BANGKA ISLAND MASSACRE

BANGKA ISLAND MASSACRE (St. Valentine's Day, February 14, 1942)
On board the liner SS Vyner Brooke (Captain R. E. Borton, OBE) named after its onetime owner Sir Charles Vyner Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak, and in peacetime had sailed between Singapore and Kuching, were 65 Australian Army nurses of the 2/10 and the 2/13th Australian General Hospitals in Singapore who, together with other civilian women and children, made up the 330 persons being evacuated from the city. In the Banka Strait, a narrow strip of water between the islands of Bangka and Sumatra, the Vyner Brooke was bombed and sunk by Japanese planes. A few lifeboats managed to reach the mangrove lined shore of Bangka Island. On advice from some islanders they were advised to give themselves up to the Japanese as there was no hope of escaping. That night another lifeboat arrived on the shore containing between 30 and 40 British servicemen from another ship sunk earlier. The civilian women, some nurses and children, then set out to walk to the nearest Japanese compound to give themselves up. When the Japanese arrived at the beach the men and women were separated, the men were marched into the jungle, never to be heard of again. The soldiers returned and forced the remaining 22 nurses to wade out into the sea. There, in waist deep water, they were machined-gunned to death, leaving only one survivor, Sister Vivian Bullwinkle, who later managed to reach the island's Japanese Naval Headquarters where she was put to work in the hospital. For over three years she kept the secret of the massacre to herself and a few friends. To speak openly about it would have been a certain recipe for execution. Of the 65 nurses from the Vyner Brooke, 12 had drowned, 21 shot in the water at Radji Beach and 32 had gone into prison in Muntok before being shipped to Palembang in southern Sumatra to serve three-and-a-half years of privation and punishment as prisoners of war. Sadly, only 24 survived the war. (Sister Bullwinkle died in Perth, Western Australia, in 2000, aged 84)