Vivian Bullwinkel: The Nurse Who Survived Hell

Sister Vivian Bullwinkel was the sole survivor of the Bangka Island Massacre, which took place on February 16, 1942 on Radji Beach, Bangka Island, Indonesia, during World War II. Of the 22 Australian Army nurses lined up in the surf and shot that day, she was the only one who lived. She survived to make sure the world would know what happened to the others.

The Nurse with Flat Feet

Vivian Bullwinkel was born in Kapunda, South Australia in 1915 and trained as a nurse in Broken Hill, where her father worked as a miner. She completed her general training at the Broken Hill and District Hospital in 1938 and her midwifery in 1939. She worked as a staff nurse at Kiaora Private Hospital in Hamilton, Victoria, then moved to Jessie McPherson Hospital in Melbourne from 1940 to 1941. There she met Wilma Oram, who became a longtime friend through the war and after it.

Vivian first applied to nurse with the Royal Australian Air Force but failed the medical exam for an absurd reason: flat feet. The rejection did not stop her. She and Wilma signed up as volunteers with the Australian Army Nursing Service and were accepted in 1941 into the 13th Australian General Hospital. That September their unit sailed on the hospital ship Wanganella toward Singapore.

Life in Singapore

The nurses missed home in the first weeks. They worked medical and elective surgical cases with poor facilities and short supplies, and still found time to socialize with the soldiers in their unit, share a few drinks, and dance at night. Vivian kept a diary, recording everything. For a while it hardly felt like a war. That changed in December 1941.

The Fall of Singapore

On the morning Pearl Harbor was attacked, December 7, 1941, General Yamashita's 25th Army began its invasion of Malaya, and parts of Singapore were bombed. The Japanese drove south down the Malay Peninsula toward the island.

The nurses were suddenly overwhelmed with wounded. This was the work Vivian had volunteered for, and now there was too much of it. By late January 1942 the 13th AGH evacuated and turned St. Patrick's School into a makeshift hospital under constant bombing.

On February 8, 1942, Colonel A. P. Derham, Assistant Director of Medical Services for the 8th Division, and Lt. Colonel Glyn White decided the moment to evacuate had come, and the nurses would go first. Two days later the nurses were ordered out against their will, refusing to leave their patients until the last minute. Some had one hour to pack and run to the port. Carrying the guilt of leaving patients behind, Vivian and 64 other nurses boarded the SS Vyner Brooke on February 12 at 5:00 in the afternoon.

The SS Vyner Brooke

As the ship pulled away, the passengers watched Singapore burn behind them, the city wrapped in fire and smoke. The Vyner Brooke was built to carry 12 passengers and now held 265, short on food and water. In the dark the captain steered into a minefield and had to hold position until daybreak.

On Friday, February 13, the ship hid behind islands to avoid being spotted by air. It moved again at night and reached the Bangka Strait, but daylight caught it in open sea. Around 2 p.m. on February 14 the air attack came.

Machine gun fire from above tore through the lifeboats and the hull. Bombs hit the funnel, the bridge, and the aft section, and the ship sank in about 15 minutes. In those 15 minutes the nurses, Vivian among them, worked to get the wounded into the bullet-riddled lifeboats. "Those that weren't keen to leave, we gave a helping hand to," she recalled. One lifeboat carrying children and the elderly was strafed as it lowered and capsized, and many did not survive.

Once most of the civilians were in the boats, Vivian climbed down a rope ladder and clung to the side of a packed lifeboat with half her body in the water. They reached Bangka Island by late afternoon, guided in by a bonfire that earlier survivors had lit on the shore.

The Bangka Island Massacre

Survivors arrived through the night, exhausted, thirsty, and without shelter. By morning roughly 60 survivors, men, women, and children, plus 22 members of the Australian Army Nursing Service, were gathered on Radji Beach.

A scouting party of Vivian and five other nurses found a village, but the locals were too afraid of Japanese reprisal to help and advised them to surrender. That night another sea battle lit the horizon, and a large lifeboat brought British servicemen ashore, raising the group to nearly 100.

The survivors decided to surrender, despite warnings. A wounded soldier in Singapore had told them what to expect. "When the boys had come to the hospital their one cry had been, they're not taking prisoners," Vivian recalled. "It doesn't matter what member of the forces came in. Their cry was the same. However, when you're young and you've got a group of over 100 people, you can't imagine anything happening. We felt we would not be taken prisoner because of safety in numbers."

