One Bullet Missed — When Japan Raped and Executed 22 Nurses and Silenced the Witness for 77 Years.

image

 

The water was red before the last body stopped moving. Not from the tide. Not from the sand. From 22 women who walked into the surf with their hands at their sides, wearing nurses’ uniforms with Red Cross armbands, and were shot from behind with a machine gun.

February 16, 1942. Raji Beach, Banka Island, Indonesia.

21 of them never came back out.

One did.

Sister Vivien Bullwinkel was 26 years old. A bullet passed clean through her left side, missing every organ. She lay face down in the water and did not move. Japanese soldiers waded through the bodies around her, bayoneting the wounded. She felt the water move as they passed. She did not breathe. She did not make a sound.

For more than an hour she floated among her dead colleagues.

Then she crawled onto the beach alone.

But before the machine gun opened fire, before the water filled with bodies, something else happened on that beach—something the sole survivor tried to report at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal in 1947, and something she was ordered by her own government never to speak of again. She carried that secret for 58 years, until the day she died.

The world would not learn the truth until 2019, 77 years after Raji Beach.

On February 12, 1942, Singapore was falling. The Japanese Imperial Army had pushed through the Malay Peninsula in 70 days, one of the fastest military campaigns in modern warfare. British commanders surrendered as the city burned. Approximately 130,000 Allied soldiers were about to become prisoners of war in the largest capitulation in British military history.

At the docks, 65 Australian Army nurses from the 2/13th Australian General Hospital were ordered to evacuate. They boarded the SS Vyner Brooke, a small passenger vessel already overloaded with wounded soldiers, civilians, women, and children.

Among them was Sister Vivien Bullwinkel.

She had been born on December 18, 1915, in Kapunda, South Australia. She trained as a nurse in Broken Hill and volunteered for the Australian Army Nursing Service in 1941. She was 26 years old.

The ship left Singapore on February 12.

Two days later Japanese bombers found it in the Bangka Strait. The SS Vyner Brooke took multiple direct hits and sank within minutes. Two nurses died during the attack. The rest were thrown into the open ocean.

For hours survivors clung to wreckage, to each other, and to anything that would float.

Through the night small groups washed ashore on different parts of Bangka Island. Vivien Bullwinkel reached Raji Beach with 21 other nurses, along with a group of wounded Australian and British soldiers and several civilians.

They were exhausted. Many were injured. They had no food, no water, and no weapons.

They made the only decision that seemed possible.

They would surrender to the Japanese.

They were nurses—noncombatants protected under the Geneva Convention. The Red Cross emblems were still on their sleeves.

On February 16 a Japanese patrol arrived at the beach.

What followed reflected a pattern that Japanese forces had already established weeks earlier in Hong Kong, a pattern Allied commanders knew about but did not act upon when they delayed evacuating nurses from Singapore.

The soldiers separated the men from the women.

The wounded soldiers—men on stretchers who could not walk—were taken around a rocky headland. The nurses remained on the beach.

Soon they heard the sound of a machine gun.

Then silence.

After a time the soldiers returned.

They sat down in front of the women and began cleaning their bayonets and rifles.

What happened next was later confirmed by Vivien Bullwinkel herself in a private interview conducted by broadcaster Tess Lawrence before Bullwinkel’s death in 2000. Historian Lynette Silver later corroborated the account through forensic and documentary evidence.

The bullet holes in Bullwinkel’s recovered uniform showed that the bodice was open at the waist and down the front when she was shot.

A Japanese soldier later told an Australian investigating officer that he had heard screams from the beach and had been told that the platoon was “pleasuring themselves,” and that it would be his turn next.

The evidence was documented.

Then it was buried.

After the assault, a Japanese officer gave the order.

The 22 nurses and 1 civilian woman were instructed to walk into the surf.

They walked in a line toward the sea, still wearing their uniforms.

When the water reached their waists, the machine gun opened fire from behind.

Vivien Bullwinkel was hit.

The bullet passed through her body, entering and exiting her left side without striking any vital organs. She fell forward into the water and remained completely still.

Around her the sea turned red.

Japanese soldiers walked through the surf among the fallen women, bayoneting anyone who appeared to move. Bullwinkel kept her face in the water and did not breathe until the soldiers had gone.

For more than an hour she remained there, motionless among the bodies.

Eventually she crawled from the water and made her way into the jungle.

There she encountered a wounded British soldier named Private Cecil Kingsley. He had survived the earlier execution of the wounded soldiers and was hiding in the vegetation near the beach.

Bullwinkel treated his injuries as best she could without supplies. For 12 days she attempted to keep him alive using whatever resources they could find in the jungle.

