The Real Tenko

Prelims

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Contents Acknowledgements ......................................................................viii Introduction ....................................................................................1 Chapter 1 – Black Christmas ..........................................................4 Chapter 2 – The Second Best Camp ..............................................29 Chapter 3 – A Band of Angels ......................................................39 Chapter 4 – Escape from Singapore ..............................................46 Chapter 5 – Bloodbath at the Beach ..............................................63 Chapter 6 – New Britain................................................................73 Chapter 7 – Comfort Women ........................................................91 Chapter 8 – Barbed Wire Horizon ..............................................103 Chapter 9 – Paradise Road ..........................................................130 Chapter 10 – Released from Bondage ........................................141 Chapter 11 – Debt of Honour ......................................................153 Appendix A – Chronology of the Asia-Pacific War ......................159 Sources and Bibliography............................................................162 Index ..........................................................................................163

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Chapter 5

Bloodbath at the Beach ‘[The] bodies of the Australian nurses and other women … lay at intervals of a few hundred yards – in different positions and in different stages of undress … it was a shocking sight.’

STOKER ERNEST LLOYD, ROYAL NAVY

A

machine gun chattered to life, its staccato reports echoing across the beach and jungle-covered hills behind. High-pitched screams and cries mingled with the shots, accompanied by the sounds of splashing.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the gun stopped firing, and the only sound was the waves breaking gently upon the beautiful palm-fringed beach.

Japanese soldiers stood in silence looking out to sea for a few moments, cordite smoke curling from the end of the machine gun’s barrel. Laid out across the beach were stretchers, the injured groaning in pain while others stared dumbfounded at the Japanese, wondering what new horror was about to be enacted after the slaughter in the surf. Japanese soldiers strode from patient to patient, and issuing blood-curdling cries they drove their long bayonets attached to their rifles deep into the chests of the wounded. Pleas for mercy were ignored, and the ghastly sounds of metal being driven into yielding flesh and hard bone went on and on. The wounded, unable to move, could only lie waiting for the Japanese to move on to them. The agony of being completely helpless to defend oneself, yet consciously aware of what was about to happen, was about the worst fate anyone could have imagined.

The sand was soon running with blood. The Japanese soldiers, once their work was done, carefully wiped their bayonets clean of gore, formed up in ranks, and retreated up the beach towards a path leading through the jungle leaving the mass of bodies lying like discarded piles of laundry.

The Japanese had already killed wounded and unarmed Commonwealth soldiers on several occasions during their advance down the Malay peninsula, and before that in Hong Kong, and their behaviour at Radji Beach that day was not unusual. Australian and Indian wounded had had to be left behind after one particular battle at a place called Parit Sulong in Malaya.

Army medics and the padre had bravely volunteered to remain with the wounded and all genuinely believed that the Japanese would care for these helpless and harmless men. After Parit Sulong it became clear that the Japanese disdained taking prisoners and actually enjoyed finishing off the wounded with the utmost sadism. A survivor of what had occurred at Parit

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64 The Real Tenko Sulong, Lieutenant Ben Hackney of 2/29th Australian Battalion, described the arrival of the Japanese Imperial Guards in January 1941.1 The Japanese discovered an open-air aid station filled with 110 Australian and forty Indian soldiers sitting on the ground or lying on stretchers, all of them wounded.

Lieutenant Hackney recounted that the Japanese soldiers had kicked the wounded prisoners or had struck them with their rifle butts. Then, at an officer’s shouted command, the Japanese had forced the wounded able to walk into an overcrowded shed and denied them food, water and medical attention. At sunset, the prisoners were roped together and led away in groups. The Japanese had collected petrol from abandoned British transport vehicles, shot the prisoners, dumped petrol onto the prone bodies and ignited it. Some prisoners were burned to death as they lay bleeding and incapacitated from gunshot wounds. Only two men, including Hackney, had managed to escape from this horror and later recounted what had happened to Allied war crimes investigators after the war.

Some of the bodies of those recently machine-gunned in the surf at Radji Beach, located on the small island of Banka south of Singapore, had already been washed ashore before the last Japanese soldier had left, the corpses staining the brilliant white sand with dark red blood. Others floated face down in the shallows. All of them were white women, and all of them, with one exception, were army nurses. Twenty-one were dead, but by a miracle one of the nurses was still alive. She floated in the sea, her head tilted to one side to gulp in air, occasionally nearly gagging on a mouthful of salt water, the tide bringing her gently in towards the beach. Not daring to make a sound Sister Vivian Bullwinkel, a 26-year old nurse from 2/10th Australian General Hospital, let the rhythm of the sea carry her wounded body back in to the beach.

