A new film, Dongji Rescue, dramatises the forgotten rescue of hundreds of British prisoners of war during the Second World War. The story centres on the sinking of the Lisbon Maru, a Japanese cargo liner torpedoed on 1 October 1942 while transporting 1,816 British POWs to Japan. Unknown to the American submarine that fired the torpedo, Allied prisoners were on board.
According to survivors, Japanese troops battened down the hatches of the holds before evacuating the ship, leaving the British prisoners trapped inside. As the vessel sank, the prisoners attempted to escape, only to come under fire from Japanese forces. The rescue came from an unexpected quarter: Chinese fishermen from the nearby Zhoushan Archipelago, who pulled 384 men from the sea.
Survivor Jack Hughieson of the Royal Navy described, in an interview for the Imperial War Museum in London, hearing doomed men still trapped in the hold singing the wartime marching song It's a Long Way to Tipperary. "I can still hear it to this day," he said. "Between the yells, the cries for help, was the singing. You could hear from the water… the cries of men going to meet their maker." Another survivor, Dennis Morley, recalled the filthy conditions in the hold, saying the men were "swimming in excreta, virtually", and described how the Japanese used the prisoners as "target practice".
The rescue operation has been documented by Chinese filmmaker Fang Li in his documentary The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru, released in 2024. Major Brian Finch, a military historian and advisor to the documentary, explained that the explosion from the ship's boiler drew the attention of islanders, who initially rowed out to collect bales of cloth thrown into the sea. "When they saw people floating around too, they started picking up people instead," Finch told the BBC. "This turned into a professional rescue operation." He added that once the Chinese fishing fleet appeared, the Japanese stopped shooting and began picking up survivors as well.
The documentary, which took Fang Li nearly a decade to research, made over $6m at the Chinese box office. Now the big-budget action feature Dongji Rescue, costing $80m and filmed in Imax, aims to bring the story to a wider audience. Co-directed by Guan Hu, whose film Black Dog won a prize at Cannes in 2024, and Fei Zhen Xiang, the film was shot at the historical site of the sinking. Of the 1,816 British servicemen aboard the Lisbon Maru, 828 died, but the lives of the rest were saved thanks to the courage of those Chinese fishermen.
