During the Second World War, a large number of atrocities and war crimes were committed
by the various armies of the conflict.
Some of the most brutal and savage were punished after the war had come to an end in trials,
but a large number went unpunished.
Trials such as the Nuremberg Trials took place to bring the perpetrators of those committed
by the Nazi government and Third Reich to justice, and the Tokyo War Crimes Trials also
held the major aggressors of the Japanese war effort to account.
But the Japanese war crimes trials were considered some of the worst of the whole of World War
Two, and the Japanese army gained a reputation for committing horrific atrocities and massacres.
One of those saw 22 Australian Army nurses, women who were based on Bangka Island caring
for soldiers machine gunned and mown down in a horrific massacre that also saw over
50 Australian and British soldiers and crew members executed in barbaric fashion.
There was only 3 survivors of the massacre.
So join us today as we look as ‘The BRUTAL Executions of the Nurses of Bangka Island.
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On the 12th February 1942, it looked as if Singapore was about to fall to the Japanese
Army.
The Japanese had been advancing throughout different regions causing chaos even before
the war officially began for them, or when they joined the Axis alliance.
As Singapore was about to fall, 65 Australian Army nurses were evacuated on a small coastal
steamer ship named the Vyner Brooke.
Also onboard the ship were over 200 civilians fleeing for their safety and a number of English
military personnel and members of staff.
On board were also a number of injured members of the armed forces, but as the ship was on
it’s way to its destination it was attacked.
Japanese aircraft were flying overhead, and they strafed and bombed the ship which was
greatly overloaded.
The bombs hit the ship and it sank very quickly.
There was panic on board, with many people clambering for their lives, and the survivors
headed for the lifeboats on board the ships and left the ship, where they were again staffed
by Japanese aircraft.
Many people were killed onboard the ship or drowned at sea as it was passing between Borneo
and Sumatra.
12 Australian Nurses were killed in the attacks or drowned at sea, but 53 remaining nurses
along with other people managed to get onto the lifeboats, cast away and draft with the
tide.
They reached Bangka Island which is an island to the east of Sumatra.
Today it’s the 9th largest Island in Indonesia, and has a population of over 1 million, but
during the Second World War it would be captured and occupied by the Japanese.
When the nurses arrived, they wore their Red Cross armbands which they believed would give
them some sort of protection.
This was true as they were supposed to be given protected status as non-combatants,
and they were expected to be treated also with respect and in a civilised way.
Around 100 survivors reunited together from the ship met up near to Radji Beach, but it
was quickly realised that those who had occupied the land were the Japanese.
Talks were held upon landing on the beach, and an officer of the ship tried to find the
Japanese to surrender the group of survivors of the ship to the Japanese and to turn over
as Prisoners of War.
Whilst this officer was away, the most senior nurse who survived, Irene Melville Drummond
said that the civilian women and the children should leave for the town of Muntok.
It was said that the nurses should then also stay behind on the beach and to care for any
wounded survivors who washed up on the beach.
Here the nurses established a shelter to triage patients which was labelled with a big Red
Cross sign on it, indicating that they were not a military threat and were simply nurses
administering medical care.
Fires on the sand were lit and the survivors huddled around together to keep warm as the
evening set in.
The next day the ships officer arrived at the beach with around 20 Japanese soldiers.
The soldiers commanded all of the wounded men to gather together and then they were
split into two different groups.
The soldiers then pointed towards half of the ship wrecked men to follow them around
the cove, a short time later they came back and were seen wiping their bayonets and they
then called for the second men to follow them.
The men followed them, and then whilst they were there they saw the corpses of the first
group floating in the water.
The nurses heard a quick volley of shots and what the Japanese had done was just massacre
around 60 British and Australian soldiers and crew members, who should have been considered
prisoners of war.
Those who had not been killed initially by the shots were then bayonetted to death, with
the Japanese plunging knives into their bodies.
When the Japanese returned again, they sat by the nurses and wiped their bayonets again
and cleaned their rifles.
Shortly after this, the Japanese then began to order the nurses and women to stand up,
and to line up and walk into the surf of the sea.