Bullwinkel lay in the surf gasping in pain at the wound caused by a Japanese bullet that had passed clean through her left loin, and stared with horror about her. Twenty-one female bodies, twenty of them fellow members of the Australian Army Nursing Service, eventually washed back upon the shore. The beach was arrayed with more bodies, of men and women who had been lying on stretchers when the Japanese soldiers had arrived. ‘I lay there 10 minutes and everything seemed quiet, I sat up and looked around and there was no sign of anybody,’ recalled Bullwinkel at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial. Bullwinkel slowly dragged herself across the beach towards the tree line, exhausted and bleeding, where she ‘lay down and either slept or was unconscious for a couple of days’. She awoke on Wednesday morning with a monumental thirst and dragged herself to a nearby freshwater spring and drank deeply.

What had happened to her friends and colleagues replayed in her head over and over again as Bullwinkel drank at the spring. They had arrived on Radji Beach in the dark clinging to bits of wreckage and rafts after their ship,

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Bloodbath at the Beach 65 the luxury yacht Vyner Brooke, had been sunk in the Banka Strait. The Vyner Brooke, a 1,679 ton former royal yacht built in 1928 for the White Rajah of Sarawak, had been overloaded with people escaping the inferno of the final battle for Singapore. The Royal Navy had requisitioned the yacht as an armed trader at the start of the war and outfitted her with additional lifeboats, life rafts and a navy crew of forty-seven men. Painted battleship grey, and fitted with a single 4-inch gun forward and a Lewis machine gun and depth charges aft, it would have been pushing it to have even described the vessel as a corvette. Her civilian master, Captain Borton, remained in command, assisted by Lieutenant Mann from the Royal Navy, whose job it was to command the gun crews.

HMS Vyner Brooke – designed to carry a maximum of forty-four first-class passengers in great comfort (though usually no more than twelve people graced her elegant teak decks and cabins) – was crammed with 181 passengers, including sixty-five Australian nurses. The commander of the 8th Australian Division in Singapore, Major General H. Gordon Bennett, had originally resisted General Percival’s order to get the nurses out while there was still time, believing that their departure would be bad for civilian morale.

Fortunately, Colonel A.P. Derham, Bennett’s Assistant Director of Medical Services, coolly gave instructions that as many nurses as possible were to be sent out with the casualties being evacuated from Singapore. Whether Derham disobeyed Bennett’s orders has not been established, but considering the obvious direction the British defence was going it would have been understandable if Derham had decided to overrule his superior as confusion reigned about them. The remains of three Australian divisional medical units were still in Singapore as the final act of the defensive battle were being played out: the 2/4th Casualty Clearing Station, 2/10th Australian General Hospital and 1/13th Australian General Hospital. The nurses, in common with their British colleagues from Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service, were completely overwhelmed with patients. They did not want to leave, Sister Betty Jeffrey of the 2/10th recalling that they did not want to ‘walk out on those superb fellows’. Their overwhelming sense of duty and personal bravery in trying to remain at their posts is one of the astounding features of the story of the fall of Singapore.

Sergeant Jack O’Donnell, a medic with 10th General Hospital, described the conditions the nurses and the male staff faced in his diary: ‘Bombs are being dropped on us continuously this day. Casualties were coming in thick and fast. About mid-day the Japanese decided to give us a taste of their HE [High Explosive] and concentrated on the Cathay [Building]. Shell after shell hit us and huge pieces of concrete, shrapnel etc were flying.’2 Outside was a complete shambles. The city ‘had taken a terrific battering this day,’ wrote O’Donnell. ‘Water and sanitation were disrupted while the dead were lying around in thousands.’3 On 11 February, just five days before Percival surrendered the colony,

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66 The Real Tenko Colonel Derham hastily ordered half of the nurses out immediately aboard the evacuation ship Empire Star. The journey out was bloody, terrifying and almost ended in complete disaster as Japanese aircraft bombed and strafed any vessel found in Singapore Harbour or caught fleeing south towards Sumatra or Java in the Netherlands East Indies.

Aboard the Vyner Brooke the civilians, mainly women with small children, and the nurses crowded the decks, cabins, public rooms and superstructure.

Matron Dorothy Paschke, RRC, was in charge of the nurses, who slept on deck, and had little to eat and no washing facilities. Captain Borton was ordered to sail to Batavia in the Netherlands East Indies. The captain’s aim was to sneak his ship south through the Banka Strait under the cover of night and, using a network of tropical islands as camouflage during the daytime, hopefully avoid patrolling Japanese aircraft and warships until the vessel was out of the danger zone.

The Vyner Brooke sailed during the evening of Thursday, 12 February.

Under cover of the failing light the vessel got clear of Singapore harbour without any Japanese aircraft spotting her and urgently steamed south at full speed. Colonel Derham was not among those on board. He remained with 8th Australian Division headquarters and was taken prisoner on 15 February.

