How Japanese Women POWs Once Screamed “They’re Going to Drown Us!” When American Trucks Rolled Toward a Flooded River, and How That Terrifying Ride Turned Into Decades of Argument About Rumors, Mercy, and What We Choose to Remember

By the time the trucks hit the ruts, most of the women in the back could no longer feel their feet.

Canvas flaps snapped in the dusty wind. The metal floor vibrated under every bump. Sunlight pushed through in thin strips, lighting up faces drawn tight with exhaustion and suspicion.

Private Frank Doyle, riding shotgun in the lead truck, could feel the tension even through the steel of the cab.

It had a weight.

Like humidity before a storm.

He shifted his rifle, wiped sweat from his neck, and peered ahead down the road.

“Bridge is still up, right?” he asked the driver.

“Yesterday it was,” Corporal Mills grunted, shifting gears. “Unless the river got ideas overnight.”

“River’s had a lot of ideas lately,” Frank muttered.

They were crossing the southern part of an island he’d never heard of before the Navy had landed there. To him, it was all the same: jungled hills, red mud, heat thick enough to drink.

Behind them, in the line of trucks, were eighty Japanese civilians who were no longer civilians, not exactly—women taken off surrendered ships and from pockets of territory that had finally raised white flags.

The Americans called them “POWs” because the paperwork needed a word.

The women called themselves a dozen other things, in whispers: nurses, clerks, singers, daughters.

And underneath, in the space no language reached easily, they called themselves something else.

Expendable.

In the back of the third truck, Nakamura Aiko pressed her palm against the wooden slat of the sideboard and tried to breathe evenly.

The air smelled of dust and canvas and too many bodies. Heat baked through the metal roof. Her blouse itched where sweat had dried and dried again.

“How much longer?” whispered Yuri, the girl wedged in beside her. Yuri’s hair had come loose from its careful bun, dark strands sticking to her cheeks.

“I don’t know,” Aiko said. “They said ‘river’ earlier. Maybe there is a bridge.”

Her words were calm. Her stomach was not.

Rumors had a life of their own in the camp they’d just left—coiled things passed from bunk to bunk at night, carried on the same breath as prayers and curses.

One rumor she’d heard just yesterday, from a woman who claimed to have talked to a guard who’d once been in another camp:

When the war ends and we are too many, they will take us to the water. It is quicker that way.

“They’ll never admit it,” the woman had said, eyes hard. “But better for them to say we died of illness at sea than to bring us home and answer questions.”

Aiko had smiled politely and pretended not to believe.

She’d been trained to be a nurse. She believed in charts, doses, the logic of fever curves.

But the war had shaken that belief like a storm shakes a tree. Things that didn’t make sense had happened every day now for years.

And when the Americans had loaded them into trucks and pointed them inland, away from the port where ships sat readied with flags, away from the sea that had always meant home, the rumor wriggled tighter in her mind.

“River,” someone murmured near the front.

“What?” Yuri’s head snapped up.

“The driver. I heard him say ‘river’ just now,” the woman said, English word pronounced awkwardly. “Ribah. River.”

A small ripple passed through the truck.

“Maybe we’re crossing it,” Aiko said quickly. “There must be a bridge.”

“Maybe they can’t spare a bridge for us,” someone else muttered, too quietly for the guards to hear.

The words were like a match flicked into dry grass.

The road dipped.

The air cooled.

Frank felt the change before he saw it.

The jungle fell away on both sides, trees opening like curtains to reveal a wide, brown sweep of water ahead. The river was swollen from rains that had fallen for three nights straight, turning the banks into red mud and dragging branches and debris along with its current.

The bridge that crossed it—or what was left of it—stood off to the left.

“Aw, come on,” Mills groaned, easing his foot off the gas.

The main span was still there, a steel frame rising in clean geometry over the river—but the approach on their side had collapsed, a chunk of road missing where the bank had given way. Chunks of concrete jutted at odd angles. The far bank looked chewed.

A sign in English and rough local script had been planted at the edge of the gap.

NO VEHICLES.

Frank scanned the waterline.

“To the right,” he said, pointing. “Looks like they’ve been taking jeeps through.”

A narrower track led off down toward the riverbank, where tire tracks cut through mud and shallow water. A bed of rocks had been piled in one spot, making a kind of ford.

A jeep sat on the far bank, waiting. Its driver waved.

