Final Voyage (20 page)

The wreck of the
Wilhelm Gustloff
lies 144ft (44m) below the surface, designated a war grave by the Polish government and accorded the protection of a ban on divers visiting the site. Her mid-section, where she received the three fatal blows, appears crushed, but her bow and stern remain in comparatively good condition.

Maritime disasters since the Second World War

The end of the Second World War didn't bring peace to all of the Pacific. China had been embroiled in civil war for a decade before the Japanese invasion in 1937, and, despite combined efforts to drive Japan out lasting until 1945, once China was free again, the communist and nationalist forces resumed their fight for control of the country. By the end of 1948, the communist faction was closing on Shanghai, and coming nearer to securing absolute victory. People fled Shanghai in their thousands, taking steamships to the relative safety of Chekiang (now Zhejiang) Province, several hundred miles further to the south.

About 2,150 passengers were listed on the manifest of the 2,100-ton steamship
Kiangya
. People had queued for days to buy tickets on any ship leaving the Yangtze River, and desperate demand greatly exceeded limited supply. Spotting an opportunity, the
Kiangya
's officers decided to ignore the vessel's official capacity of only 1,186. But by allowing such overcrowding they lost control over the actual number who boarded. Some people on board threw their tickets to friends they spotted on the wharf, so whilst their tickets were used twice, they were only counted once. Over 1,000 people may have got on board without a ticket at all. When she finally began steaming towards the open sea on 4th December, it is possible there were between 4,000 and 5,000 people aboard.

The ship shook violently. Terrified passengers on deck saw a column of dirty water rise above the wrecked stern like a geyser.

The
Kiangya
reached the mouth of the river at around 6.30pm. As she moved out into the East China Sea her stern suddenly exploded with an ear-splitting crack. The ship shook violently. Terrified passengers on deck saw a column of dirty water rise above the wrecked stern like a geyser. Inside the ship, the lights went out. Panicking, screaming people pushed and shoved to get out, but the ship was too tightly packed, and began listing rapidly toward the stern. Some escaped by climbing out of cabin windows, but for most people trapped below decks, there wasn't time to get out. Those not killed by the explosion were quickly overcome by the sudden surge of water. There wasn't time to launch many lifeboats either, and some of those that did get away were swamped and sunk by too many people climbing in.

Only minutes after the explosion, the
Kiangya
sank stern-first. The river was shallow, so when the keel hit the riverbed, the
Kiangya
's superstructure remained suspended above the surface. Over a thousand survivors thrashed in the freezing water, and there wasn't enough room for all of them to climb onto the superstructure, where in places the water would only come up to their waists. The explosion had destroyed the
Kiangya
's radio, so no SOS had been sent. The 700 survivors had to wait over three hours until other vessels began to arrive and took them back to shore.

Speculation as to the cause of the disaster ranged from the possibility that carrying so many people overworked the
Kiangya
's boilers, to the generally accepted explanation that the steamship had hit a mine planted by the Japanese navy during the war. But many people in Shanghai, and supporters of the nationalist faction throughout China, refused to believe either story. Instead they believed the suspicions of some members of the
Kiangya
's crew, who alleged that communists had planted explosives on the ship. Eight years later this version of events still held considerable sway in China, so the now victorious communist government raised the ship. Their subsequent propaganda claimed to prove the
Kiangya
had hit a mine.

Eight years later this version of events still held considerable sway in China, so the now victorious communist government raised the ship.

The Western reaction to the loss of the
Kiangya
is quite representative of how some of the worst disasters of the post-war era have become little more than a footnote to recent maritime history. The catastrophe made few
headlines. Parochial Europe and the United States were still licking their own war wounds, some of which had resulted in casualties that dwarfed those of the
Kiangya
. Perhaps more importantly, and more tellingly, the steamship had sunk on the other side of the world. No Europeans or Americans had been killed. It was a foreign news story. That approach continues to this day, so that even when some of the deadliest maritime disasters of all time have occurred over the past thirty years, they seemed to warrant little attention from the Western world.

The
Himeyuri Maru
was built in Hiroshima, Japan, and launched in April 1963. Just over 300ft (91.4m) long and 45ft (13.7m) across the beam, she could reach speeds of up to 18 knots. A 2,600-ton passenger ferry, she was capable of carrying about 600 people. In 1975 her owners Onomichi Zosen sold her to Sulpicio Lines in the Philippines. They renamed her the
Don Sulpicio
, and increased the passenger capacity to nearly 1,500. After a fire in 1981, Sulpicio Lines refitted the ship and gave her another new name: the
Doña Paz
. She went on to suffer the worst maritime disaster in living memory.

Twice a week the
Doña Paz
travelled the route from Tacloban City to Manila, the capital of the Philippines, nearly 400 miles away. At around 6.30am on 20th December 1987 she left Tacloban with, according to official records, a full complement of 1,493 passengers. In truth, she was probably carrying three times as many. This was the
Doña Paz
's last trip before Christmas, and thousands of people wanted to reach loved ones in Manila for the holiday. Entire
families travelled together. While the shipping line only had a finite number of tickets, the
Doña Paz
didn't stop taking passengers on board until it was standing room only.

At about 8pm the day before, the oil tanker MT
Vector
had left Limay, Bataan, en route to Masbate, over 200 miles away. She carried a cargo of 8,800 barrels of gasoline, diesel and kerosene. Her operation licence had expired and her master was not properly qualified. She didn't even have a proper lookout on board.

On the bridge of the
Doña Paz
a lone apprentice crew-member monitored the ship's progress.

