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 As the first blog entry got exhausted. My second book |
| Evolution of Love Part 2 |
| The bullet entered Vivian Bullwinkel's left side just above her hip, passed through her body, and exited the other side. She was standing waist-deep in the South China Sea on Bangka Island, one of 22 Australian Army nurses in the surf that afternoon of February 16, 1942. Behind them, Japanese soldiers positioned a machine gun. The nurses had already been ordered to march into the water. They knew what was coming. The machine gun opened fire. Vivian felt the impact, felt herself falling into the water. Around her, her colleagues—women she'd trained with, worked with, laughed with—were dying. The water turned red. Bodies floated in the surf. The shooting continued for several minutes, ensuring no one survived. Vivian lay motionless in the bloodstained water, face down, pretending to be dead while the bullet wound in her side bled into the sea. She could hear the soldiers on the beach. She waited. Minutes felt like hours. The tide pushed her body gently toward shore, but she forced herself to remain limp, lifeless. Finally, the soldiers left. Vivian Bullwinkel raised her head and looked around at a scene from nightmare. Twenty-one nurses—her friends, her sisters in service—lay dead in the surf and on the sand. She was alone, wounded, on an enemy-controlled island, with no medical supplies, no food, no way to escape. She crawled out of the water and into the jungle. Four days earlier, everything had been different. The nurses were evacuating from Singapore, which had just fallen to Japanese forces after a brutal campaign. They'd been assigned to the SS Vyner Brooke, a ship carrying hundreds of evacuees—military personnel, civilians, women, children—all fleeing the Japanese advance. On February 12, Japanese aircraft found the ship. Bombs rained down. The Vyner Brooke was hit multiple times. It began sinking. The evacuation was chaos—lifeboats launched, some capsized, people jumped into the water. Vivian and the other nurses helped load lifeboats, evacuate wounded, maintain order as the ship went down. They survived the sinking only to face something worse. Various groups of survivors made it to Bangka Island. The nurses came ashore together. So did groups of British and Australian soldiers. Civilians. The wounded. They were exhausted, traumatized, hoping they could hide or be rescued before Japanese forces found them. Japanese troops discovered them on February 16. The soldiers separated the groups—men in one area, nurses in another. They marched the men into the jungle. Then they came for the nurses. Twenty-two women in uniform, many still soaked from days of exposure, were ordered to march into the sea. The nurses understood immediately. Some prayed. Some held hands. Some simply walked forward with dignity, refusing to show fear to their executioners. Then the machine gun fire. Vivian lay among the dead for hours. When she finally moved, she discovered she wasn't completely alone. Wandering in shock near the beach, she found a British soldier—Private Ernest Lloyd "Kingsley" Kingsley—who had survived the separate massacre of the men. He too had been shot and left for dead. Two wounded survivors, surrounded by the bodies of over 80 murdered people, hiding on an island controlled by the enemy who had just committed mass murder. They moved deeper into the jungle. Vivian's nursing training helped them survive those first desperate days. She treated Kingsley's wounds as best she could with no supplies. They found water. They ate whatever they could forage. They hid. For 12 days, they survived. But Kingsley's wounds were severe. He developed infections that Vivian couldn't treat without medicine. He weakened. On the twelfth day, Private Kingsley died. Vivian Bullwinkel was alone again. Wounded, starving, exhausted, and now watching the only other survivor of the massacre die in the jungle. She could have continued hiding. But she knew she wouldn't survive much longer without food and medical care. She made an impossible choice: she would surrender to the same Japanese forces that had massacred her colleagues. She walked out of the jungle and gave herself up. The Japanese soldiers who captured her had no idea she was a witness to the Bangka Island massacre. If they had known, they would have killed her immediately. Vivian understood this. She said nothing about what she'd seen. She claimed she'd been separated from her group during the sinking and had hidden until deciding to surrender. They sent her to Palembang POW camp in Sumatra. For the next three and a half years, Vivian Bullwinkel endured the brutality of Japanese prisoner of war camps. Starvation was constant. Disease killed regularly. Guards were cruel. Forced labor was exhausting. The camp held both male and female prisoners, all suffering under conditions designed to break them. But Vivian continued nursing. Despite