“Guess that’s us,” Mills said.

“Trucks through that?” Frank frowned. “We’re heavier than a jeep.”

Mills snorted.

“Buddy, we’re also late,” he said. “Orders say railhead by nightfall. That’s on the other side of that water. So unless you feel like building a bridge with your bare hands, we’re going through.”

He leaned out the window, shouted to the sergeant in the next truck, pointed to the ford.

The sergeant nodded reluctantly.

The convoy angled off the main road and began to descend toward the river.

In the back of the third truck, someone screamed.

At first it was just a short, sharp sound—startled, angry.

Then it rose.

Aiko went rigid.

Yuri’s hand clamped on her wrist.

“What is it?” Aiko asked, but she already knew. Even before the truck bed tilted and she felt the shift in her stomach, even before the canvas flap lifted briefly and she glimpsed brown water glinting nearby, she knew.

“They’re going toward the river,” hissed the woman near the front. “I saw it. We’re going down. The bridge is broken.”

Broken.

The word landed heavy.

“Down there, they will drown us like… like unwanted puppies,” someone else said suddenly, voice trembling.

She regretted the metaphor as soon as it left her mouth, but it was too late.

The women had all seen it at some point, in some alley or yard—a sack, a bucket, a hand that did not hesitate.

“They’ll drown us,” another voice took it up.

“They can say we fell when the truck slipped.”

“They don’t want us on their ships. Too much trouble.”

“THEY’RE GOING TO DROWN US!” a voice shrieked, high and panicked.

The words tore through the cramped space.

It was not a reasoned statement.

It was fear, raw and loud.

She screamed it again, in Japanese this time, louder, as if the repetition might somehow prevent it.

“They’re going to drown us! They’re going to drown us!”

The truck lurched as the angle increased.

Mud squelched under the tires.

The sound of the river grew louder, a sluggish roar.

Yuri’s nails dug into Aiko’s skin.

“What do we do?” she gasped. “Aiko, what do we do?”

Aiko’s training in the hospital had prepared her for many things: a steady hand with a needle, a calm voice in a ward full of fevered patients, a swift assessment of bleeding and shock.

It had not prepared her for this: a truck full of terrified women, a river, and the possibility—more rumor than fact—that the people driving them preferred them dead.

“We stay together,” she said, because it was the only thing that sounded like an answer. “If something happens, we… we help each other.”

She hated how weak that sounded.

She hated how strong they both wanted it to be.

In the cab, Frank heard the scream faintly, even over the engine.

“What was that?” he asked.

Mills grimaced.

“Probably a rat,” he said. “Or a snake. They freak out about anything back there.”

Frank frowned.

He’d spent enough months near the POW camp to know “they” were not cowards. They stepped where guards told them to, they worked where they were sent, they took news of home with their faces held tight.

This scream had sounded different.

“Just… go easy,” he said. “Last thing we need is the wheels slipping. If we get stuck and they have to walk through—”

“Got it,” Mills said.

He eased the truck into the shallow water of the ford.

Mud sucked at the tires.

The truck rocked.

“Come on, baby,” Mills muttered, coaxing the throttle.

Behind them, the other trucks followed in a nervous parade.

Water lapped at the tires.

The river, at this shallow point, was only knee-high—a flat, slow sheet over rounded stones, diverted off the main current by a sandbar. But to someone who couldn’t see that, who heard only the rush of water and felt the chug of the engine, it might as well have been an ocean.

Inside the covered truck, the sound of the river became a monster.

It filled the air under the canvas, mixing with the grinding of gears and the crunch of stones.

The truck swayed.

Aiko felt the floor tilt, heard women sucking in breath, heard prayers in half-whispered phrases from childhood.

“Please… please…”

Somebody pounded on the wooden wall with an open hand.

“Stop! Stop!” a voice shouted in Japanese.

The truck did not stop.

The panic sharpened.

“THEY’RE GOING TO DROWN US!” the screaming woman shouted again, voice cracking.

It bounced off wooden slats and canvas, sank into ears and flesh.

“We have to get out!” someone cried. “Jump!”

“And drown faster?” Gerda—the older interpreter who’d picked up some English and some Japanese—snapped from the corner. “Use your head. If the truck tips, you’ll be under it before you see water.”

Her German accent chopped the Japanese syllables, but her meaning came through.

