A new film dramatises the rescue during WW2 of hundreds of British POWs from the Lisbon Maru, a Japanese cargo liner. The story has not been widely recounted – until now.

On 1 October 1942, a Japanese cargo liner, the Lisbon Maru, was being used to transport 1,816 British prisoners of war (POWs) to captivity in Japan. It was torpedoed off the coast of China by a US submarine, unaware that Allied prisoners were on board. According to survivors, the Japanese troops battened down the hatches of the hold before they evacuated the ship and left the British prisoners inside.

As the Lisbon Maru sank, the British mounted an escape, only to be fired at by the Japanese troops. Help arrived in the form of Chinese fishermen from the islands nearby, who rescued 384 men from the sea. These true events were the inspiration for first a documentary by Chinese film-maker Fang Li, The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru, released in China in 2024, and now a lavish Chinese blockbuster, Dongji Rescue.

The voice of Jack Hughieson from the Royal Navy describes, in an interview for the Imperial War Museum in London, how he heard doomed men still trapped inside the hold of the Lisbon Maru singing the wartime marching song, It's A Long Way to Tipperary. "I can still hear it to this day," he says. "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."

His is just one of the moving survivors' testimonies Fang Li drew upon for The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru. He spent nearly a decade researching and making the documentary, based on a book by historian Tony Banham. As well as the oral histories, the director met families of the British POWs who died or survived the sinking, and found two survivors still living, nonagenarians William Beningfield and Dennis Morley. He also met the last surviving Chinese rescuer, Lin Agen, then aged 94 (all three men died before the film was released.)

Survivors' accounts agree that the British troops, taken prisoner after the Battle of Hong Kong, were being held in filthy conditions in the holds of the Lisbon Maru, as Morley described it, "swimming in excreta, virtually". When the ship was torpedoed and the British left imprisoned, one POW, a butcher by trade, who still had a knife, climbed up and cut the tarpaulin, giving some of them the opportunity to escape. They overpowered the guards left on board, only to be shot at by the Japanese military on nearby boats. "They were enjoying themselves," Dennis Morley says in the film. "We were target practice."

Their rescue came in the form of a fleet of Chinese fishing boats from the nearby islands on the Zhoushan Archipelago, who had realised that people were in the sea. These Chinese fishermen managed to pull the 384 British soldiers to safety, which prompted the Japanese to start rescuing men too, according to Major Brian Finch, a military historian and advisor to The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru, who has a producer's credit on the film.

"As the ship went down, sea water got into the boiler room, there was a huge explosion, and that drew the attention........

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