her own wounds, despite chronic illness, despite the very real risk of punishment or death, she secretly treated fellow prisoners. She improvised bandages from scraps. She shared her meager rations with the sick. She comforted the dying. She used her medical knowledge to help prisoners survive illnesses that would have killed them without care. She never told anyone in the camp that she'd witnessed the massacre. She carried that secret through three and a half years of imprisonment, knowing that revealing it would mean her death. Liberation came in September 1945 after Japan's surrender. Allied forces reached the POW camps. Survivors emerged—skeletal, sick, traumatized. Vivian weighed less than 90 pounds. She had survived wounds, jungle survival, massacre, and years of brutal imprisonment. Only then, finally safe, did she tell her story. Vivian Bullwinkel became the sole surviving witness to the Bangka Island massacre. The 21 other nurses had no one to speak for them except Vivian. The approximately 60 men killed in the separate massacre had no surviving witnesses at all. Her testimony became crucial evidence at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials in 1947. She described what happened on that beach in careful detail. She identified the Japanese unit responsible. She ensured the world knew about the war crime committed against unarmed medical personnel. Several Japanese officers were convicted and executed for war crimes related to the massacre, partially based on Vivian's testimony. Justice was imperfect—war crimes trials always are—but at least there was accountability, at least the victims were acknowledged. Vivian returned to Australia and resumed her nursing career. She could have retired. She'd earned it. But she chose to continue serving. She became matron of Fairfield Hospital in Melbourne. She worked with veterans' organizations. She mentored young nurses. She spoke publicly about her experiences, ensuring that the Bangka Island massacre would never be forgotten. She received numerous honors: Lieutenant Colonel rank, Order of Australia, Australian War Memorial recognition. But she deflected praise, insisting she'd simply done her duty and survived by luck. Friends and colleagues described her as remarkably lacking in bitterness. She didn't hate Japanese people. She distinguished between the soldiers who committed atrocities and the broader Japanese population. She focused on building peace rather than nursing grievances. Vivian Bullwinkel died on July 3, 2000, at age 84. By then, she'd spent 58 years honoring her murdered colleagues through service, testimony, and remembrance. Today, memorials commemorate the Bangka Island massacre in Australia and at the site in Indonesia. The nurses are remembered. Their names are carved in stone. But they're remembered primarily because Vivian survived to tell their story. Twenty-two nurses marched into the surf that day. Twenty-one died immediately. One lived to witness, to testify, to ensure accountability, and to spend the rest of her life serving others despite having every reason to be broken by trauma. Vivian's story asks uncomfortable questions about human nature—about what soldiers are capable of when orders remove moral restraint, about survival instincts strong enough to lie motionless among the dead for hours, about the choice to surrender to murderers because it's preferable to dying alone in a jungle. But it also demonstrates something about human resilience that transcends horror. Vivian emerged from hell and chose continued service. She transformed survival into purpose. She refused to let trauma define her. The nurses who died on Bangka Island were murdered for no reason except that they were there, inconvenient to soldiers who'd been ordered or permitted to eliminate them. They were medical personnel, protected under international law, killed in deliberate war crime. They have no voice except Vivian's. She gave them that voice for 58 years. She testified in court. She spoke at memorials. She told their stories. She ensured that Bangka Island became more than just another forgotten wartime atrocity. Every year on the anniversary, Australia remembers the 22 nurses. Their names are read aloud. Their service is honored. Their murder is acknowledged. All because one woman survived, hid her survival for three and a half years to stay alive, then spent the rest of her life making sure the world knew what happened. Vivian Bullwinkel didn't just survive a massacre. She survived with purpose. She turned witness into testimony. She transformed trauma into service. She proved that even when surrounded by the worst humanity can inflict, individual courage and compassion can prevail. Twenty-two nurses in the surf. Twenty-one bodies in the water. One survivor who refused to let them be forgotten. That's not just survival. That's victory over the darkness that tried to erase them all. |
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