“Maybe they will leave us halfway,” another said bitterly. “Let the river decide.”

“Stop it,” Aiko said sharply.

Her own heart was thundering. Her mouth was dry.

She imagined cold water rising around her ankles, then knees, then waist. Imagined hands clawing at each other in the dark of the canvas.

The truck jolted.

Something splashed against the underside.

“We’re in it,” Yuri whispered.

Aiko grabbed her hand tighter.

“Breathe,” she said. “Breathe.”

Her voice shook.

She hoped no one noticed.

From the outside, the crossing took less than thirty seconds.

The first truck trundled over the rocks, engine growling, water slapping its tires. The second followed, slipping slightly but catching traction. The third—the one with Aiko and Yuri—hit a deeper rut and lurched.

For a moment, the right rear wheel spun.

Mills, glancing in the side mirror, swore.

The truck tilted a few degrees.

In the back, women screamed.

Frank half-rose from his seat.

“Easy!” he shouted. “Easy…”

The driver of the jeep on the far bank scrambled down, wading into the water, and slapped the side of the truck.

“Left! Left!” he shouted, gesturing.

Mills twisted the wheel, feathered the throttle.

The tire bumped over a submerged rock, caught, climbed.

The truck straightened.

The rest of the ford passed without incident.

On the far bank, they pulled up onto dry land, water dripping from the undercarriage.

“You see?” Mills said, blowing out a breath. “Easy. Like Sunday school.”

Frank kept listening.

The screams had faded to sobs, then to low, ragged breathing.

He felt his shoulders unclench a fraction.

“Maybe tell them next time,” he said. “That we’re not driving into the deep end.”

Mills snorted.

“You want to explain hydraulics and bridge conditions in Japanese?” he asked. “Be my guest.”

Frank sighed.

“Just… maybe tell someone who can,” he said. “We’re already the monsters in their stories. No need to help that along.”

The trucks climbed back up to the main road.

The river shrank behind them.

For the women in the back, however, the water stayed.

It clung to their thoughts, cold and heavy, long after the sound of the current faded.

When the truck finally shuddered to a stop hours later in the railhead yard—where trains waited with open cars and guards with lists—they climbed down shakily, legs stiff, faces pinched.

Some looked back down the road, toward the unseen river.

Aiko did.

She half-expected to see a dark stain on the horizon, as if the water had come this far.

Instead, there was only dust.

“They didn’t drown us,” Yuri said.

Her tone was somewhere between relief and accusation.

Aiko let out a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding.

“No,” she said. “They didn’t.”

“But they could have,” whispered the screaming woman, rubbing her arms. “They could have slipped the trucks. No one would have known.”

She was right.

The thought made Aiko’s stomach lurch again.

“We would have known,” she replied quietly. “As long as one of us lived long enough to tell it. And perhaps that is why they did not.”

She wasn’t sure if she believed that.

She was very sure that she needed to.

The incident did not go in any official report that day.

On the American side, the convoy log listed: Depart Camp 0900. Crossed river at ford 1130. Arrived railhead 1630. Weather: fair. No mention of panic. No mention of screams.

On the Japanese side—among the women—it became a story.

Whispered in bunks on the train.

Told again on the ship weeks later, when they were finally put aboard a vessel for the long journey home.

Modified in the telling, as stories always are.

“In one version,” Aiko would say years later, “they say the truck was halfway underwater, swimming like a fish. In another, the driver laughed as we screamed. In truth, the water barely reached the wheels. And the driver never turned his head.”

What did not change was the heart of it:

For a brief, terrible moment, they believed they were being driven to their deaths.

The truth of what the Americans believed in that moment—whether they thought of the women as freight to be delivered or people to be protected—was harder to know.

That gap, between belief and intention, became fertile ground for argument.

Decades later, on a stage at a peace conference in Tokyo, that old blizzard of feeling rose again.

A banner behind the speakers read:

“MEMORY AND MISUNDERSTANDING: CIVILIANS IN CAPTIVITY, 1941–1945”

On one side of the table sat Dr. Sato Emiko, a historian whose book on Japanese women prisoners had caused more than one uncomfortable silence in public debates. On the other sat Colonel (Ret.) Mark Ellis, an American veteran turned military historian, invited for “balance.”

Between them lay a glass of water, two microphones, and a copy of a memoir with a dog-eared page marked.

