![]() ![]() ![]() This was a remarkable turnaround for a navy that only began to modernize in 1868, although defeats inflicted on the Russians and Chinese in successive wars at the turn of the century gave a sense of the threat the IJN was to pose. Suffocation, malnutrition, disease, dehydration, infestation, madness, and simple despair claimed the lives of nearly three quarters of those who boarded "the beast".The Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) was the third most powerful navy in the world at the start of World War II, and came to dominate the Pacific in the early months of the war. Myers was one of the first captured.Īfter a brutal three-year encampment, Myers and his fellow POWs were forced onto an enemy hell ship bound for Japan. While he and his fellow corpsmen tended to the bloody tide of soldiers pouring into their once peaceful Naval hospital, the Japanese overwhelmed the Pacific islands, capturing 78,000 POWs by April 1942. The son of a Kentucky sharecropper and an enlistee in the Navy's medical corps, Myers arrived in Manilla shortly before the bombings of Pearl Harbor and the other six targets of the Imperial Japanese military. More than 1,100 of them would be dead by journey's end. On December 13, 1944, POW Estel Myers was herded aboard the Japanese prison ship, the Oryoku Maru, with more than 1,600 other American captives. "The Belly of the Beast (is).a searing tribute.(to) America in its bleakest hour." -Senator John McCain, author New York Times bestseller Faith of My Fathers Published by Diversion Publishing in 2014 Belly of the Beast: A POW's Inspiring True Story of Faith, Courage, and Survival Aboard the Infamous WWII Japanese Hell Ship Oryoku Maru
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