Sole Survivor: A Vivian Bullwinkel Story
Born on 18 December 1915 in Kapunda South Australia, Vivian Bullwinkel trained as a nurse and midwife at Broken Hill, New South Wales before beginning her nursing career in Hamilton, Victoria. After moving to Melbourne in 1940 it wasn’t long before Bullwinkel decided to enlist with the RAAF.
“I figured if my friends were going to fight, I should go to take care of them. I felt I could do that, that I had something to offer”.
She volunteered as a nurse but was rejected for having flat feet, later joining the Australian Army Nursing Service in 1941 and sailing for Singapore in September of the same year.
On 7 December 1941, just a few months into her service, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and within 24 hours, Singapore was also under attack. Japanese troops invaded Malaya and began to advance southwards, winning a series of victories until in February 1942, allied forces had little choice but to evacuate from Singapore.
While transporting nurses and wounded servicemen away from the conflict, a Scottish built steamer named the SS Vyner Brooke was crossing into the Bangka Strait when it was bombed by Japanese aircraft, sinking in just half an hour with 181 passengers and 47 crew on board.
After many hours in the water, about 150 men, women and children finally made it to the shores of Bangka Island, Bullwinkel and 21 of her sister nurses among them. They were short on supplies and more dangerously, they’d been washed up on enemy territory with little choice but to surrender.
“When we got ashore from the ship the men in the party decided that the best way to protect us was to surrender peaceably to the Japanese” said Bullwinkel in an interview published in The Sydney Morning Herald on September 19 1945, just three days after she had been liberated from a Japanese Prisoner of War Camp in Sumatra.
Her survival of the massacre, the resulting guilt she felt, had changed her purpose in life and as a sole survivor, she felt an onerous responsibility to share every detail she could recall about the atrocities she had witnessed not only to honour the memory of her comrades who had not returned but also to ensure the war crimes that had been committed on that day would not go unnoticed, even if the perpetrators were never punished.
She went on to testify to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in 1946, later referred to as the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal where she exhumed her memories about the massacre after years as a prisoner of war. She recalled the groups attempt to negotiate their surrender with the Japanese on Radji Beach, Bangka Island after being turned away from a local village.
“After we’d come to a decision, a large group of civilian women and children left in search of someone to surrender to. The nurses, soldiers and wounded waited.” After an officer met the Japanese at a town at the northern end of the island, he led them back to the group. It was at this time that the men were separated from the women before being taken away and killed. The enemy soldiers then returned to clean their bloodied bayonets in front of those who remained. Reports of violation of women prior to the massacre were vehemently denied by the Japanese.
“They took out tommy-guns and set up a machine gun, there was no doubting their intentions. We all seemed to accept what was going to happen”. Two days after the sinking of the SS Vyner Brooke, the woman were ordered into the sea where they were mercilessly machine gunned in the back and left for dead.
“We were ordered up and made to march into the sea” she recalled. “When we got out to about waist level, they started machine gunning from behind and I was hit just here at the side of the back. The bullet came through my hip but I wasn’t aware of it at the time. The force of the bullet and the waves knocked me over and I swallowed a lot of sea water. I was violently ill from the taste but knew if I wretched they would find and kill me”.
The sea water was inked with her own blood and that of her comrades and after witnessing the soldiers cleaning their bayonets earlier, Vivian knew that “playing dead” was her best chance of survival. With varying accounts of what happened next hazy at best, Bullwinkel’s response was simple but relatable. “I am sorry I am hazy in parts about all this. I have tried all this time to drive these scenes from my mind”.
She had tried so desperately to float, to stay still and not to drown that it is likely she lost consciousness for some time. Later in life in an interview with the Australian War Memorial she stated “The only reason I survived is because I lay still. Something told me that if I moved, I would be killed. I wouldn’t know how long I laid there but when I did venture to sit up everyone had been swept away, there were no bodies or soldiers on the beach, there was nothing. Just me.”
As it was, she said that part of her did die that day, 16 February 1942, resulting in a struggle with PTSD for the rest of her life.
After dragging herself to the safety of the jungle where she lay unconscious for three days, Bullwinkel came across a wounded solider and survivor of an earlier attack on the island who she nursed for 72 days. However, without sufficient food to sustain them, they decided the best thing to do was to surrender to the Japanese. They were taken into captivity where the soldier died shortly after. Bullwinkel was reunited with other survivors from the Vyner Brooke with whom she shared stories of the massacre. Fearing that Bullwinkel would be in danger as a witness to the massacre, her story was never shared until their release from captivity three and a half years later in September 1945.
Upon her return to Australia, it is said that Bullwinkel contacted the families of all the nurses who had been massacred to convey their remarkable stories of strength and service in an aim to fulfill the promise made to herself that the story of the Bangka Island massacre be heard and noted in history as a crime of abhorrent nature. Bullwinkel was one of just 24 of the 65 nurses who had been on the Vyner Brooke to survive the war.
Retiring from the army in 1947, she became the Director of Nursing at Melbourne’s Fairfield Hospital. She devoted herself to the nursing profession and to honouring those killed on Bangka Island, raising funds for a nurses’ memorial and serving on numerous committees including a period as a member of the Council of the Australian War Memorial and later, President of the Australian College of Nursing.
In the decades following the war, Bullwinkel received many honours and awards including the Florence Nightingale Medal, an MBE and the AO which she always accepted gracefully on behalf of her massacred colleagues.
She married in 1977 and returned to Bangka Island in 1992 to unveil a shrine to the nurses who had not survived the attack.
Lieutenant Colonel Vivian Bullwinkel passed away on 03rd July 2000 in Perth, Western Australia aged 84. Nerang RSL & Memorial Club are proud to be able to commemorate Vivian’s life and service to our country by naming our new entertainment lounge – Bullwinkels – in her honour along with the installation of a bronze plaque in the area to inspire younger generations to learn her story.
We also look forward to the upcoming installation of a nurses statue in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Garden, as a tribute to all women who served as nurses in the war.
Lest we forget.
https://nerangrsl.com.au/my-bar-the-mounting-yard/
WWII nurse Lieutenant Colonel Vivian Bullwinkel’s incredible tale of survival – ABC News