The Japanese leopard with unchanging spots

THE Japanese citizen's home is becoming his castle, General MacArthur, summing up the first year of occupation of Nippon, reported this week.

While this pleasant reflection was being broadcast to the world, other Japanese citizens were being carefully hanged in Hongkong and Singapore, as British justice caught up with war criminals.

And two Japanese officers were rounded up, charged with being principals in the Massacre of Banka Island.

The Banka crime parallels in horror other Japanese atrocities which Australia will never forget: The sinking of the hospital ship Centaur; the horrors of the Burma-Thailand railway; the Sandakan Death March.

Today, the full story of this massacre is told for the first time, by Hal Richardson, ex-Eighth Division AIF, himself a prisoner of the Japanese.

Here is his story:

Banka is the traditional tropic island.

Warm seas lazily break on sand fringing the jungle wall.

On an outcrop of rock on the western side of the island stands a lighthouse that blinks across to Sumatra, some sixty miles to the west.

Back of the lighthouse is the quaint town of Muntok—first point taken by the Japanese to control Banka Straits.

Ships fleeing from Singapore did not know that the Japanese had warships in the Straits, a seaplane base in the peaceful Muntok Bay, and that the narrow straits were a deathtrap for shipping.

In these Straits 80 ships fleeing Singapore were sunk or captured. Only two reached Java.

One of this tragic procession was the Vyner Brooke. Among those on board this vessel were 65 Australian nurses.

Slight-fair-haired Wallace Vivian Cake, a 25-year-old AB from St. Johns, Newfoundland, who had survived the sinking of the Prince of Wales, was one of the gun crew of the Vyner Brooke.

After about 12 hours in the water Cake was washed ashore on the stretch of beach at Banka.

On the beach were gathered 130 men, women and children survivors, including 21 of the Australian nurses.

Twelve nurses had been killed or drowned.

All night long searchlights from Jap warships lit up the straits and the weary survivors slept on Banka Beach.

On the morning of February 17 a senior naval officer said, "We have been here long enough."

"We have not food or water," he said. "We cannot get away. I will go in and contact the Japanese and bring out a party to fetch you all into Muntok."

And he left.

As he vanished into the jungle an engineer officer suggested to Cake that a little party of walking wounded and women and children should go on ahead.

As they rested by the side of the native path they saw their senior officer returning.

With him were 19 Japs armed with rifles and bayonets. One had a machine gun.

*    *    *

With the main party back on the beach was Stoker Ernest Lloyd from the Vyner Brooke.

He looked around at his companions—21 nurses, two or three civilian women and between 25 and 30 soldiers and sailors.

"They all seemed pretty cheerful," he told me later. "Then we saw the Japs come down on to the beach."

"Our officer told us to stand up then," said Lloyd.

"The Japs came round and searched us and then motioned us to stand in line.

"There were two lines—one of men and the other of women.

"Then they counted off ten of us and told us to walk around the beach.

"We thought we were going into Muntok and we passed across the jungle path and continued on around the beach to a small bay past a headland.

"About six Japs were with us.

"They lined up in front of us and then motioned us to stand at the water's edge. We did that.

"The man next to Lloyd said, 'This is where we get it right in the back. I'm going into the water.'

"Lloyd whispered back, 'I'm with you' and the line broke.

"About four of us dived in," said Lloyd. "The Japs opened fire. They started at the other end on those running up the beach.

"They finished those up and then they got on to us.

"I got one across the head. Another in the left shoulder; another in the right leg then one in the left. The tide was going out.

"I was lying in the sea just being washed out, whilst the Japs took pot shots. Then they went and I dragged myself out, up over the sand and into the jungle."

*    *    *

The party waiting back around the headland heard the shots.

With them the Japs enacted the crowning horror of all.

It has been told briefly in the tragic words of Sister Vivien Bullwinkel, slight, fair-haired, young nurse of Adelaide.

She said: "The Japs took out a Tommy-gun and ordered us into the sea.

Grim glimpses of the massacres were seen by a sergeant, Robert Seddon, of the Royal Marines, who had been floating in the sea for two days and was just off the beach.

"I could see people walking up and down," he said later.

"Then as I went closer to the shore I saw Japanese."

He later joined Richard Wilding, 27-year-old leading seaman, from the Li Wo.

Wilding had landed on the coast and was trying to reach Muntock.

Wilding and Seddon went around the dreadful scene of carnage on the beach.

Wilding told me: "I saw the Australian nurses. One was nearly naked. Another had three bayonet wounds in the back.

"Footprints showed where women ran up the beach.

"At the end of the footsteps they lay—heads cleaved—I counted twelve nurses and two civilian women.

"They were too gruesome to go around and accurately count.

"There had been no attempt to bury them. They lay mostly face downwards. I did not see any bullet wounds—they appeared to have been bayoneted."

The two men explored the little hut at the top of the beach where the nurses had been tending two wounded naval ratings. The ratings were dead—shot through the head.

Round the headland was another shocking sight—the bodies of Lloyd's companions strewn in death.

"There were fifteen or twenty men dead there, and it seemed as though they had been shot," said Wilding. "I did not stay there but, full of fear, went up into the jungle to hide."

Wally Cake was one of those who could not at first credit the terrible explanation why the party he had left on the beach awaiting the Japanese had not arrived. Then he believed.

Near death, Lloyd staggered into the hospital. His shocking state and story put the seal of truth on the terrible story the rest of the prisoners had thought too shocking to believe.

He said that, after crawling from the beach into the jungle, he collapsed for three days.

Then he went down the beach again and came to the spot where he had originally landed.

"There I saw the Australian nurses," said Lloyd.

"All were dead. I recognised two or three. I counted 12 or 15 nurses and about 25 men dead.

"Two or three of the women had practically all their clothes torn from them.

"They were in the most horrible positions—some kneeling—some doubled up.

"Some had bayonet wounds as well as bullet holes. I saw the chief officer dead and his clothes covered with blood.

"The nurses were scattered. Some had fifty yards between them. I reckoned they had been dealt with individually."

Four times wounded and in a terrible state, Lloyd spent four days at the scene of carnage.

With his wounds festering and weak from the loss of blood, he could hardly walk and hid by day in the jungle.

At death's door he met Chinese coolies who strung him on a pole and carried him into Muntock to be handed over to the Japs.

Of the 65 Australian nurses on the Vyner Brooke, 12 were killed in the sinking, 21 perished in the massacres, eight died later in the prison camps on Sumatra; the rest landed on another part of the coast and were made prisoners.

This is the crime for which the two Japanese officers will stand trial.