Normally this space is reserved for political commentary. As a hit-or-miss practitioner of the same I tend to leave judgment of artistic fare to poets, dreamers and people far more optimistic than I. But a few days ago, a family member, who happens to be Chinese, introduced me to a riveting new documentary by a Beijing filmmaker, Fang Li, whose focus is a little-known WWII maritime disaster and the U.S. screw-up that set it in motion.
The film is titled “The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru” in deference to the Japanese prison ship, a requisitioned freighter, that is its central character.
Emotionally the doc stopped me in my tracks.
It also made me feel marginally better about the state of our current politics by highlighting what bravery and resourcefulness can accomplish even against the most daunting odds.
Technique and Overtones:
What Fang gives us is a balanced blend of “process” and “follow-through,” part of it showing how he went about gathering his facts, the other part devoted to his discoveries.
The film has a political edge to it that will please audiences in China and perhaps raise a few hackles here. But the artistry that went into it elevates the final product into Victory at Sea territory and fixes it in memory as a unique reflection on the behavior of mortals in combat, both good guys and bad.
Factual backstory:
In late September 1942, approximately 1,816 British and Canadian servicemen captured during the fall of Hong Kong months earlier were crammed aboard a Japanese transport bound for prison camps in the imperial motherland. Conditions belowdecks in the holding pens deteriorated rapidly. Food and water rations became spit in the bucket, literally. Prisoners soon found themselves wallowing in a deepening stew of body waste. Diphtheria spread like wildfire.
Shortly after daybreak on October 1, as the Lisbon Maru pulled abreast of Dongji island off the China coast, a U.S. submarine commander, unaware of the POWs aboard, fired four torpedoes at the ship, one of them blowing a hole in the bow close to the locked compartments where the prisoners were stashed.
The Japanese captain and most of his men quickly fled to nearby escort vessels, leaving behind a six-man suicide squad to make short work of the prisoners. Over the next twenty hours, as the ship began splitting apart, scores of POWS tried to break out of the cargo holds and seize control of the upper decks. Some were immediately shot down by the sniper squad. Others dove overboard, only to be met with withering fire from the accompanying vessels.
By the second day Chinese fishermen on nearby Dongji Island had learned of these unfolding horrors and dispatched scores of small fishing boats to pick up survivors, many of them bleeding out in the swells. The appearance of this makeshift flotilla apparently chastened the trigger-happy Japanese, and the gunfire slackened. But no sooner had the fishermen delivered their human cargo to Dongji and begun tending to the wounded than Japanese troops showed up, recaptured all but three of the 380 servicemen who had been rescued and whisked them off to hell holes in Japan.
The lucky three, all of them Chinese speakers, managed to blend in with the islanders by donning peasant clothing. They were soon handed off to Chinese “rebels” and smuggled to safety.
Lost and Found:
Given all the other monstrosities of World War it is not surprising that the Lisbon Maru story quickly dropped away into obscurity. But it has scarcely gone undocumented.
Over the years the British imperial war museums have compiled interviews with the ever-dwindling number of survivors and many descendants of the doomed. In 2006, a British historian based in Hong Kong, Tony Banham, published a highly acclaimed account of what had happened, based on the available sources, titled The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru.
Ten years later, while visiting Dongji, filmmaker Fang learned of the tragedy, convinced himself it was ripe material for a documentary and became obsessed with filling in the blanks.
Already an accomplished marine surveyor, he began searching for the sunken vessel using sophisticated sonar. By 2017, he had located a shipwreck that seemed to match the design of the Lisbon Maru, in whose hull more than 800 Brits and Canadians still lay entombed. He had also befriended a 94-year-old fisherman named Lin Agen, one of the last living rescuers, and had established contact with an equally aged POW-survivor, British veteran Dennis Morley.
Within a year Fang interviewed historian Tony Banham, enlisted his help in fleshing out the story and identifying other interviewees, and traveled to London to scour the imperial archives. Through newspaper ads, he located yet another survivor, Canada-based William Beningfield.
Completing the documentary took six more years, many more interviews, and interaction with more than 340 POW families. Running low on financing, Fang had to sell his condo in Beijing and hock other belongings to keep the money coming.
