The Bangka Island massacre

On 16 February 1942, the day after the fall of Singapore, on Radji Beach in the north of Bangka Island off the east coast of Sumatra, Japanese soldiers murdered a group of Allied shipwreck survivors who wanted to surrender. The men were shot and bayoneted behind a nearby headland, while 22 Australian army nurses and one British civilian woman were ordered to walk into the sea and were machine-gunned. Twenty-one nurses were killed. Only one of them survived, Sister Vivian Bullwinkel, who after hiding in the jungle for twelve days gave herself up to the Japanese and survived captivity. It was her testimony that told the world of the crime.

War chronologies record under 16 February that the Japanese opened fire on Australian nurses, killing 21 of them, and under 26 February that Vivian Bullwinkel, the “sole survivor” of the massacre, was captured and imprisoned. The number of nurses killed agrees with the sources, but it should be added that some eighty people in all fell victim, most of them soldiers and sailors. Bullwinkel was the only nurse to survive, but not the only survivor: two men from the first group and one badly wounded British soldier also escaped execution. According to Australian biographies of Bullwinkel and the Australian War Memorial, she gave herself up to the Japanese twelve days after the massacre, that is around 28 February; she was not captured but decided herself to come out of hiding.

The last ships from Singapore

By early February 1942 it was already clear that Singapore would not hold out for long. After the Japanese landing on the island on the night of 8–9 February, the military authorities began sending out of the harbour everything that could still float: passenger ships, coastal steamers, tugs, yachts and patrol craft. On board were civilians, mainly women and children, wounded, hospital staff and specialists designated for evacuation. Most of these vessels had to sail south through the Riau Archipelago and the Bangka Strait towards Sumatra and Java – exactly where the Japanese were assembling warships and transports for the attack on Sumatra. In those days Japanese aircraft and warships sank or intercepted most of the small evacuation ships. The exact number of victims cannot be established, since nobody kept complete passenger lists.

The Australian nurses had served in Malaya in the military hospitals of the 8th Australian Division: the 2/10th and 2/13th Australian General Hospitals and the 2/4th Casualty Clearing Station. They belonged to the Australian Army Nursing Service, whose members held officer rank but bore no arms. The command was slow to send them away. Some of the nurses left on other ships on 10–12 February, and the last 65 boarded the Vyner Brooke on the evening of 12 February. They were under two matrons, Olive Paschke and Irene Drummond.

The Vyner Brooke was a small passenger-cargo ship belonging to the Sarawak Steamship Company and named after Charles Vyner Brooke, the last “White Rajah” of Sarawak on Borneo. Before the war she had plied between Kuching and Singapore and could take only a dozen or so passengers. The Royal Navy requisitioned her when war broke out, painted her grey and armed her with a single gun and machine guns. On 12 February she had on board 47 crew and, according to various sources, from about 180 to more than 300 passengers.

The sinking of the Vyner Brooke

The ship’s captain, Lieutenant Richard Borton, tried to sail by night and shelter by day close to the shores of small islands. On 13 February Japanese aircraft spotted the ship but did not hit her. That night the Vyner Brooke headed for the Bangka Strait, but the presence of Japanese warships forced her into cautious manoeuvres, and at dawn on 14 February she was still on the open, calm sea in the strait. After 2 p.m. Japanese bombers attacked her. The ship fended off the first run by manoeuvring and gunfire, but on the second she took several direct hits. According to most accounts she rolled over and sank bow first within about half an hour.

The nurses helped civilians and wounded into the lifeboats and onto rafts, and were themselves the last to jump into the water. Two were killed on deck. The survivors drifted in lifeboats, on rafts and in the water, clinging to wreckage, for anything from a few hours to more than sixty. Some 150 people reached the shores of Bangka at various points on the island. Twelve Australian nurses died at sea, including those killed in the bombing. Among them was Matron Paschke: the raft on which she was drifting with a group of wounded and nurses never reached land.

Radji Beach

Several groups of survivors came ashore at Radji Beach on the north coast of the island, some fifteen kilometres from the town of Muntok. Among them was Matron Drummond with 21 nurses. On the beach they met survivors from other sunken ships: civilians and up to sixty British and Australian soldiers and sailors. Some hundred people gathered there in all, many of them wounded, with little food and water. The nurses set up a makeshift dressing station and put up a Red Cross sign.

Bangka was already in Japanese hands. The Japanese had taken Muntok in mid-February, at the same time as the attack on Palembang in Sumatra, where paratroopers landed on 14 February and the 38th Division – the same division that had taken Hong Kong in December – came up the Musi River a day later. The inhabitants of the nearby villages, fearing reprisals, would not help the survivors. It was therefore decided that the only way out was to surrender. A senior officer of the Vyner Brooke went to Muntok to inform the Japanese and hand the group over as prisoners. In his absence Matron Drummond advised the civilian women to follow him to the town with the children. All but one of them did so and survived. The nurses stayed with the wounded.

The crime of 16 February

Late on the morning of 16 February the officer returned to the beach with a detachment of some twenty Japanese soldiers under an officer. The Japanese separated the men from the women. They divided the men able to walk into two groups and led them, one after the other, behind the headland at the end of the beach. The nurses heard shots. The soldiers came back wiping their bayonets. Only two men from the two groups survived, having thrown themselves into the sea and played dead or swum away: Ernest Lloyd, a Royal Navy sailor, and an American civilian, Eric Germann.