Kingsley’s condition gradually worsened. Without medical supplies or proper treatment he became too sick to survive.

Realizing that he would die without assistance, the two decided to surrender to Japanese forces.

They were captured soon afterward.

Kingsley died shortly after their surrender.

Bullwinkel was taken prisoner and transported to a jungle prison camp on Sumatra. She would remain there for the next 3 and a half years.

During that time she kept her survival secret from the Japanese guards. If they had discovered that she had witnessed the execution at Raji Beach, she believed she would have been killed immediately.

Among the prisoners were other Australian nurses who had survived the sinking of the SS Vyner Brooke but had been captured elsewhere on the island.

They protected her secret.

Together they agreed that those who survived the war would remember everything that had happened and would tell the world when the war was over.

When the war ended, Bullwinkel prepared to testify.

In 1947 she appeared before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo, the war crimes tribunal established to prosecute Japanese leaders and military personnel.

She described the events at Raji Beach.

She testified about the separation of the men and women. She described the sound of the machine gun that killed the wounded soldiers behind the headland. She recounted the order for the nurses to walk into the sea and the machine gun fire that followed.

She described lying in the water among the bodies of her colleagues and pretending to be dead while soldiers bayoneted the wounded.

But she did not describe what happened before the execution.

She had been ordered not to.

While she was still serving in the Australian Army she had been instructed not to include those details in her deposition for the war crimes tribunal.

Historian Lynette Silver later explained that Bullwinkel was following direct orders.

According to Silver, the Australian government’s reasoning involved several factors. In the 1940s sexual violence carried a heavy social stigma, and officials feared the effect that such revelations might have on the families of the murdered nurses.

There was also the issue of responsibility.

Senior Allied officers had already known for weeks before the evacuation of Singapore that Japanese troops had raped and murdered British nurses during the capture of Hong Kong in December 1941.

Despite this knowledge, the evacuation of the Australian nurses from Singapore had been delayed.

The massacre at Banka Island might have been prevented if those evacuations had occurred earlier.

The perpetrators of the Banka Island massacre were never identified.

No one was charged.

No one was tried.

The official Australian government position remains that the perpetrators escaped punishment for their crimes.

After the war Vivien Bullwinkel returned to Australia and resumed her career in nursing.

She eventually became the Director of Nursing at Fairfield Hospital in Melbourne. Over the years she also served on the council of the Australian War Memorial and worked to raise funds for a memorial dedicated to nurses who died during the war.

In 1992 she returned to Banka Island for the first time since the massacre.

There she helped unveil a memorial shrine honoring the nurses who had died at Raji Beach.

Throughout her life she accepted awards and recognition on behalf of her colleagues who had been killed. She consistently refused to accept personal recognition for her own survival.

Before her death in 2000 she spoke privately with broadcaster Tess Lawrence and described what had happened on the beach before the execution.

Lawrence later said that the subject remained a source of deep distress for Bullwinkel.

Bullwinkel had wanted to include those details in her testimony before the war crimes tribunal in Tokyo, but she had been ordered not to do so by the Australian government.

According to Lawrence, the secrecy weighed heavily on her for the rest of her life.

In 2019 historian Lynette Silver published the book Angels of Mercy, bringing together the evidence surrounding the events at Raji Beach.

The research included physical forensic evidence, witness accounts, and a 10-page report written by the wife of an Australian Army investigator. Several pages of that report had been removed at some point by an unknown person.

Silver concluded that the accumulated evidence was sufficient to confirm what Bullwinkel had described privately.

“It’s taken a long while for enough bits of evidence to come together,” Silver said, “to enable us to say now, yes, they were raped. This actually did happen.”

The confirmation came 77 years after the massacre at Raji Beach and 23 years after Vivien Bullwinkel’s death.

The 21 nurses who walked into the surf on February 16, 1942 were not statistics.

They were real women with real names.

Matron Irene Drummond.

Sister Elaine Balfour Ogilvie.

Sister Mickey Farmer.

Sister Pat Gunther.

Sister Blanche Hempstead.

They had survived the bombing of their ship and the struggle to reach the shore. They had helped each other through the night after the sinking of the SS Vyner Brooke.

On the morning of February 16 they walked into the water in formation, still wearing their uniforms, their Red Cross armbands visible on their sleeves.

They entered the sea as nurses.

They died as witnesses to a war crime that remained hidden for decades.

Vivien Bullwinkel was the only one who emerged from the water alive.

For 58 years she carried the truth she had been ordered to keep silent.

In the end, she told it anyway.