After more than 48 hours without real food, with the children failing, they sent a small group of civilians ahead to find the Japanese and surrender. Matron Drummond suggested the rest of the women and children follow to keep the children's minds off their hunger. The mothers, children, and other civilian women walked on, leaving Matron Drummond, the 21 nurses including Vivian tending the injured, and an elderly woman who stayed with her wounded husband. That decision bought the walking group time and saved their lives.

The Japanese arrived. They ordered half the men to their feet and marched them at bayonet point behind a headland out of sight, then came back for the rest. "We just looked at each other and said, they're not taking prisoners," Vivian recalled. "And we seemed to accept that."

Rifle shots came from where the men had gone. The soldiers returned with bloodied bayonets, sat down in front of the women, and cleaned their weapons in silence. Then they motioned the women to stand. The nurses did not cry, scream, or run. They knew the men were dead.

The soldiers lined all 22 nurses and the elderly woman in the knee-high surf, facing the sea. Matron Drummond spoke: "Chin up, girls. I'm proud of you and I love you all." The Japanese opened fire from behind.

"We were ordered to march into the sea, we got out to almost waist deep when they started shooting from behind," Vivian recalled. The nurses fell one after another. A bullet struck Vivian in the torso and threw her face down into the water. She was hit, but not dying.

She held still and feigned death, taking the smallest breaths she could while the soldiers walked the beach bayoneting anyone still alive. The current carried her ashore. "When I was hit I can remember thinking it's like the kick of a mule, and then I went down. I was very surprised to find myself still alive. I just laid there and eventually let the waves bring me in."

When night fell she sat up. She was alone. "The bullet that hit me struck me at the waistline and just went straight through," she realized. She was badly wounded but the bullet had missed her vital organs. "I looked around and there was no sign of anybody. There was nothing. Just me."

She crept into the jungle. After about 20 yards she had to lie down and lost consciousness. She woke parched, desperate for the springs she remembered, then froze when she saw Japanese soldiers walking the beach in the distance. She stayed still until they left. They had missed her again.

Surviving in the Jungle

When the coast was clear she made it to the springs and drank. A man's voice came from behind her: "Where have you been, nurse?" It was Private Pat Kingsley, a British soldier who had also survived being shot. They hid together in the jungle and kept each other alive. Despite her own wound, Vivian tended Kingsley and gathered what food she could from the villagers. They stayed hidden for 12 days. When it became clear they could not last, they agreed to surrender and hope to be taken prisoner this time. Kingsley had one request. "I'll be thirty-nine tomorrow," he said, "and I'd like to think I had my thirty-ninth birthday free." Vivian agreed, and they spent his last 24 hours of freedom in the jungle.

The Prison Camp

On February 28, 1942, Vivian and Pat reached the Japanese camp and were taken in. Vivian found Wilma alive. With about 30 other nurses, Wilma had survived the sinking of the Vyner Brooke.

Wilma later remembered Vivian's arrival: "When we first saw Vivian, we were overjoyed and hoped that more of our colleagues would come. Vivian was sunburnt, tired, and hungry. Her bloodstained uniform was taken from her and some of the blood washed out, and although clothes were not plentiful, Vivian was given something to cover her wound. A little cooked rice was found and a small amount of water. A sleeping space was made for her on the sloping concrete slab, but we had no bedding."

Her colleagues kept asking about the missing nurses, and at first Vivian said nothing. "I'd made up my mind I wasn't going to say anything about the girls who were with me, because these are the very people they keep asking about. I said no, and in the end I said yes, I do know. And when I told them, they were appalled." No one in the camp gave her away as the lone eyewitness to the massacre. She hid her bullet-holed uniform and a diary she kept on Bible pages, and stayed hidden as a witness who would one day testify.

Pat Kingsley died soon after they arrived, of his abdominal wounds and infection, despite Vivian's care. His death left her the only person alive who could tell what happened at Radji Beach. She wanted to live so she could tell it. If she had not, she said, the names of the bravest nurses she knew would have been lost.

Vivian was a prisoner for three and a half years in Sumatra, surviving beatings and forced labor. The prisoners worked long hours for 80 cents a day, were made to stand bareheaded in the sun for as long as 12 hours, and cleaned clogged latrine drains with a coconut shell, hauling the waste half a mile into the jungle. Former civilian prisoner Betty Kenneison described it: "Imagine not having a toothbrush, a comb, no shoes, tattered clothes, so thin you could put your fingers around your upper arm. Rotting food thrown at us, putrid meat, feet covered in mud, and the monsoons washing through with feces."

