Australian army nurses prisoners of Japanese forces in the Dutch East Indies

david

In An Attractive Naivety, Armistice Darcy is one of 65 Australian army nurses evacuated from Singapore on 12 February 1942, just before its fall, on the SS Vyner Brooke. The following day, Friday the 13th, the ship was attacked by six Japanese bombers and sunk. Of those who made it to shore, 21 were savagely raped and murdered by Japanese soldiers on Radji Beach, Bangka Island. One, Sr Vivian Bullwinkel, miraculously survived the massacre, having been shot through her side, and would live to testify against the perpetrators at the Tokyo trials after the war. Bullwinkel and the other surviving nurses were interned in a small village at Muntok and later transported to jungle POW camps on the island of Sumatra where they endured three and a half years of starvation, disease, ill-treatment and neglect at the hands of their Japanese captors. Only 24 nurses would survive the ordeal to return home.

Map of POW camps in Sumatra in World War 2
https://muntokpeacemuseum.org/?page_id=71FF 

 

SS Vyner Brooke
The SS Vyner Brooke 

 

 

Nurses massacred - More Japanese attrocities
Riverine Herald (Echuca, Vic. : Moama, NSW : 1869 - 1954; 1998 - 2002), Tuesday 18 September 1945, page 2 

 

Australian army nurse survivors
Singapore, September 1945. Nurses from 2/10 AND 2/13 Australian General Hospital, and one survivor from 4 Casualty Clearing Station, aboard the Vyner Brooke when it sank. After three and a half years as prisoners of war of the Japanese they arrived at the airfield in Singapore. They are wearing their original uniforms, incomplete and oil-stained.

 

For further reading

Betty Jeffrey, White coolies: a graphic record of survival in World War Two ( North Ryde, NSW: Angus & Robertson, 1997)

Vivian Bullwinkel, Diary and diary entries. 

Ian Shaw, On Radji Beach (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2010).

David Gormley-O'Brien, An Attractive Naivety (Inhouse Publishing, 2024).

https://muntokpeacemuseum.org/ 

https://www.awm.gov.au/visit/exhibitions/stolenyears/ww2/japan/nurses#:~:text=The%20first%20six%20Australian%20nurses,massacre%20on%2016%20February%201942. 

https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/E84734

https://australiannursesmemorialcentre.org.au/index.php/events/80th-anniversary-of-the-ss-vyner-brooke-sinking-bicton-wa-event/ 

 

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