The Japanese officer then ordered the women to line up and walk into the sea. Left on the beach were 22 nurses in uniform with Red Cross armbands and one elderly British woman who had not gone to Muntok with the other civilians. According to Bullwinkel, Matron Drummond said to her nurses: “Chin up, girls. I’m proud of you and I love you all.” When the water reached the women’s waists, the Japanese opened fire on them with a machine gun, shooting them in the back. They then bayoneted the wounded men lying on stretchers, some ten to twelve of them. According to Australian tallies, some eighty people in all were killed at Radji Beach.

After the war a matter emerged about which Bullwinkel had kept silent on the orders of the authorities. The Australian historian Lynette Silver and the biographer Barbara Angell, drawing on the accounts of people in whom Bullwinkel had confided privately and on documents, concluded that the nurses had been raped before the execution and that the Australian authorities had deliberately concealed this after the war. These findings, published only in recent years, rest on indirect accounts, but they have been accepted by many historians and by some of the institutions that commemorate the victims; some sources present them without reservation.

Vivian Bullwinkel and Cecil Kinsley

Vivian Bullwinkel, a 26-year-old nurse and midwife from South Australia serving with the 2/13th General Hospital, was hit by a bullet that passed through her side above the hip. The waves carried her back towards the shore. She lay in the water playing dead until the soldiers had gone, then crawled into the jungle and lost consciousness. When she came round she came upon a British private, Cecil Kinsley (Kingsley in some sources), who had survived a bayonet thrust to the chest. She dressed his wounds and her own, and women from a nearby village, despite their fear of the Japanese, occasionally gave them food.

They hid in the bush for twelve days. Kinsley, however, was too badly wounded, and without help they could not survive. According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, on 28 February they decided to surrender. On the way to Muntok they came across a Japanese naval officer, who took them for interrogation and then to the internment camp at Muntok. Kinsley died a few days later. There Bullwinkel met the civilian women who had left the beach before the massacre, and nurses from the Vyner Brooke who had come ashore elsewhere on the island. She concealed what she had seen, and her bullet wound, from the Japanese and from most of her fellow prisoners, since as a witness to the crime she might have been murdered. Ernest Lloyd, who was also taken prisoner, survived the war, and his account later helped to corroborate her testimony.

Captivity

Of the 65 nurses who had boarded the Vyner Brooke, 32 were taken prisoner. They were held first at Muntok and then for more than two years in camps near Palembang in Sumatra, together with Dutch and British women and children. Hunger, malaria, beriberi and the lack of medicines made death an everyday event. The nurses worked as carers for the sick in the camp, though they themselves were growing weaker. In the autumn of 1944 the women prisoners were moved back to Muntok, and in 1945 to the Belalau camp in the interior of Sumatra, near Lubuklinggau. Eight nurses died in captivity, most of them in the last months of the war.

The remaining 24 lived to be liberated. They were found only in September 1945, several weeks after the surrender of Japan, and were freed on 16 September. Only then did Australia learn of the fate of the missing nurses and of the massacre. The story of their captivity was later told by one of them, Betty Jeffrey, in her book White Coolies (1954), and in 1997 the camp experiences of the women of Sumatra were portrayed in the film Paradise Road.

Perpetrators and trial

In December 1946 Vivian Bullwinkel gave evidence before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo, which was trying the major Japanese war criminals. Her testimony became one of the best-known accounts of Japanese crimes against prisoners. According to later findings, the Australian authorities instructed her not to speak about sexual violence.

Australian investigators established that the island had been occupied by units of the 229th Infantry Regiment of the 38th Division. Several officers and NCOs were named as suspects, above all the battalion commander, Captain (later Major) Masaru Orita. Retrieved after the war from a Soviet camp in Siberia and brought in 1948 to Sugamo Prison in Tokyo, Orita committed suicide there before he could be interrogated and brought to trial. According to the investigators’ findings, the lieutenant colonel commanding on the island and some of his subordinates had been killed in action before the end of the war. No one was punished for the crime on Radji Beach, and according to Australian government records the perpetrators were never identified with complete certainty.

Place in the war

The Bangka Island massacre is one of the best-known Japanese atrocities of the first months of the Pacific War. It stood alongside the murders of wounded and medical staff in Hong Kong, the Alexandra Hospital massacre in Singapore on 14 February and the Sook Ching operation that began on 18 February. All of them showed that the Japanese army did not treat prisoners in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, whose provisions on prisoners of war Japan had not ratified, and that contempt for those who surrendered and the acquiescence of commanders encouraged murder. For Australia, which had lost most of the 8th Division at Singapore, the crime was, together with the fate of the prisoners on the Burma Railway and at Sandakan, one of the most painful experiences of the war. The Allies had announced that such acts would be brought to account as early as January 1942, in the St James’s Declaration, but in this case justice failed.

After the war Vivian Bullwinkel remained in nursing. For her service she received, among other honours, the Royal Red Cross and the Florence Nightingale Medal; she was director of nursing at the Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital in Melbourne, president of the Australian College of Nursing, and the first woman to sit on the council of the Australian War Memorial. All her life she raised funds to commemorate her dead colleagues. In 1993, together with other former prisoners, she unveiled a memorial to the victims on Bangka. She died in Perth in 2000. In Australia ceremonies for “Bangka Day” are held every February, and in 2023 a statue of her was unveiled at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.