The nurses didn’t know, but a machine gun had been set up on the beach.
The Australian nurses and a civilian women were forced to walk together in the sea, and
whilst facing the horizon as soon as they entered the water, the machine gun opened
up on the nurses and each one fell one by one.
All but one of the women were executed in barbaric fashion.
The massacre on the beach was a terrible atrocity, which highlighted the barbarism of the some
elements of the Japanese army.
Vivian Bullwinkle was the only woman who survived the attack, as a bullet passed through her
body and missed her vital organs.
She lay in the shallow water stunned and feighned her death with the waves washing over her,
and she only just recovered as the Japanese soldiers left.
She then looked around and she saw her dead nurses and friends around her, floating bodies
in the sea.
Vivian worried that the soldiers would come back, so she entered the jungle wounded and
hid out.
She came across another injured person from the ship, Private Cecil George Kingsley who
had wounds to his abdomen and shoulder.
Vivian looked after him for 12 days and she relied on food from the locals.
However they then walked into the town of Muntok to surrender as they could not wait
out for years or the Japanese to surrender.
Once they arrived in Muntok, the pair were placed in jail with other shipwrecked civilians
and people, but the prison was barbaric.
Kingsley passed away as he was not given medical care, and also the Japanese gave them hardly
any food.
Eventually the civilians and survivors were then taken to a Prisoner of War camp, and
Vivian Bullwinkle spent 3 years inside of one.
She had told her fellow nurses what happened at the beach, and they all swore to protect
her life to make sure that the story of the massacred men and women would be told to the
world.
It was considered that the Japanese could kill her as she had witnessed the massacre
and executions.
The Australian public did not know about the massacre until after the Second World War.
One newspaper report from the time states, ‘Between 30 and 35 nurses were either shot,
bayonetted or drowned.
The Japanese lined up the remainder of survivors, facing the sea and motioned them towards the
water.
A soldier with a Tommy gun ruthlessly shot down nurses, civilians and merchant sailors.
The Japanese then bayonetted those who’s fate was uncertain.’
It was said that the women went to their deaths knowing what was going to happen as they heard
the firing from the previous massacres of the men.
Vivian Bullwinkle, the only nurse who survived did live to see the end of the Second World
War, and after she testified at the Japanese War Crimes Tribunal in Tokyo in 1946.
She told the world the horrific story of the massacre of the nurses.
She said, ‘The Japanese came back and sat in front of us and when they had finished
cleaning their rifles and bayonets, they stood up and the one in charge suggested that we
should go towards the sea, and he sent a couple of soldiers to push us along.
We went towards the sea and kept walking in when we got to our waists they started firing
up and down the line up the machine gun.
There was only the one machine gun, they just swept up and down the line and the girls fell
one after the other.
I was towards the end of the line and a bullet got me in the left loin and went straight
through and came out towards the front.
The force of it knocked me over into the water.
There were 23 including myself, 22 men and one civilian.’
Of the 65 nurses onboard the Vyner Brooke, 12 drowned in the sea and 21 were shot from
behind being executed in the water at Radji Beach.
32 women were sent to Prisoner of War Camps, and all suffered terrible throughout the war
with starvation and ill-treatment.
A number would succumb to their sickness.
No one was ever punished for their role in the massacre and the perpetrators were never
tracked down, and today their identity remains unknown, and there was no punishment at all
for the atrocities and executions.
Some of the locals who live near Radji Beach of Bangka Island refer to the beach as English
Bay because of the slaughter of the people which occured there.
It has been said that pieces of bone have washed up there, and the residents refused
to eat fish from the area for a long time because of the bodies and the fact it was
the site of a massacre.
The Bangka Island Massacre saw 22 Australian Army Nurses and around 60 men including soldiers
and crew members of the ship slaughtered by the Japanese.
By the rules of war, the Japanese should have taken them as prisoners of war, but the state
of the concentration camps in Japan and the forced labour camps were terrible.
The executions on the beach shows us how awful armies and militaries could be during the
Second World War, as the slaughter of innocent nurses who were involved in caring for anyone
injured is the worst of the worst war crime.
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