One man who was noticeably absent from the list of surrendered personnel was the Australian divisional commander, Major General Bennett, who had refused to allow the evacuation of nurses even though Singapore was clearly going to fall to the enemy. Australia’s senior soldier in Singapore suddenly handed over command of the remains of 8th Division to his shocked deputy, Brigadier Cecil Callahan, and along with a coterie of staff officers, commandeered a boat in the harbour. Bennett abandoned his men to the Japanese, and as Colin Smith notes in Singapore Burning, ‘shedding various travelling companions with all the facility of a multi-stage rocket, [he] reached Australia in twelve days’.4 Bennett escaped the Japanese, but he was not to escape official sanction, being forcibly retired in 1944 with a cloud hanging over his name.

Throughout the daylight hours of 13 February the captain laid up the Vyner Brooke in the lee of a small jungle-covered island. The nurses and passengers assisted the crew by trying to camouflage the ship’s superstructure with foliage as Japanese aircraft droned about overhead hunting for fleeing Allied vessels. In the afternoon the Vyner Brooke was spotted by one such plane which immediately plunged in to attack without mercy. Everyone dived for cover as the fighter roared overhead, machine guns blazing. Fortunately, no serious casualties were caused by the strafing, but all of the lifeboats along one side of the ship were holed by machine-gun bullets. At sunset the Vyner Brooke’s engines were fired up, and as a wisp of smoke banked from her funnel, the ship ran for the Banka Strait hoping to cross most of it during the hours of darkness. But prowling Japanese warships and aircraft impeded her progress, as lights on the horizon forced

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Bloodbath at the Beach 67 the captain to slow down and deviate from his planned course in an effort to steer clear of trouble.

When the sun came up on 14 February, the Vyner Brook was running on a flat sea just inside the strait, and completely exposed. At 2.00pm patrolling Japanese aircraft found the yacht, and although the captain desperately zigzagged his ship, aerial bombs straddled the vessel, dooming her. Six twinengined ‘Betty’ bombers came in three waves of two, but the Vyner Brooke almost made it. The first five aircraft missed with their bombs as Borton veered sharply to port or starboard. But the last aircraft landed a bomb on the No. 2 hatch, the weapon punching through to explode in the hold below.

Lieutenant Mann ran to the radio shack but discovered that the set had been damaged and that he could not send a distress call. The damage control party was defeated by the rising flames as the bomb had also ruined the pump providing water for the fire hoses.

Scenes of horror were played out aboard the sinking Vyner Brooke as women, children and crewmen had been blown to pieces by the bomb, burned to death in the resulting inferno, or flayed by white hot shards of shrapnel. Sister Wilma Oram remembered: ‘There was broken glass sprayed all over us. I thought my legs had been cut off, but when I had a look they were only just cut by flying glass. But one of our girls was badly wounded.

She had a very bad wound in her buttock. We carried her up this ladder onto the deck and put a field dressing on it.’

The captain gave the order to abandon the ship as the Vyner Brooke took on a severe list and as the fires raging aboard began to run out of control.

Pandemonium reigned as the crew and the nurses tried to free life rafts from the superstructure. The three undamaged starboard lifeboats were successfully launched and people worked to free the three portside boats, all holed by machine-gun bullets, as the ship’s list increased. Borton and Mann slid down the ship’s side on ropes and clung to floating wreckage alongside about one hundred others in lifejackets who were treading water.

As the ship began to roll over and go down rapidly by the head, everyone remaining alive aboard her flung themselves into the sea. Fellow Australian nurse Sister Pat Gunther watched in horror as the act of abandoning the foundering ship spelled the end for many. ‘Many of the women and children jumped overboard and broke their necks – the lifejackets were stiff and flipped up as they hit the water. I survived because I was helping a friend down slowly.’5 Many drowned quickly if they were not wearing lifejackets, unable to swim, injured or simply too young to care for themselves in the case of the many children who were lost. As the ship rolled over many people were trapped and sucked down as she made her final plunge to the depths.

Sister Oram was actually in one of the damaged lifeboats with fellow nurse and best friend Mona Wilton when the ship heeled over. ‘The boat was full of women and children. It was sinking. So we just had to jump out of the life boat,’ recalled Oram. ‘We couldn’t get it away from the ship … So Mona and

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68 The Real Tenko I jumped out. It was everybody for themselves at this stage. And Mona said “I can’t swim.” She had a life belt so I said “Just dog paddle.”’ The ship actually loomed over the two nurses and the struggling civilians in the water.

