U.S. Submarine Calls Off Attack on the Evacuation Ship

U.S. Submarine Calls Off Attack on the Evacuation Ship is the near-fatal encounter between an American submarine and a Japanese refugee transport in August 1945. A civilian vessel with inadequate means of evacuation is given a deadline to prepare for an attack; at the last moment, the submarine withdraws under new orders. The episode turns a military threat into an abrupt reprieve, while its layered telling distinguishes what Nutmeg Akasaka sees from what she later learns.

The Evacuation Ship and Its Passengers

The transport was a worn freighter, converted for wartime use with little preparation, carrying more than five hundred passengers and crew toward Sasebo. Most of the civilians aboard were women and children, including families connected to officials in the Manchukuo government and senior personnel of the South Manchuria Railway. They were leaving Manchuria as Japan’s defeat approached, accepting the danger of a sea passage rather than remaining amid the disorder expected to follow.

The ship’s capacity for escape was starkly inadequate: it had only two small lifeboats for all those aboard, and few life vests or buoys. Against this vulnerable vessel, the submarine’s deck gun and machine gun were enough to sink it. Its torpedoes were limited and reserved for armed convoys, but the transport’s civilian character did not initially prevent the crew from preparing an attack.

The Submarine’s Threat

Nutmeg’s account of the approaching vessel begins with its emergence from the sea. It surfaced beside the transport and ran parallel to it, while officers examined the ship through binoculars. The American crew signaled an order to stop, followed by notice that an attack would begin after ten minutes and that passengers should evacuate to the lifeboats. Nutmeg could not read the signal lamp at the time; the meaning of the warning belongs to her retrospective understanding.

The transport stopped its engines as ordered. Its captain signaled that it carried unarmed civilians, no munitions or military personnel, and too few lifeboats. The submarine’s reply gave no concession: the attack would proceed when the ten minutes expired. The captain did not pass this exchange on to the passengers. On the transport, the submarine’s guns remained trained on the ship as its crew waited; on the other vessel, passengers watched without knowing what the sailors’ movements meant.

The Attack Is Called Off

As the deadline approached, activity among the submarine’s crew changed. Officers exchanged hurried words, and an order spread among the sailors. The submarine then removed the shells from its deck gun, turned the barrel away from the transport, and returned the ammunition below. Its crew went belowdecks, the engines started, and the submarine submerged. The transport’s passengers remained frozen on deck as the vessel disappeared beneath the water.

The withdrawal did not immediately end the danger. The transport’s crew feared the submarine might instead attack with a torpedo, and the captain and navigator watched the sea while the ship moved in short zigzags. No torpedo came. Only after twenty minutes had passed did the passengers begin to accept that they had survived. The immediate outcome was clear—the transport was not attacked—but the reason for the sudden reversal remained unknown to those aboard.

Orders, Retrospective Knowledge, and Aftermath

The account supplies the explanation only afterward: headquarters had instructed the submarine to suspend hostilities unless attacked by the enemy, following the Japanese government’s announcement that it would accept the Potsdam Declaration and surrender unconditionally. Thus a change in the wider political situation arrived just before the planned attack and reversed the ship’s immediate fate. The reprieve was not something the passengers could recognize as it happened; the submarine’s departure first appeared as an unexplained change of course.

Nutmeg did not witness that departure. During the crisis she fell into a deep, prolonged sleep in her mother’s arms, and her mother later told her what had happened. Nutmeg’s story combines her own view of the encounter’s earlier stages with secondhand knowledge of the withdrawal and its aftermath. The distinction matters: the event is presented not as a child’s complete eyewitness account, but as a memory assembled from direct observation and family retelling.

The freighter reached Sasebo on the morning of August 16, after the Emperor’s announcement of Japan’s surrender the previous day. The port was silent, and the returning refugees encountered a country changed by defeat; Nagasaki had been destroyed by an atomic bomb six days earlier, while Manchukuo was vanishing as a political entity. The submarine’s nonattack therefore forms a narrow passage between imminent death at sea and a homecoming shadowed by national collapse. The passengers were spared, but the reprieve did not make the world they returned to whole.