The prisoners were not alone. A database of Japanese naval movements lists about fifteen hundred Japanese troops aboard, five hundred and forty-seven women and children, and more than eleven hundred survivors of other sunken ships.

By that database's log, the ship left Manila's Pier Seven at four forty in the morning on the fourteenth. The agency's own timeline starts the voyage on the thirteenth, the day they boarded. The ship headed north, along the coast of Bataan.

14 December 1944 2:13

That morning, carrier planes of the U.S. Navy's Task Force 38 found the convoy. The database counts eleven waves of attacks that day, by aircraft from the carrier Hornet. The agency says the planes attacked unaware that the prisoners were on board.

A plane from the Hornet photographed a large transport west of Bataan on the fourteenth. The Navy's caption says this is probably the Oryoku Maru. Probably is the Navy's word.

The ship was hit and began to list, and at ten twenty its captain beached it. It was refloated, and at ten to ten that night it anchored in Subic Bay, off Olongapo. Before the war, Olongapo had been an American naval station.

15 December: the sinking 2:59

On the fifteenth, planes from the Hornet came back. The database counts twelve waves. The agency's timeline says the attack caused an explosion. At ten thirty in the morning, the order to abandon ship was given.

A plane from the carrier Hancock photographed the old station that day. This time the Navy's caption names the large ship: the Oryoku Maru, with smoke rising over the bay. The same caption says it was sunk on the sixteenth. Every other source we read says the fifteenth.

Around a thousand men swam for shore, according to Stars and Stripes. The agency's timeline says the Japanese guards fired on some of them in the water. On land, the survivors were herded onto a tennis court at the naval station.

The tennis court 3:47

At the tennis court, two hundred and eighty-six prisoners were found missing or dead. That is the count of the National World War Two Museum, and the database gives the same number. The agency's own figure for the Americans still unaccounted for from the ship is two hundred and eighty-six as well.

That afternoon, at four thirty by the database's log, the Oryoku Maru heeled over and sank, about three hundred yards off the old naval base. Stars and Stripes puts the wreck five hundred and fifty yards from shore, at a maximum depth of ninety feet.

On the twentieth of December, the agency's timeline says, the survivors were moved to San Fernando, in Pampanga province, and held in the provincial jail. The agency says fifteen wounded prisoners, judged unfit to travel, were executed there.

Two more ships 4:40

Then the survivors were put on two more ships. Most went aboard the Enoura Maru, and a smaller group aboard the Brazil Maru. The ships reached Takao harbor, in Formosa, now Taiwan, on the first of January 1945.

On the ninth of January, American aircraft attacked the Enoura Maru in the harbor. The agency's timeline says the explosion killed about three hundred prisoners. Its own news story says over three hundred. A history published at Brigham Young University says more than four hundred.

The survivors went on in the Brazil Maru, and reached Moji, in Japan, on the twenty-ninth or the thirtieth of January, depending on whose record you read. The agency says about five hundred came ashore. The historian of the trial counts four hundred and twenty-five.

Here is the voyage in three numbers. Sixteen hundred and nineteen boarded at Manila. Somewhere between four hundred and twenty-five and five hundred reached Japan alive. About three hundred, the agency's timeline says, survived the war.

Yokohama, 1947 5:49

In 1947, an American military commission at Yokohama tried nine Japanese men for the voyage. On the ninth of May 1947, the guard commander, Lieutenant Junsaburo Toshino, was sentenced to hang. Online summaries often put the trial in 1946. The historian who read the transcript dates it March to May 1947.

Where are the dead? 6:14

So where are the dead? There is a different answer for each ship, and only one of them has produced names so far.

At Takao, the dead of the Enoura Maru were buried in a mass grave on a beach. In May 1946, an American graves registration team exhumed it. The agency's releases give three numbers for that grave: three hundred and eleven bodies, three hundred and twelve, and three hundred and ninety-one.

None could be identified then. They were buried as Unknowns at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, the Punchbowl, mostly in group burials. The agency's slide puts it at about four hundred and six remains in forty caskets.

In 2018, the agency disinterred one of those caskets, marked as one man. Its slide says at least four DNA sequences were found inside. One was identified. One of its scientists compared the whole project to the USS Oklahoma, another large case of mixed remains.

The Enoura Maru Project 7:18

In 2022 the agency began what it calls the Enoura Maru Project. Between October 2022 and July 2023, it disinterred the Unknowns from the Punchbowl linked to that ship. It warned that the analysis and the DNA testing would take several years.

The names began to come. We counted ten agency announcements for Enoura Maru Unknowns between September 2025 and October 2026. One was Captain Willibald Bianchi, who had earned the Medal of Honor for his actions in 1942.

The tenth, Captain Albert Wilcox, was announced in October 2026 as the agency's two hundred and fiftieth identification of the fiscal year, a record. The agency's story says he was killed when the Enoura Maru was mistakenly sunk, and buried as an Unknown.

The method in those releases is nearly always the same: anthropology and circumstantial evidence, then mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA, matched to family samples. Several releases add that the Japanese casualty lists contained errors.

The wreck 8:29

But none of those ten names came from the Oryoku Maru. Its dead never went to Takao. They stayed in Subic Bay.

In August 1946, a Navy salvage team made an exploratory dive on the wreck. The agency's slide says it was judged too unstable and dangerous to explore further, and the ship was partially demolished for safety reasons. Stars and Stripes says it was reduced to a tangled mass, to protect passing ships.