Oram shouted to Wilton through the cries and screaming of terrified women and children: ‘The ship’s coming down. Looks as though we’re sunk this time. We’re not going to get out of this.” I put my hand up and caught the rail of the ship and came through the rails. When I surfaced there was no sign of Mona. I don’t know what happened to her, I guess the ship came down on top of her and she couldn’t get out from under it. I never saw her again.’ As Oram frantically tried to kick herself clear of the sinking ship, unsecured life rafts slid off the deck and struck her on the head. ‘I’d taken my tin hat off prior to this and the raft hit me on the head. And as I came up another raft hit me. I think there were six altogether, one after the other, they hit me on the head and kept pushing me under.’

Sister Betty Jeffrey, another Australian nurse, found herself floating in the sea, clinging desperately to a life raft containing among others Matron Paschke. Jeffrey, who was thirty-four years old, had become a nurse quite late at the age of twenty-nine, and in 1940 had qualified as a midwife. She had joined the Australian Army in 1941. Swimming alongside Jeffrey was Sister Iole Harper and two Malays. The question uppermost in their minds was how they were going to get ashore, as strong currents swirled around Banka Island. Lieutenant Mann knew that Captain Borton had ordered the lifeboats rowed to Banka Island, located about 8 miles away, where they would be unloaded and then rowed back to the scene of the sinking to rescue more survivors from the water. The three lifeboats began to pull for the shore while the survivors began to be dispersed by the strong current running close to the island. For some, like Lieutenant Mann, it would mean eventual salvation and rescue by Allied forces; for others capture, death or imprisonment by the Japanese.

Sister Jeffrey and her companions almost made it ashore as their raft passed by a wooden pier, but a strong offshore current cruelly washed them all back out to sea. The raft was overcrowded, so in order to relieve the weight, Sisters Jeffrey and Harper and the two Malays let go of the sides and started swimming alongside it, buoyed up by their lifejackets. Inevitably, the strong current soon separated the swimmers from the raft. Matron Plaschke, who had warned her staff that the chances of reaching Palembang were slim, was last seen on the raft with several other nurses and two small children.

She was posthumously awarded the Florence Nightingale Medal for her bravery and devotion to duty through the ordeal that ultimately took her life.

Sisters Jeffrey and Harper swam in the sea and mangrove swamps around Banka Island for three days until they were rescued by a Malay fishing boat.

The fishermen took the two exhausted nurses to their village where they told them that the Japanese were now in control of the island, and they had better give themselves up. Sister Gunther and two other nurses spent eighteen

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Bloodbath at the Beach 69 hours trying to swim to the shore, ‘hanging on to ropes at the edge of a raft and singing to comfort one another through the night … they would have drowned but for some Japanese scientists who picked them up and let them sleep on concrete slabs next to some pigs – their introduction to a life of discomfort.’6 Approximately 150 survivors out of the 228 who had been aboard the yacht eventually made it ashore at Radji Beach on Banka Island. People were in the sea anywhere from eight to sixty-five hours before the currents cast them, exhausted, thirsty and desperate upon the shoreline of the island. Of the sixty-five nurses aboard the Vyner Brooke, twelve had drowned. Most of the survivors were taken prisoner by the Japanese within hours of crawling from the surf, the Japanese having captured the island on 14 February.

A fire on the beach had alerted Vivian Bullwinkel’s group of twenty-two nurses to more survivors, and they had been quickly reunited with another group under the command of Matron Irene Drummond. A lifeboat, containing British soldiers, many of whom were wounded, had made it to the beach from another recently sunk evacuation ship, and by first light over sixty Commonwealth servicemen and merchant sailors from other sunken ships were also stranded on the tropical beach alongside the survivors from the Vyner Brooke. Everyone was without food or water. Although they discovered a small freshwater stream later that day, the same stream Bullwinkel now sat staring into, they could not remain on the beach for long.

The many wounded, and the women and children survivors, were crying out for medical attention, or food and water, so Bullwinkel joined a party of four other nurses who had volunteered to walk through the jungle to the nearest village to fetch help. Unfortunately, when they arrived at the kampong the locals chased them out, shouting at them in broken English, and it was clear that they were terrified of Japanese reprisals if they helped the shipwrecked white people.

Back at the beach the senior naval officer to survive the sinking announced that he was going to walk to the nearest big settlement, Muntok, and surrender the whole party to the Japanese. Matron Drummond suggested that all the mothers and young children should also begin walking towards Muntok rather than remain on the beach, a sensible decision that undoubtedly saved many lives.

Bullwinkel was on her knees beside the stream furiously slurping water from her cupped hands into her mouth and recalling those fateful decisions when a voice suddenly spoke behind her, startling her. ‘Where have you been, nurse?’ said the voice. Bullwinkel looked around and found a young British soldier crawling slowly towards her, obviously in great pain. Momentarily forgetting where they were, Bullwinkel replied: ‘I am a sister in the Australian Army Nursing Service, address me as Sister,’ speaking perhaps rather harshly.