Hell ship

A hell ship is a ship with extremely unpleasant living conditions or with a reputation for cruelty among the crew. It now generally refers to the ships used by the Imperial Japanese Navy and Imperial Japanese Army to transport Allied prisoners of war (POWs) and romushas (Asian forced labourers) out of the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Singapore in World War II. The POWs were taken to Japan, Taiwan, Manchuria, Korea, the Moluccas, Sumatra, Burma or Siam to be used as forced labor.

The term was coined much earlier. During the American Revolution, HMS Jersey and other prison hulks in New York Harbor were used by the British to house American prisoners of war in terrible conditions. More than 11,000 prisoners died, more than all American battle deaths in the war. HMS Jersey in particular was referred to as "Hell."

The term was also used for German prisoner of war transports including the German tanker Altmark. The Royal Navy destroyer HMS Cossack boarded Altmark in a Norwegian fjord on 16 February 1940 and released some 300 British merchant sailors picked up from ships sunk by the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee. In reporting the Altmark Incident, British newspapers frequently called Altmark "Hitler's hell-ship" or the "Nazi hell-ship".

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