Three numbers, one agency 8:58

How many are still in the hold? The agency's January 2026 update says two hundred and eighty-six Americans. Its historian's slide says about two hundred and eighty. Its director, in April, said more than two hundred and fifty. Three numbers, one agency.

Before sending divers, Military.com reports, the agency spent three years mapping the site with autonomous underwater vehicles, and built a three-dimensional model to find where the prisoners likely came to rest. The director said they might be limited to one of two holds.

The 2026 mission 9:33

In February 2026 the mission began. The agency called it one of its largest and most complex recovery efforts to date, led with the U.S. Navy and the government of the Philippines, and planned over several years.

A fifteen-person dive team worked from the salvage ship USNS Salvor. Navy divers of Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit One went down with them.

The divers are surface-supplied: their air comes down a hose from the surface. The wreck lies near the mouth of the Kalaklan River, and the visibility down there is close to zero.

Dredge, crane, screen 10:09

On the twenty-sixth of March, the divers dredged the excavation site. The dredge draws mud, decaying wood and loose material up a hose and into a steel basket.

On the thirtieth, a barge crane brought a dredge basket up. The basket comes out of the bay streaming water, and is emptied into a tank on the barge deck.

On the thirty-first, the team and the National Museum of the Philippines wet-screened the material. Water pushes the mud through a mesh. What stays on the screen is sorted by hand.

On the sixteenth of April, the Salvor's crew worked the baskets alongside the team. The first phase was scheduled to run through April.

What came up 10:52

What came up? The agency has not published a result. Military.com reported artifacts sent to the agency's laboratory at Pearl Harbor, and Divernet a leather boot marked U.S. Army on the sole. One wreck database says remains were recovered. We found no official source for that.

If an identification comes, Military.com wrote, it will be the first tied to the wreck since the ship went down. The agency is collecting family reference samples for about a thousand men lost across these ships.

Until then, the names of the missing are carved on the Walls of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery. When a man is identified, the releases say, a rosette is placed next to his name.

The account 11:39

So here is the account. Sixteen hundred and nineteen boarded at Manila. About three hundred survived the war. Ten have names again from the Enoura Maru's Unknowns. From the Oryoku Maru's hold, about two hundred and eighty-six are missing, and none has a name yet.

For eighty-one years, the last known position of those men has been a hold in Subic Bay, under ninety feet of water and a demolished hull. In 2026, divers went back down for them.

Next: a bomber over Germany 12:10

Next, a bomber over Germany. On the ninth of February 1945, two B-17s collided in formation. Six of the crew were buried together in 1947, under one collective identification. In 2025, the laboratory gave the pilot back his own name. That is the next episode.

Description and sources

We read the case through the record: the 1,619 prisoners the agency says boarded at Manila on 13 December 1944 (or 1,621, or 1,620, or more than 2,500), the carrier strikes of 14 and 15 December, the two Navy aerial photographs that show the ship (one of them 'probably'), the sinking off Olongapo (on the 15th, or the 16th in one Navy caption), the 286 found missing or dead at the tennis court, San Fernando, the Enoura Maru bombed at Takao on 9 January 1945, the Brazil Maru at Moji, and the Yokohama trial of 1947. Then where the dead are: the Enoura Maru's mass grave at Takao (311, 312 or 391 bodies), the Unknowns of the Punchbowl, the Enoura Maru Project of 2022-2023 and ten names announced between September 2025 and October 2026, among them a Medal of Honor recipient and the agency's record 250th identification of fiscal year 2026. None came from the Oryoku Maru: its hull was partially demolished after a 1946 Navy dive, and the agency's own count of the men still inside is 286, about 280, or more than 250. Last, the 2026 mission, 26-1PH: three years of mapping, a dive team on USNS Salvor, the dredge, the crane, the wet screen, and no public result yet.

PRIMARY SOURCES

ARCHIVE PLATES — public-domain documents, with author, date, archive and licence.

  • U.S. Navy photo NH 95602, from a USS Hornet plane — 1944-12-14 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
  • U.S. Navy photo NH 95603, from a USS Hancock plane — 1944-12-15 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
  • U.S. Army Map Service — 1944 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain

Last Known Position reads a missing-in-action case through the record that closed it: the loss report, the excavation and the laboratory.

About the material. Video: Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency recovery mission 26-1PH in Subic Bay, 2026, and U.S. Navy (Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit 1), via DVIDS; Manila American Cemetery, U.S. Marine Corps, 2016, via DVIDS. The cemetery scenes in Honolulu (the Punchbowl, and a 2024 disinterment there for another group of Unknowns) and the DNA laboratory come from other cases, via DVIDS. Film: U.S. Army Signal Corps film of carrier strikes on shipping, December 1944, and U.S. Navy film of diving operations in Subic Bay, 1951 (National Archives); neither shows the Oryoku Maru. Photographs: U.S. Navy, 14 and 15 December 1944 (Naval History and Heritage Command), via Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Diagrams are drawn in code. Nothing here is AI-generated imagery. No human remains are shown.

About the result. As of our checking in October 2026, the agency had published no result of the 2026 mission and no identification tied to the wreck.

The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense visual information does not imply or constitute endorsement. This channel is independent and not affiliated with the U.S. Navy or the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.

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