Finished product:
Not surprisingly, given the passion fueling the project, what finally winds up on screen is intensely personal. Fang narrates the documentary himself, in Chinese with English subtitles. He lets his cameras follow him as he tracks down sources, explores the bottom of the sea for signs of the sunken vessel, conducts survivor interviews (in English), and commiserates with stricken descendants as they recite from letters and diaries written by their loved ones.
Intersplicing this material with beautifully executed artwork portraying the final agonies of the Lisbon Maru and the suffering — and heroism — of so many of the captives, Fang endeavors to draw viewers viscerally into the tragedy and bring it alive as no written account can.
For the most part he succeeds spectacularly.
An interview with relatives of the US torpedoman who fired the fatal projectile makes clear to all of us that the sinking of the Lisbon Maru exacted a terrible emotional toll on the Americans responsible for it. Family members of the Japanese commander who perpetrated the horrors provide a troubling portrait of those for whom “obeying orders” becomes the all-purpose rationale for any excess.
Through survivor testimony and the recollections of family members we are also introduced to warriors of incomparable bravery. The top-ranking British officer, Lieutenant Colonel Moncrief Stewart, whose bristling upturned mustache gave him the look of an idealized Hollywood version of himself, struggled valiantly to maintain order and discipline among his fellow POWs, but in the end he succumbed to one of the many diseases that took such a heavy toll in these ghastly conditions.
A multilingual British translator, Lieutenant Alan Porter, tried to persuade the Japanese snipers to hold their fire and allow the prisoners above decks — and received a fatal bullet for his effort.
A captain in the Scots Guards, Norman Cuthbertson, helped to overwhelm the snipers at the last minute, but refused to abandon mortally wounded comrades and returned to the holds to comfort them in their agonies. He read to them from a pocket edition of Scottish author Robert Lewis Stevenson’s poems as the ship went down.
While reports of such selflessness have been preserved in the British archives, Fang Li’s interviews and animated illustrations make these men immortal, sources of inspiration for the ages.
The final cut of the documentary was selected to kick off the Shanghai film festival last June and its official premier occurred two months later on Dongji Island. The Chinese government considered submitting the film as its nominee for an Academy Award in the feature film category this year but ultimately, according to industry sources in Los Angeles, decided against this because so many of the interviews had been conducted in English.
Reception by American movie critics has ranged from ecstatic to mixed. Manuel Betancourt of Variety enthused about the “harrowing” first-person accounts and the “incredibly effective” animated visuals. But he gently chided the producer for spending “perhaps too much time walking us through how the excavation [of the story] happened rather than letting his results (like the many teary-eyed interviews he has with descendants of the survivors) speak for themselves.” The same reviewer questioned Fang’s claim that the tragedy had been forgotten and noted his debt to historian Tony Banham and the British archives.
But these little digs seem nitpicky against the sheer power of the subject matter and inventiveness of Fang’s handling of it.
Though Chinese audiences are notoriously documentary-shy, the film has done well at the domestic box office, possibly because it occasionally strikes a nationalistic chord or dings a real or potential adversary of China. It reminds the world, for instance, of a major U.S. military botch – the costliest American-on-British “friendly fire” incident of World War II. Indeed, more than a fourth of all the KIA’s suffered by the British Hong Kong garrison during the conflict were due to the Lisbon Maru episode.
The film also highlights, at least inferentially, the inability of the British to protect their colonial interests in pre-WWII Asia and the barbarity of the Japanese militarists who led the country that is now one of China’s most formidable regional competitors.
Finally, on a more positive note, the documentary provides a legitimate opportunity for China to celebrate the heroism of the kind of peasant stock who spearheaded the communist revolution, the fishermen who rescued so many of the Brits and Canadians, at least temporarily, from the clutches of the Japanese.
At a recent screening in Los Angeles, Fang pledged to continue to add to his collection of interviews and make it available to researchers and the public as a memorial to those who perished in the sinking of the Lisbon Maru.
As a one-time Hong Kong resident, an incurable student of war, and as a despairing Harris supporter, I am comforted by any evidence that we are, even in the most trying times, equal to our better angels.