Dr. Sato tapped the book.

“In this chapter,” she said, “Nakamura Aiko describes the river crossing. She writes”—Sato switched to English, reading slowly—“‘We thought we were being taken to be drowned. Some of us screamed. Some of us prayed. None of the guards said a word.’”

She looked up.

“For her, and for many of the women I interviewed, this was not a minor misunderstanding,” Sato said. “It was a moment when all the rumors of deliberate drowning, of being considered ‘disposable,’ suddenly seemed about to become real.”

Colonel Ellis nodded.

“I don’t doubt that for a second,” he said. “The fear was real.”

He adjusted his glasses.

“But then,” he added, “we have the convoy log and the testimony of Private Frank Doyle—who turned out to be very much alive and surprisingly willing to talk when you tracked him down, Doctor.”

The audience chuckled.

Sato smiled briefly.

“Yes,” she said. “He was amused to find himself in our footnotes.”

Ellis continued.

“In his account, the ford was chosen because the bridge approach was unsafe,” he said. “The depth was, at most, a couple of feet. There was no plan, no hint of any idea, to harm the prisoners. In fact, he argued for making it more comfortable for them.”

He spread his hands.

“So what do we do,” he asked, “with a story where both sides tell the truth as they experienced it, but those truths look very different?”

The room murmured.

A young woman at the back whispered to her friend, “Of course they didn’t mean to drown them.”

Her friend whispered back, “But they didn’t tell them that.”

On stage, Sato sighed.

“We argue,” she said simply. “We argue about intent, about structure, about responsibility. Some people want to say, ‘See? The Americans were kind. The fear was just rumor.’ Others want to say, ‘See? The women had so little trust that any unknown turn of the wheel felt like a death sentence.’”

She glanced at Ellis.

“And sometimes, we argue with each other,” she added.

Ellis nodded.

He’d been on the receiving end of those arguments more than once.

“I’ve had veterans hear this story and get offended,” he admitted. “They say, ‘We fed those prisoners, we protected them, and still they thought we’d murder them in a river?’ They feel their effort is being questioned.”

He leaned forward.

“What I tell them is this,” he said. “Your decency does not erase what they were told before they met you. And their fear does not erase what you did.”

He paused.

“The question is not, ‘Were the Americans secretly planning to drown them?’” he said. “We have no evidence of that. The question is, ‘Why did the women so easily believe it?’ And that leads us back through Tokyo’s propaganda, through stories of other camps where mercy was… in short supply.”

Sato nodded.

“And,” she added, “through the silent choices made on that truck. No one said, ‘We are crossing at a shallow place. You are not in danger.’”

Ellis spread his hands.

“You’ve been in a convoy,” he said. “Half the time, the guys in front don’t know what’s happening either.”

The audience laughed.

“That doesn’t make the women’s interpretation wrong,” Ellis went on. “It just means fear rushes into any space where information is missing.”

A hand went up in the front row.

“Yes?” Sato said.

An elderly woman stood, leaning on a cane.

Her voice was thin, but clear.

“I was there,” she said.

The room quieted at once.

She nodded toward the book on the table.

“I sat behind Nakamura-san in that truck,” the woman said. “I remember the river. I remember thinking, ‘So this is where it ends, in muddy water on a foreign island.’”

She smiled faintly.

“And I remember stepping down on the other side, boots only a little wet, and feeling very silly inside my own head,” she said. “But I did not say so out loud.”

Laughter rippled gently.

“Why not?” Ellis asked, genuinely curious.

“Because,” she said, “I was angry. Angry that I had been afraid. Angry that fear had been planted in me in the first place. Angry that they had not thought to tell us what was happening.”

She looked at the water glass on the table.

“So I told the story where I was the one who was fooled,” she said. “But I also told the story where they could have fooled us much worse, and did not.”

She sat back down.

The room held its breath for a long moment.

Then applause rose, hesitant, then warm.

Later, online, clips from that exchange did what clips do.

They bounced around, stripped of context.

Some people shared them with captions like: “POWs falsely thought Americans would drown them. Shows you how much propaganda they swallowed.”

Others shared them with captions like: “Even when treated comparatively well, these women lived in constant terror. Shows you what war does to trust.”

In comment threads, strangers argued.

“They were in no real danger, so it’s not a big deal,” one commenter wrote.

