Vanished at Sea

For months, even years, families waited for news of those believed lost at sea. The truth was even more extraordinary.

In April 1942, the British tramp steamer SS Willesden was crossing the South Atlantic with vital war supplies bound for Britain’s 8th Army in North Africa when she was attacked by the German raider KMS Thor. Shelled, torpedoed and set ablaze, the Willesden sank with five of her crew. Among the badly wounded survivors was Second Mate David Millar.

Taken prisoner by the Germans, David and his fellow survivors were moved through a succession of prison ships before being handed over to the Japanese. They would spend the rest of the war in a civilian internment camp at Fukushima, north of Tokyo.

The Willesden was not the only victim. The Thor also captured or sank the SS Kirkpool and the passenger ship SS Nankin; survivors included women and children. More than 130 civilians were eventually held in Fukushima, yet their whereabouts remained hidden. Families at home waited in agony, not knowing whether their husbands, fathers, sons, wives and children had survived, or whether they had vanished forever beneath the sea.

Vanished at Sea tells the remarkable true story of these forgotten prisoners: the terror of attack, the uneasy honour between enemy naval commanders, the long hardship of captivity, and the fragile bonds formed when ordinary people are forced together in extraordinary circumstances.

Drawing on wartime records, survivor accounts and the private papers of his father, Andy Millar uncovers a little-known chapter of the Second World War — and the hidden war that shaped the man who came home.

‘A fresh insight into the war at sea.’ — Naval Historical Review