The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru

3/25/2025

It is quite interesting that it took over seventy years before anyone tried to discover this wreck, but once it was found nestling in the sand it opened up quite a can of worms as we discovered that it was a freighter carrying two thousand tons of wartime supplies and 1,800 British POWs. These men had been ordered to surrender after the fall of Hong Kong and were being taken to “a beautiful land” where they would be put to hard labour. Except, they didn’t get very far before the ship encountered the USS Grouper that found the 7,000 ton vessel a legitimate target and holed it with one torpedo. The thrust of this documentary takes us through the next 24 hours as the ship slowly sank and the prisoners were treated as little better than malnourished ballast. Filmmaker Fang Li had managed to tr