Extract from On Radji Beach
Outstanding courage shown by Australian nurses during World War Two.
By Ian Shaw
The nurses believed that their place was with the wounded Australian soldiers they had been nursing in Singapore.
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Extract from On Radji Beach by Ian Shaw
Original full-length version published by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
Condensed version © Reader’s Digest (Australia) Pty Ltd
Original full-length version published by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
Condensed version © Reader’s Digest (Australia) Pty Ltd
Keppel Harbour, Singapore, February 1942
The little ship was painted battleship grey, she flew the white ensign and she had a four-inch cannon neatly mounted in her bow, and in some eyes that was enough to make her a warship. She wasn’t nearly that grand, though, just a simple freighter, christened the Vyner Brooke after one of the White Rajahs of Borneo. She wasn’t the largest, but she was one of the most reliable ships of the Sarawak Steamship Company.
And now she was about to run for her life.
The Vyner Brooke would carry no freight on this trip; her cargo consisted solely of human beings. Those on board would be under Royal Navy leadership and Royal Navy discipline. The ship’s captain was a newly minted officer of that navy, a middle-aged captain of the Sarawak Steamship Company, R.E. Borton, known as ‘Tubby’. Tubby Borton was told he would be taking aboard 200 passengers for this trip. Most of them were civilians, men, women and children fleeing Singapore before its inevitable surrender to the advancing Japanese forces. Some of the passengers were very young, but most were adults.
There were also representatives of several of the armed services currently engaged in the conflict with Japan. Some of these were specialists with technical knowledge that made them simply too important to be allowed to fall into the hands of the Japanese—radar technicians, code breakers and cipher clerks, intelligence officers and the like.
And then there were the nurses, 65 of them, clearly distinguishable in their light grey uniforms and armbands displaying the red cross of their profession. They were all members of the Australian Army Nursing Service, and they represented all three medical units dispatched to Malaya in 1941—the 2/10th Australian General Hospital, the 2/13th Australian General Hospital and the 2/4th Casualty Clearing Station. They were led by two matrons—Olive Paschke of the 2/10th and Irene Drummond of the 2/13th—and they were just about the last Australian service personnel authorised to evacuate the doomed city of Singapore.
Not one of the Australian sisters had wanted to leave and, until the previous day they all believed they would remain on the island until the drama that was the Malayan Campaign played itself out. In their hearts they believed that their place was with the wounded Australian soldiers they had been nursing in ever-increasing numbers for the past month.
Somewhere below them, the engines started and the propeller slowly moved through the water, pushing the Vyner Brooke ahead and around. Up on the bridge deck a clearly Australian female voice began to sing ‘Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye’, and they all knew it was Jenny Greer because she would sing no matter what came along. But the voice faltered and then faded away as no one joined in. They understood that something important in their lives had just ended and that they were moving into an unknown future. Tomorrow would be Friday the 13th, and Tubby Borton was well aware of sailors’ superstitions about that date. He was also aware that Japanese ships controlled the seas and Japanese aircraft controlled the skies.
‘Half speed ahead,’ he ordered.
… Three days later, the Vyner Brooke had been sunk by Japanese bombers, many of the passengers had been killed in the raid or, like Matron Olive Paschke, had disappeared at sea, and some had drifted to Banka Island, on which there is a place called Radji Beach. Here, the occupying Japanese executed three groups of defenceless civilian and military prisoners of war. The last to die were the Australian nurses …
The Japanese squad stopped and squatted down to clean and reload their rifles, glancing across at the officer and at the nurses themselves.
After an eternity that lasted no more than two minutes, Captain Orita Masaru called out a command and the soldiers stood up and, using gestures and bayonet tips, forced the nurses into a line, facing the sea, about 10 metres away from where they had been sitting.
