Army field kitchens on marus

[Sewer King]

My thanks also, Taki,. Japanese mastery in large-scale model-making might not be often seen abroad. It is interesting that a wartime maru shipping horses would be chosen for such a model. Maybe the setting of the model display would tell why it was.

About 40-45 stalls for horses can be seen here. Probably there would be more aft and in the cutaway part of the model? Along the maru's centerline, twenty stalls can be told as back-to-back because of their feed troughs.

• The horse slung from the model's hoist resembles this one here being offloaded, said to be at the central China port of Kiukiang (today Jiujiang)
  

  

  IJA horse disembarking from ship, China.jpg (53.86 KiB) Viewed 520 times

  editors of Time-Life Inc, Prelude to War a volume in their “World War II” series (Time-Life Books, Inc, 1977), page 142-145
  
  And:
  

  From picturechina.com.cn: 1937. (Cavalrymen watching one of their mounts being unloaded)

Since stabling of horses below decks was messy, photos seem unlikely. But “mucking out” the holds during and after the passage must have been equally bad. The mess cannot be flushed out from below the waterline, and some of it might seep into the bilges, which were filthy already without the horses. Freighters can be fumigated after cleaning, but that is to kill vermin. Would it help clear out the smell?

It was certainly harsh for man and horse. But, were these problems common to anyone sending large numbers of horses overseas? Shipping practices would have been worked out long before. What armies besides the IJA had had to do it on short notice?

• Maybe there is some comparison to experience of the Americans in Cuba and WW1 France. Or the British in south Africa, the allied forces for the Boxer Rebellion, etc. For that matter, Australia shipped thousands of horses to the Japanese because of the Russo-Japanese War.

We can’t see the name of the maru to find its tonnage. But the model looks too large to photograph the entire ship for an estimate.

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… men of the 36th Infantry squeezed themselves so tightly into temporary shelves built into battleship Kongo’s bottom that the soldiers compared themselves to the stuffing in a sushi roll.

That is hard enough to imagine. Aren’t the spaces in or near a warship’s bottom typically used for unpleasant things? Such as ballast, bilge pumps, the ship’s brig, or fuel oil bunkerage. They will also be dark because they were not meant to be inhabited, and probably had normal population of rats and cockroaches.

... I had not heard the description "broiler chickens." All the accounts I have read say "We experienced the hard life of a silkworm on a shelf" and "We were like stuffing in a sushi roll." The convoy that the soldier from the 43rd Division talked about was Convoy East Pine No. 8 with the 135th and 136th Infantry aboard. The three marus reached Saipan safely.

Denfield quoted Yamauchi Takeo on this from a secondary source, Cook and Cook's Japan at War: an Oral History. Broiler chickens and sushi are easy enough for most people to picture, but silkworms may be less so. In the end they are boiled to death so their silk thread can be unreeled. Maybe that is part of the simile.

Troop transport ships have another problem -- many soldiers had not been to sea before, and might get seasick. This causes another kind of mess, among all the other ones in crowded conditions far below decks.

–- Alan

[Peter H]

I think this double page spread shows an intake duct on the left.

[john whitman]

It looks like two ducts. Crewmen probably move the lines to position the "intake" at the top to pull in the most wind possible. This probably works well when the maru is steaming against the wind, and it probably doesn't work at all if a 6-knot maru is steaming with a 6-knot wind.

John

[Sewer King]

From other threads, lighter views of troop transport by sea:

From ebay,seller tugsbote: Shipboard meal

Troops enjoy an open-air meal up on deck, under an awning -- maybe on board a maru? This tranquil scene is far from the terribly crowded conditions known from the accounts of those who endured them. Another photo hints at the latter, but does the wear of steel helmets there suggest anything about the moment of the photo?

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... [Any] troop transport ships have another problem -- many soldiers had not been to sea before, and might get seasick. This causes another kind of mess, among all the other ones in crowded conditions far below decks.

And so it was:

From eby071: By sea ... to the front in China

The soldier at bottom left looks seasick, especially with his dialogue written in bold.

Men at top right are singing together, while those at left watch flying fish. At bottom right are men down in the hold?

-- Alan