Nursing With Nothing

The nurses kept caring for the sick with no supplies. "We had nothing, literally nothing to care for our patients with," Vivian recalled. "The hospital was just a hut, leaf roof, earthen floor, a bamboo bench on one side. No mattresses or linen. Nothing." They improvised, pounding fire embers into a powder meant to help with diarrhea, though by then their patients had dysentery.

Betty Kenneison credited Vivian with saving her life. Her step grandmother had been pressing a boiling cloth to her head to kill the maggots in it, and Betty was screaming, when Vivian stepped in and took over her care. The maggots had actually cleared the infection. "Viv always looked out for me," Betty said. "She made me her responsibility." Wilma put it simply: "Vivian was a stalwart in the camp, and everybody admired her for what she did."

Over the next stretch Vivian lost eight of her fellow nurses. Even dying, they kept caring for others, apologizing for taking too long to die and wasting resources.

Liberation

The war ended in 1945. Of the 65 nurses who had boarded the SS Vyner Brooke, 24 survived. Australia's senior army nurse, Colonel Annie Sage, joined the search for her missing nurses. She opened the plane door at the camp expecting 65 and asked, "I am the mother of you all. Where are the rest of you?" Twenty-four answered. Of the 41 who did not, 12 had drowned in the sinking, 21 were murdered at Radji Beach, and eight died as prisoners of war.

The 24 survivors had saved their uniforms through captivity and insisted on being seen in them again, bullet holes and dirt and all. They stepped off the plane in Singapore to a crowd of journalists, emaciated and worn, and their condition told the press what they had been through. Vivian said she wanted her story heard. When wounded Australian soldiers in Singapore heard it on the radio, they were enraged, and an Australian sergeant wept in shame that the men had not been able to protect the nurses.

The newspapers fixed on Vivian's survival, but she avoided the spotlight and said her story mattered little next to the courage of the women who died. She spent her time with their families and wrote to those who would never come home.

After the War

Vivian and Wilma worked at the Heidelberg Military Hospital until June 1946, then traveled across Australia with their fellow former prisoners, caring for people who needed it.

After the war Vivian testified at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal about Radji Beach. The officer accused of ordering the massacre escaped justice by dying by suicide before he could be held to account. Going to Japan was hard for her after three and a half years as a prisoner and the loss of so many colleagues, and she did not think she could forgive. But standing in the ruins of Hiroshima, she could not help being moved by the suffering of the Japanese people.

She left the Australian Army Nursing Service in December 1947 and returned to civilian nursing, later serving as Director of Nursing at Fairfield Hospital in Melbourne. With fellow survivor Betty Jeffrey she toured Victoria raising funds to build a memorial to the nurses who died, collecting more than £100,000. The Australian Nurses Memorial Centre opened in Melbourne in 1950 as a place to support the welfare and development of the profession, and Vivian remained its patron.

She went on to lead the College of Nursing, Australia, as a council member and then president, and pushed to move Australian nursing education out of the hospitals and into the universities, work that reshaped the curriculum and improved nurses' pay and conditions. In gratitude to the Malaysians who had helped her, she backed a scholarship fund for Malaysian nurses to study in Australia. In October 1999, marking 100 years of military nursing, she helped dedicate the National Service Nurses Memorial on Anzac Parade in Canberra.

Remembering the Fallen

In 1993, 50 years after the massacre, Vivian returned to Bangka Island to honor the women who died there. She visited the springs where she had hidden with Pat Kingsley, walked through a former POW camp, and stood at the grave sites, but she could not find the exact beach. The horror had faded into something she could no longer fully reach. "At that time I asked, why me? Why me?" she said. "And as time went on, I still say, why me?"

Before she left, she and some of her fellow former prisoners chose a spot close to where they believed the killings had happened and unveiled a shrine to the 41 nurses who lost their lives.

Wartime nurses rarely get the recognition the soldiers do, and most of these women's names dropped out of the histories. Vivian Bullwinkel made sure her colleagues at Radji Beach would not be forgotten. She survived hell to keep their names.

References and External Links

• Audio Recording of Vivian Bullwinkel's Interview
• Sister Vivian Bullwinkel