There were 23 women in that line—22 nurses, and an elderly civilian, who now stood weeping in the middle. At the far right of the line stood Irene Drummond, quietly encouraging and bustling over the wounded girls like the mother hen that she was. To her left were Clare Halligan, Rosetta Wight and Flo Casson, each too weak and in too much pain from their injuries to stand alone, so they were supported on either side by sisters and friends. On the far left, the line ended with Alma Beard, a 28-year-old from Toodyay in Western Australia, Vivian Bullwinkel and Jenny Kerr. There was no shouting and no tears, no panic and no hysteria, even when two nurses were prodded into line by Japanese bayonets.
Vivian [who, by a miracle, would prove to be the only one to survive this slaughter] was in another place. She was looking out to sea, thinking: ‘How can something as dirty and evil as this be happening in a place that is so beautiful?’ Many thoughts swirled around and around and flashed in and out of her consciousness. The one that gave her both comfort and solace was that, in a very short while, she would be reunited with her dead father and that, some time in the future, her mother and brother John would join them, and it would all be like it had been when she was young and free and happy.
There was no direct order given, but the line began to shuffle forward. As they moved, they all heard Matron Irene Drummond call out: ‘Chins up, girls. I’m proud of you and I love you all.’ There was a moment of almost supernatural silence as they continued to move towards the water’s edge. Several of the girls looked across and made eye contact with friends, but most just looked straight ahead, seeing something that no one else would or could ever see. And then the killing began.
The machine gunner was good, but that was his business. He fired in short bursts, concentrating on two or three prisoners at a time rather than rushing up and down the line. He aimed for the middle of the back, where the vital organs are, and he made sure that what he aimed at, he hit.
Irene Drummond was a couple of metres short of the water’s edge when the machine gunner opened fire. She was hit immediately and knocked head first into the sand. The impact knocked her glasses off. As she groped for them in the sand, a second bullet struck her, killing her instantly.
Flo, Rosetta, Clare and the sisters supporting them fell in a group, together in death as they had been in life. The other girls didn’t falter. They kept walking, in water that reached their ankles and then reached their knees. Several now prayed aloud, the Lord’s Prayer mixing with the Hail Marys as one by one the nurses were hit and knocked headlong into the water by the force of the bullets.
Second last in line, Vivian glanced quickly to her right and saw some of her friends die—most of them silently, some saying the names of their loved ones. She wondered whether she should be saying something, but that thought was never fully formed. Something like a sledgehammer smashed into her back and she felt herself falling forward, as everything around her turned to black.
At another shouted order, the firing ceased. Captain Masaru split his men into three sections. One section approached the bodies of the nurses on the beach and in the shallows; anyone who showed the least sign of life was bayoneted through the heart. A second section worked its way through the wounded whom the nurses had cared for on the makeshift stretchers in the shade of the trees, bayoneting them all, while the third section went to the fishermen’s hut where the severely wounded had been treated. They, too, were bayoneted to death.
The soldiers reformed on the beach, cleaned their bayonets and marched in single file behind their captain onto the track that led away from the sea.
Behind them, Radji Beach was silent and still, except for the lapping of the waves where the sea met the shore. Among the crumpled forms lying individually or in little groups on the sand or in the shallows were the earthly remains of Irene Drummond and the girls whose lives she had shared with Olive Paschke. They were their girls, their sisters, and she and Olive had loved them all. Lainie Balfour-Ogilvy, Alma Beard, Ada Bridge, Flo Casson, Mary Cuthbertson, Buddy Elmes, Lorna Fairweather, Peggy Farmaner, Clare Halligan, Nancy Harris, Minnie Hodgson, Nell Keats, Jenny Kerr, Mary McGlade, Kathleen Neuss, Florence Salmon, Jean Stewart, Mona Tait, Rosetta Wight and Peggy Wilmot.
The great letter writers and the beautiful singers, the raconteurs, the social butterflies and the serious thinkers were all gone. The city girls and the country girls, and the girls from in between, had had their lives ended. They were gone, and would not be coming back to families and friends.
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