H-POW-Bullwinkel

Brutality in war is as ancient as warfare itself. But the atrocities committed by the Japanese in World War II against Allied soldiers and civilians revealed, to a shocked public the savage character of the enemy. In prisoner-of-war camps throughout Asia, men, women and children died in their thousands from the brutal treatment and privation meted out by their captors.

Such was the fate of a group of Australian Army nursing sisters who were evacuated from Singapore early in 1942 on board the small ship Vyner Brooke. On February 14, of the coast of Bangka Island, Vyner Brooke was sunk by Japanese bombers, and most of the survivors got ashore on the island, where they were captured by Japanese troops. Justin Arthur interviewed Sister Vivian Bullwinkel, one of the nursing sisters, and tells of her experiences as a prisoner-o-war.

Sister Vivian Bullwinkel renews old friendships on Anzac Day two years after the end of the war.

The weather was fine, with the low shores of Bangka Island still visible in the haze. The Vyner Brooke lay dead in the water, her engines stopped, and all lights out below decks.

"Abandon ship" was ordered, and the Army nurses went to work to get their passengers, and their casualties, into the boats or on to life rafts.

Of the six boats carried by the Vyner Brooke, two were splintered by bullets and useless. In the end, only one, with civilian women and children aboard, got clear away from the sinking ship, by now settling fast.

One of the nurses was a South Australian girl, Sister Vivian Bullwinkel, who had left Australia the previous September. Tall, slim, blue-eyed, young, she had already experienced war on the Malayan main land and in Singapore, on the staff of the 13th Australian General Hospital, which had taken over St. Patrick's Boys' School.

When the situation in Singapore deteriorated, the authorities decided to move the nurses and civilians. Sister Bullwinkel and the other nurses, humorously making the best of a bad situation, had gone aboard the little Vyner Brooke, which was to take more than half of them to death.

When her turn came to go, Sister Bullwinkel went over into the sea where her lifejacket kept her head above water as she made for an upturned boat floating nearby. Others joined her and finally there were about 12 or 15 people clinging to the hand-ropes fixed to the boat. All were women, with the exception of one elderly, injured man and one of the ship's officers.

Tide and current took them slowly and steadily to the shore of Bangka Island and, at 10 p.m., the water logged lifeboat grounded gently on the beach.

In the distance along the beach there was the light of a big fire. Drenched, hungry but hopeful, those who had come ashore found it had been lit by other survivors who had reached shore earlier.

About this time, the feeling of relief began to be replaced by thoughts of being taken prisoner by the Japanese. The survivors knew the enemy were not far away, and they knew their reputation for cruelty.

In the morning, one of the native deck-hands from the Vyner Brooke, who said he came from Bangka Island, told them about a village through the jungle, three to four miles inland. He thought they might get help there. A party went to the village, but they were received coldly, and told that Bangka Island had fallen to the Japanese that morning. They were advised to give themselves up. The villagers were taking, no chances of getting on the wrong side of the Japanese by helping survivors. The party went back to the beach again to decide what to do.

It was decided that Bill Sedgman, one of the ship's officers, would go into Muntok, a town on the north end of the island, see the Japanese military authorities and arrange the surrender.

Sister Bullwinkel continues her story. "About an hour later, Sedgman came back with about 15 Japanese soldiers, in the charge of an officer. They didn't say anything. Sedgman said to them, `Well, this is the party.' No one answered. They just used signs to move us into a group. Then they counted us, and with more signs separated the men from the women. Sedgman tried to find out what was going on; they simply brushed him aside, still saying nothing.

"Next, they counted off about half the men and marched them off down the beach out of sight into a little cove. Then they came back and took the other men in the same direction.

"In about 15 minutes, they came back, wiping their bayonets as they walked. There had been a shot or two. The wounded men were still lying on their stretchers near us.

"The Japanese officer indicated for us all to stand up. There were 22 of us -- 21 nurses and the civilian woman who had stayed behind.

"They made us turn around, facing, the sea, then made us march forward -- into the surf, We went on slowly until we were almost waist deep. A machine gun behind us began firing, traversing in short bursts. The woman near me began to fall. I remember being hit; it was like the kick of a mule. The impact and the weight of the waves threw me down.

"I must have swallowed gallons of sea water, which made me violently sick. I just floated in the water and the waves brought me quietly into the sand after a while. I remember thinking, the Japs would see me vomiting up the sea water. Then I sat up, looked around and saw nothing moving on the beach the Japs had gone. I didn't see any bodies, they must still have been in the water. As a matter of fact, I never saw the bodies of any of the nurses again. A machine-gun bullet had passed right through my body, on the left side below the ribs. I thought I might just as well go to die where it was warm. I dragged myself up the edge of the jungle and lay down just inside. But I didn't die: I slept.