By 10.30pm on the 20th, most of the passengers on the
Doña Paz
who could sleep were doing so. The ship being so overcrowded, people slept several to a single cot. Some of those without a bed slept in the open air. Throughout the ship's three decks people filled the corridors. Some had brought mats to sit or lie on because they knew how packed the ship would be. It was difficult to move around, but most didn't need to. They expected to arrive at Manila's port in the early hours of the next morning, ready to meet their waiting relatives.

Meanwhile on the bridge of the
Doña Paz
a lone apprentice crewmember monitored the ship's progress. Other officers took advantage of the benign summer sailing conditions to sit down with a beer and watch some television. The captain was watching a video.

Nobody who witnessed the collision survived to explain to investigators how it happened. None of the
Doña Paz
's 60 crew were rescued, and the only two survivors from the
Vector
both claimed to have been asleep at the time. At around 10.30pm both ships passed Dumali Point on the
Tablas Strait. Given their respective courses (the
Vector
heading eastward, the
Doña Paz
heading north), and the fact that the
Vector
's hull suffered such a catastrophic breach, it is more than likely that the
Doña Paz
struck the starboard side of the
Vector
with her bow. This does not mean the
Doña Paz
was necessarily at fault, however, because whilst there are no ‘right of way' laws of the sea, it is generally accepted that the vessel on the left (the
Vector
in this case) should give way.

Several thousand sleeping passengers on board the
Doña Paz
awoke in a panic. On the lower decks of the ship nobody knew what had happened, but the impact felt and sounded like an explosion. Two things happened in quick succession which ensured most of the people on board both the
Doña Paz
and the
Vector
would not get off the ships alive: the
Doña Paz
suffered a power failure that plunged the ferry into darkness, and the
Vector
's ruptured hull began to leak copious quantities of burning oil into the waters around both vessels.

Two things happened in quick succession which ensured most of the people on board both the
Doña Paz
and the
Vector
would not get off the ships alive.

The few survivors who made it out from the lower decks of the
Doña Paz
reported the chaos fuelled by terror as thousands of people in the hopelessly overcrowded belly of the ship tried to find a way up and out in complete darkness. Nobody could see anything, and nobody could give instructions to the surge of people trying to push in every direction at once because of the constant screaming.

Not that the crew of the
Doña Paz
co-ordinated an evacuation. None of the survivors saw or heard any crewmembers giving orders to help people escape. The lockers containing lifejackets remained locked – a precaution previously intended to prevent them from being stolen. Invariably there weren't enough for everyone on board, anyway.

The fire had spread on to the
Doña Paz
and her wooden lifeboats could not be launched into the burning waters below.

Those from below who made it up to the top deck discovered the true horror of the unfolding disaster. No lifeboats were being launched. It was impossible to do so. Whilst the fire probably started on the
Vector
, the oil slick had now spread so far so quickly that it looked like the sea itself was aflame. The fire had spread on to the
Doña Paz
and her wooden lifeboats could not be launched into the burning waters below.

Though oil tankers like the
Vector
had been designed so that their cargo holds would not explode, the ship had become a raging inferno. Flames spread rapidly through the
Doña Paz
too. Her lower decks, where thousands were already trapped by darkness, filled with smoke. Those who still managed to escape from below recalled not being able to see anything but flames. They may have put it down to God's mercy that they survived, but luck certainly played a part. There were no means to fight a major fire aboard the
Doña Paz
, least of all an oil-based fire that spread as quickly as fuel spilled.

Only 24 people on board the
Doña Paz
when she collided with the
Vector
survived, and most of them suffered horrific burns. With the lifeboats unusable, fire
spreading quickly through the ship and no rescue vessels forthcoming, there was only one way off the
Doña Paz
. All of those who survived the disaster jumped off the ship and into the burning waters. Hundreds of people attempted it. Most failed. Not only did they have to survive the leap through the flames but they then had to hold their breath long enough to swim under the burning oil slick on the surface. A point came when the burning oil had spread so far that it was impossible for anyone to swim far enough without needing to come up for air. Those who managed it were heavily outnumbered by the charred bodies of those who hadn't.

A point came when the burning oil had spread so far that it was impossible for anyone to swim far enough without needing to come up for air.

The
Doña Paz
sank in 1,800ft (550m) of water at around 12.30am, roughly two hours after the collision, and the
Vector
went down a further two hours after that. It wasn't until after 6am that morning, when the
Doña Paz
was now several hours overdue in Manila, that the Filipino maritime authorities learned of the disaster. It took yet another eight hours for a proper search and rescue operation to be launched, by which time it was mostly too late anyway.

Other vessels in the vicinity of the Tablas Strait responded to the distress calls from the stricken ships, but these small merchant vessels would have been even less capable of tackling the inferno than the crews of the
Doña Paz
and the
Vector
themselves. Arriving on the scene as the ships sank, the merchant ships pulled 26 survivors
from the water: the two crewmen from the
Vector
who had slept through the collision, and the 24 passengers who had survived jumping from the decks of the
Doña Paz
. Another passenger ship, the
Don Eusebio
, which would have been big enough to take on board a large number of survivors, circled the area for seven hours, but found nobody else alive.

Officially the death toll of the
Doña Paz
's sinking still stands at 1,749. Initially the shipping line maintained the ship's manifest was accurate, and that there were only 1,493 passengers and 60 crew aboard when she collided with the
Vector
. However, it quickly became apparent that there were many people unaccounted for, not least young children, who had not been listed on the manifest at all.

Even the generally accepted figure of 4,375 deaths remains an estimate. Investigators came to this number based on the claims of those who reported they had friends or family members sailing from Tacloban to Manila on board the
Doña Paz
. Of course, this figure would not necessarily include those who were travelling with their entire family, or alone, or who had not told anyone where, when and how they were going.