There’s also the Buyo Maru incident in 1943, involving a Japanese military transport sunk by the American sub Wahoo. A number of Japanese survivors were machine-gunned under orders of the sub’s commander, Mush Morton (there’s a dispute about exactly what happened, but Morton felt he’d done the right thing).
Sadly, many of the survivors of the torpedoing were actually Indian prisoners of war on their way to forced labor camps.
Merchant sailors were expendable. If you ship went down in the North Atlantic you might very well not be piccked up. Some convoys had a “rescue ship” that had room to pick up suvivors. But a freighter or tanker would not stop for fear of being sunk. If they could pick up the life boats sea painter then there was a chance.
Do not forget the US service with the highest loss rate was the US Merchant Marine. And after the war they received nothing for their service. Also if their ship was sunk their pay ended the moment the ship went under.
It makes sense, sort of. If you attack a destroyer, then sinking the destroyer is the goal, so you might as well let the crew live. But if you attack a troop transport, killing the troops is the goal, so allowing the survivors to get away would be counterproductive. A sailor without a ship is nothing - he’s no longer a threat. An infantryman without a ship is still an infantryman. If he gets to shore, he’s a threat.
It only makes “sense” in the context that the Pacific War was fought as a war of annihilation, where quarter was rarely asked or given and was filled with atrocities. This was a war in which upon defeating the enemy entering a hospital and bayonetting the patients, doctors, and nurses was a thing, for example. Hundreds of waterlogged soldiers who have lost all of their gear and supplies are no more (or less) of a threat or a legitimate target than hundreds of floating sailors. If anything, they’d represent a burden to the forces already ashore, as they’d simply be more mouths to feed in a situation where Japanese logistics were so bad that their forces frequently starved.
A couple or three things to additionally note. The only infantry at the scene were the Indian POWs from the 2nd battalion, 16th Punjab regiment. The Japanese soldiers were from the 26th Field Ordnance Depot. A second is that sailors can and were given rifles and used as infantry, with or without proper infantry training, the practice was particularly common in the IJN which used a wide variety of Imperial Japanese Navy land forces during the war.
The final thing is that this thread has seriously undercut my faith in wiki as a source. I was going to point out the IJN’s SNLF (Special Naval Landing Forces), frequently misidentified as Japanese “marines” as an example of the high end of IJN land forces, with Special Base Forces as more towards the low end. This is what wiki has to say on SNLFs:
The Special Naval Landing Forces (SNLF ; Japanese: 海軍特別陸戦隊, romanized: Kaigun Tokubetsu Rikusentai) were the marines of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) and were a part of the IJN land forces.
Go down four paragraphs and it says this:
The SNLF was not a marine force, but was instead sailors who had basic infantry training and were employed in landings as early as the Russo-Japanese War and the Boxer Rebellion.
So yeah, the wiki article can’t even agree with itself.
This exactly. As noted, the Japanese troops in the Pacific were chronically short of all sorts of supplies, including ammunition and medicine, in addition to food. Simply sinking the transport would have been sufficient.
The reverse wouldn’t have been the same had the Japanese been able to sink transports (or had choosen to target them with their submarines). The US had sufficient supplies that resupplying them wasn’t generally a problem, after the early years.