"I woke up once. It was quite dark, so I event back to sleep again. When I awoke a second time, it was morning. I was sweating, hot and thirsty. I made my way to a spring we had found earlier and I was just going to drink when a voice said, `Where have you been, nurse?' It was one of the British Ordnance Corps boys.

"He had been one of our stretcher cases on the beach when the Japs came. Part of his upper arm had been torn away by shell splinters when his ship was attacked, and the Japanese had bayoneted him twice through the body as he lay on the stretcher. He had been left for dead, had come to after the Japs had gone away, and then crawled into a deserted fishing hut down the beach. He had decided to make for the spring, and hadn't seen anyone else alive.

"I said I wasn't going, to give myself up, and he said he wasn't either. About this time, we had our first argument, because he wanted to stay on the beach, while I thought it better to go back into the jungle and keep out of sight. I'd been shot on the Monday; this was Wednesday morning and I had remembered nothing until I awakened in the jungle.

"The British soldier's name was Kingsley. He was a private. I never found out his Christian name. But I do remember he kept calling me `nurse' and my answer would be, `I'm not a nurse; I'm a sister.' Of course, when I went to England after the war on a visit and worked with British nurses, I found they used the term `nurse' there.

"We agreed we'd be better off together, and I helped him into the shelter of the jungle. Then I went back to the beach, collected some of the life jackets that were lying on the sand and filled some water-bottles from the spring. We hadn't eaten then for four days, and we were both wounded. My wound wasn't bothering me much; perhaps the salt water had helped it. It had bled a lot and from first to last, it received no medical attention. It just healed of its own accord.

"I felt pretty well, considering everything, although it did look as if we were going to starve to death out there on the beach or in the jungle. I went back to that village for help and there the spokesman met me. `Give yourselves up,' was his advice and that's almost all they would say in the village.

"As I was leaving the village, two women crept out from under a hut and offered me a little fish and rice. I took it back to Kingsley on the beach. We felt better after we'd eaten and thought perhaps we were not going to die after all.

"I don't think either of us really thought we'd be taken prisoner. I paid another couple of visits to the village and got the same advice there from the head man. The women gave me some rice each time I went. This was the only food we had.

"As I said, we'd prepared to give ourselves up, but Kingsley asked me to wait another day, because it was his thirtieth birthday. We eventually went to the village to give ourselves up on Saturday, February 28, a fortnight after the sinking of the Vyner Brooke.

"When the villagers knew we intended to surrender to the Japs they were quite co-operative and gave us food. We fell in with an Indonesian who spoke English. He said eve were very wise to surrender. He told me there were a lot of prisoners in Muntok, on the northern end of the island, including women wearing Red Cross armbands. We didn't think he was making up that story.

"Perhaps the Japanese would take us prisoner after all. That being the case, we decided it was better to forget temporarily about what had happened on the beach and to stick to the story that we'd been on a ship which sank and that we'd hidden in the jungle, and decided to give ourselves up on the advice of the locals.

" From the village, we took the road towards Muntok. Soon we heard a car horn tooting behind us and moved towards the left automatically, not really thinking where we were. Then we realized that the only people in cars at that time must be Japs.

" Fortunately, we didn't give way to our impulses and bolt for the jungle because they could have shot us down easily if we'd moved. There was a naval officer with a soldier in the car. They got out, searched us and motioned us to get in.

"The Jap soldier thought he spoke English. He kept telling us he was a Japanese soldier and began to sound nasty when we didn't seem very impressed. Soon, we arrived at the Japanese naval headquarters in Muntok. I felt fairly certain the officer in charge of the area both understood and spoke English, but he put all his questions to us through the soldier who thought he spoke English. This made it extremely difficult, because the man was almost impossible to understand.

"The officer asked where had we been, so we told our arranged story of the ship sinking and how we had hidden in the jungle. He asked me how many soldiers there had been on Singapore Island. I played dumb and said I was a nurse who knew nothing of such matters. Would I work? Yes, I was willing to work in a hospital. Then he asked if we were hungry.

"Biscuits and tea were brought in for both of us. Then they called Kingsley away. We shook hands solemnly. (I learned later that he died in captivity.) I was left sitting on the verandah.

"A little later they led me away to a car and after about five minutes we turned a corner and I saw a line of white men outside a building. I was taken inside the place, which the Dutch had used as lines to accommodate coolies. There were women and children there, mainly civilians. Someone came up and asked my name and Army number. All I could see was a sea of faces.

"At that time I didn't think any of the nurses from the Vyner Brooke had got through. Then I heard someone sing out, `It's Bullwinkel!' So I took off towards the faces. Two girls in sarongs grabbed me. It was almost as good as being at home. All I had wanted was to get among some of the people I knew.

"I found there were 31 nurses from the 2/4th C.C.S, the 10th and 13th A.G.H.s 31 of the 65 who had been on the Vyner Brooke. I made 32."