“Imagine being so scared you think every unknown turn is your last,” another replied. “How is that not a big deal?”

A third wrote:

“My grandfather was in a different camp, but he told a similar story—a rumor about being ‘put out to sea’ instead of sent home. He said the fear was often worse than anything that actually happened. But he also said: sometimes the rumors were true. That’s why they believed them.”

The argument, predictably, got serious and tense.

People questioned sources, motives, agendas.

Some accused Sato of “trying to make the Allies look bad.”

Some accused Ellis of “excusing everything with context.”

A few, quietly, tried to steer the thread back to the human center.

One user, with the handle RiverWitness, wrote:

“My great-aunt was in that convoy. She never said the Americans were monsters. She said she was sure they were going to drown her, and then they didn’t. She said that gap—the space between what she expected and what happened—broke something open in her. In a good way. Maybe the story is about that.”

In a small house at the edge of a Japanese town, not far from a river that behaved itself most of the year, an old woman sat with a younger one at a low table.

Rain tapped at the windows.

The younger woman—Aiko’s granddaughter, Hana—held a paperback in her hands.

“They used your name, Grandma,” she said, flipping to a page. “Here. Nakamura Aiko. ‘River crossing incident.’”

Aiko adjusted her reading glasses.

The words swam for a moment, then settled.

She read her own younger self’s description, filtered through translation and editing:

We were sure they were going to drown us.

She smiled quietly.

“They didn’t exaggerate that part,” she said.

Hana frowned.

“Did you really think so?” she asked. “Even after working in their camp? After seeing how they fed you?”

Aiko shook her head.

“I didn’t ‘think’ so the way you think one plus one is two,” she said. “I believed it the way you believe thunder means rain. Fast. All at once. In your bones.”

She tapped her chest.

“It didn’t last long,” she added. “Once I felt the truck climb up again, once I saw the gravel on the far side, the belief melted. But in that little moment, it was very real.”

Hana chewed her lip.

“They’re arguing online,” she said. “Americans and Japanese. Telling each other what the story ‘really’ means.”

“I am not surprised,” Aiko said dryly.

“Some say it shows Americans were merciful,” Hana went on. “Others say it shows they didn’t care about your fear. Some say you were foolish to believe such rumors. Some say you were right to.”

Aiko listened, looking out the window at the small, polite river.

“They are all a little right,” she said. “And all a little wrong.”

Hana huffed.

“That’s not satisfying,” she said.

“War is not satisfying,” Aiko replied. “Not in stories that try to tell the truth.”

She leaned back.

“For me,” she said, “the important part was not the rumor or the river. It was what happened later.”

“Later?” Hana asked.

Aiko nodded.

“On the ship,” she said. “Coming home. When the Americans gave the children extra bread without anyone watching. When a guard helped an old woman to the deck so she could see the ocean one more time.”

She smiled faintly.

“And when one of them—one with a crooked nose—asked me, in terrible Japanese, if I was still afraid he would throw me overboard.”

Hana’s eyes widened.

“What did you say?” she breathed.

“I told him,” Aiko said, “‘If you wanted to drown me, you already had your chance.’”

She chuckled.

“He laughed until he nearly dropped his cigarette,” she said. “Then he said, in English, ‘No drown. War over. You go home.’”

She looked at her granddaughter.

“Understanding did not come all at once,” she said. “It came in pieces. The river was one piece. The not-drowning.”

She tapped the book.

“If people want to argue about whether it was kindness or duty, let them,” she said. “I was there. I know this much: intention matters. But so does fear. And sometimes the most important thing is simply that the worst thing you imagined did not happen.”

Hana nodded slowly.

“I’ll write that in the comments,” she said.

Aiko laughed.

“Do,” she said. “But make sure you breathe between the angry ones. Rivers and words both can carry you away if you are not careful.”

Outside, the rain eased.

The river kept flowing, unconcerned.

Somewhere, miles and decades away, the muddy ford on that other island had long since dried or washed out entirely, disappearing back into the landscape.

But in the minds of those who had crossed it—on feet, on tires, in panic—that moment remained.

A place where rumor and reality had brushed against each other.

A place where trucks had dipped toward water, where women had screamed, “They’re going to drown us!”, and where, for reasons that would be argued over long after, they had emerged on the other side, boots wet but breathing, still on their way home.

THE END