On Radji Beach: The Story of the Australian Nurses after the Fall of Singapore in Aussie Readers

Feb 20, 2012 Brenda rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: aussie-authors, non-fiction, borrowed-from-library, australian-history

This extremely well researched slice of history is an incredibly sad, yet poignant story of the events of 65 Australian nurses, who went to Singapore in 1941 to help with the war effort. The story of their incredible courage, their compassion and love for their patients and each other, is one everyone should read.

When the first bomb hit Singapore on the 7th December, 1941, the request was put in to evacuate the nurses back to Australia. The wheels of authority turned slowly, but the final group This extremely well researched slice of history is an incredibly sad, yet poignant story of the events of 65 Australian nurses, who went to Singapore in 1941 to help with the war effort. The story of their incredible courage, their compassion and love for their patients and each other, is one everyone should read.

When the first bomb hit Singapore on the 7th December, 1941, the request was put in to evacuate the nurses back to Australia. The wheels of authority turned slowly, but the final group of nurses, along with civilians and others, left on 12th February, 1942 on a coastal freighter called the Vyner Brooke.

While in the Banka Strait, they were attacked by Japanese bombers, and with the captain managing to dodge and weave, it caused the first wave of bombs to be off target, but once the Japanese worked out the strategy of the manoeuvres, the next wave of bombs were directly on target. After taking direct hits by three bombs, the uninjured captain sounded the alarms for abandon ship. With the bombers strafing the life boats and ship with bullets, the survivors tried their best to stay alive, with their bulky life jackets keeping them afloat.

Those who survived drifted on the make-shift rafts, at the mercy of the currents, for up to 3 days, before feeling the sand under their feet on one of the many beaches of Banka. Some drifted away, never to be seen again. And some, including 22 Australian nurses, washed up on Radji Beach. There were survivors from other shipwrecks on Radji Beach as well, some injured, some near death, and some uninjured. They voted to surrender to the Japanese, as they knew they would starve to death otherwise.

The absolute horror of what happened next, when the Japanese patrol wouldn’t accept their surrender, absolutely beggars belief! The murder of almost one hundred people, including the Australian nurses, soldiers, women and children is astounding. But amazingly, from the group of nurses, there was one survivor...Vivian Bullwinkel, or Bully as she was known by her friends.

The story of her survival of 13 days in the jungle with a bullet wound, then re-uniting with the remaining nurses from the Vyner Brooke at a POW camp on the island, their terrible situation with starvation and disease, the shunting between one internment camp to the other for the next three and a half years, makes compelling reading.

When the war ended, there were 24 nurses who made it home, from the initial 65. This is their story, researched from the diaries and papers of some of the survivors, and is a moving account of the fate of every single nurse who was aboard the Vyner Brooke when she left Singapore on that fateful day in February 1942.

...more

6 likes · Like · see review

Feb 21, 2012 Bronwyn rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: australian, history

This is an interesting and well-researched book in which Shaw traces what happened to a group of 65 Australian Army nurses from their arrival in Malaya in 1941, through their evacuation from Singapore just before it fell to advancing Japanese forces in February 1942, and the events that unfolded after the the sinking of their evacuation ship, the Vyner Brooke.

Like · see review