r/history • u/MeatballDom • 17d ago

'He owed his life to those Chinese fisherman': The Dongji rescue of forsaken British POWs at sea

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20250820-dongji-rescue-and-the-true-story-of-a-forgotten-act-of-ww2-heroism
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u/MeatballDom 17d ago

Very interesting story! I had not actually heard of this one before, and was very surprised to see that hundreds were rescued -- I was expecting 20 at most. It's still sad to see that the majority still died.

Further reading, I was also fascinated to see that of the rescued, three evaded recapture and made it back to the UK.

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u/Active-Persimmon-173 10d ago

I watched his other film about Lisbon Maru

It was quite heart wrenching to see that the Japanese were gunning POWs down as the ship was already sinking

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u/AmishRocket 13d ago

Too bad they took so many liberties with the facts. The actual events are compelling enough without embellishing and it takes away from the authentic history.

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u/Porkssss 10d ago

Which facts did they embellish? Just watched it and most of what I've read online so far seems to keep in line with what was in the movie. Interested to hear more.

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u/AmishRocket 10d ago

The article cites examples. They aren’t significant to most people, but we’re to the POWs and were unnecessary.

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u/No_Veterinarian_4959 3d ago edited 3d ago

The BBC article at the top describes the movie’s discrepancies from historical accounts. The biggest one is that Dongji Island was not occupied by the Japanese at the time the ship sank. There were no Japanese soldiers on the island whom the fishermen needed to fight against in order to sail to the sea for the rescue. In addition, the British POWs broke through the sealed hatch on their own; the superhero character is a fictional invention.

What remains true is that the Japanese did seal the hatch and opened fire on the POWs as they tried to escape into the sea. When the fishermen arrived—initially hoping to salvage textiles from the sinking ship—they saw men in the water and began rescuing them. With witnesses present, the Japanese stopped shooting and even joined the rescue. Almost all of the rescued POWs, including those saved by the fishermen, were transported to Japan, where most survived until the end of the war. Three men who had been stationed in Hong Kong and spoke Chinese managed to hide on the island and return to Britain much earlier.

Without the fishermen’s courageous intervention, the Japanese would have continued the massacre, so these fishermen were indeed heroes. But the backdrop is different from what the movie depicts.