The day after Sister Bullwinkel arrived in Muntok, the Australian nurses, the civilian women and 12 of their husbands were taken across the Bangka Straits and about 20 miles inland to Palembang, Sumatra. They were crowded into small bungalows, in which they found a number of Dutch women who had been interned. These women had been comparatively lucky, because they had been able to bring with them all the belongings they could carry.

These civilians gave jumpers and skirts to the nurses, and Navy personnel gave them white suits, which the girls converted into shorts and sun tops.

"We were five weeks in those houses," Sister Bullwinkel says. "On April Fools' Day, the Japs suddenly ordered us out and moved us to the gaol, then into a street of four-roomed bungalows about a mile away, where 32 women were put into each bungalow. There was no furniture, so we slept on the tiled floors. We were short of food and firewood for cooking what little food we had.

"Sanitary arrangements were appalling, and there was sickness. We organized ourselves into what we called `district nursing' in an attempt to visit and help the sick. There were no medical supplies."

A year passed in the bungalows, during which conditions became worse all the time. Then the women were moved from the houses to what was called "the men's camp." White men from Palembang Gaol had built this camp before the nurses arrived from Bangka. It was wet, the slush and mud were thick, food scarce and sickness worse.

Another year passed -- it was now October 1944. Sister Bullwinkel and the other nurses and civilian women were taken back across the Straits to a newly made camp on Bangka Island. But this camp, outwardly pleasant, was a deadly place.

What the nurses came to know as "Bangka fever" broke out. There was malaria, too, and the only drug available was quinine bark. Bangka fever so weakened the women that they had no resistance left after one or two bouts of it. Three died in one day and 150 died in six months. The Australian nurses, sick and worn with having to do nursing as well as heavy camp work of chopping wood and carrying water, lost four of their nursing comrades here.

But worse was yet to come. There was a dreadful journey back to South Sumatra, with more of the women dying on the way. They crossed the Straits again, then were taken by train and bus to a plantation at Lubuklinggau, in southern Sumatra.

They were able to take only those things they could carry in their hands, and anything was precious to them by that time. Even half a brick might be used somewhere, sometime. Food was scarcer than ever at Lubuklinggau -- just a little rice, some leaves of a vegetable resembling beet and known as kankong, a few bananas. Each woman tried to cultivate a little plot of sweet potatoes.

Sister Bullwinkel recalls, "One night, we heard a terrific party going on in the Japanese quarters. When we went down to the river to wash next morning, two or three Eurasian girls who came with us said, "The war's over!" We didn't believe it. But they said they had been at the party the previous night and the Japs had told them.

"We still thought very little of it until later in the day, the camp commander, Captain Seki, ordered us all to assemble at 3 o'clock.

"Knowing that previous line-ups in front of Seki had brought us nothing but worse conditions, none of us took any notice of the order. Eventually, he sent guards along to get us. When we assembled, he told us, through an interpreter, that the war was over. He had done his best for us, he said.

"We were really convinced next day, when the husbands of women in the camp hospital were allowed to visit them. It was touching to see these people re-united.

For our part, we felt lost and lonely. Then the men arrived, took over the camp for us, chopped wood, carried water, cooked and did all the hard work which we had had to do for so long.

"The next big event was the arrival of a two man Dutch team to take over the camp from the Japanese. A sergeant led the team, and this affronted Seki, as he considered it undignified for a captain to have to take orders from a sergeant. Some days later, we heard voices coming down the track to the camp. Someone asked for the senior sister, Sister James. We all popped our heads out of the huts.

"The 24 Australian nurses were told to be ready to leave at 4 a.m. the next morning. There was no more sleep that night! We lit a big fire and used up all our rice and coffee and visited our friends.

"It was still dark when a truck, driven by Japanese, picked us up at the camp. They gave us a terrible drive. Some way down the track they stopped, took something out of the engine and threw it into the jungle. We were sure we'd miss our train to the airfield. The Dutch sergeant turned up in time and forced the Japs to find the part and replace it. Off we went again at the same mad pace. I don't think the Japanese wanted us to get away.

"Palembang railway station was surrounded by armed Japanese. On the platform, marching up and down, were two people in uniform, carrying revolvers. They were a war correspondent, Harden Lennard, and R.A.A.F. Pilot-Officer Ken Brown. They got us aboard the train in time. We got out at Lahat and drove in a truck to the airfield.

"This time, the Japanese gave us cane chairs to sit in and there was food, too. The aircraft did not arrive until 6 p. m.

"Two women stepped out. We hadn't expected to be met and here were these two, dressed in safari jackets and slacks. Someone recognized Miss Sage, Matron-in-Charge of Australian Army nurses. It was too much. We just stopped where we stood.

"They came over and welcomed us and said there were friends in hospital in Singapore waiting for