2/4 Casualty
Clearing Station nurses in Malaya. Back row, from left: E. Dorsch (drowned
1942), B.Wilmott (murdered Banka Isand 1942), W. Raymont (died as POW 1945), E.
Balfour-Ogilvy (murdered Banka Island 1942), P.Farmener (murdered Banka Island
1942).
Front row from left: D.Gardam (died as POW 1945), Matron I.Drummond (murdered
Banka Island 1942), E. Hannah (POW).
Absent: K.Kinsella (drowned 1942)
The two Tasmanians in this group are Dora Gardam and Wilhelmina Raymont.
Some Tasmanian
nurses – An Anzac Story
MORE THAN 67
years ago, as Singapore was collapsing to the onslaught of the Japanese
invasion, a last-minute decision evacuated Australian nursing staff.
On February
12th, 1942, 131 nurses of the 2/10 and 2/13 Australian General Hospitals (AGH)
and the 2/4 Casualty Clearing Station (CCS) left Singapore on board three
ships, the Wah Sui, the Empire Star and the Vyner Brooke, in the last more or
less organized group of ships to escape. Three days later Singapore
capitulated.
Tasmanian
nurses Harley Brewer, Mollie Gunton, Hilda Hildyard, Maisie Rayner and Jessie
Simons were working at Saint Patrick’s School, the site of the 2/13 Australian
General Hospital (AGH), when on February 11th all the nurses were assembled.
Matron Irene Drummond called for volunteers for immediate evacuation. No
nurses stepped forward.
The same thing
happened when the Matron of the 2/10 AGH, Olive Paschke, the senior Australian
nurse in Malaya, addressed her staff, and when Sister Kathleen Kinsella spoke
with the members of the 2/4 CCS. All the nurses knew that there were not
enough ships available for use as hospitals for the increasingly numerous
battle casualties. There were more than a thousand casualties in the hospitals,
and the only ship which evacuated some wounded men was the Wah Sui. The
last thing the nurses wanted to do was leave the wounded. Sister Jessie
Simons later wrote that “there was a good deal of sulphurous protest against
the distasteful order to evacuate”.
With no volunteers
forthcoming, the matrons then drew up lists of nurses who were to be evacuated
within two hours. The rest were to be evacuated the next day.
Mollie Gunton recalled that “at the time we left we felt ghastly. It was
like giving up all our nursing principles. There were so many wounded
that stretcher cases were lying outside the hospital”. Hilda Hildyard
remembered the emotional wrench. “When we were told to leave a number of
us were crying”.
But, unknown
to the nurses at the time it was only through the determined efforts of one of
the senior Australian medical officers of the 8th AIF Division, Colonel Derham,
that all were not captured by the Japanese when Singapore fell.
On at least
three occasions during the last weeks and days before the fall of Singapore
Derham recommended officially to General Gordon Bennett, the commander of
Australian forces in Malaya, that the nurses be evacuated before their safety
was threatened.
The requests
were refused on the grounds that civilian morale would be undermined. It
was only when Derham ordered six nurses of the 2/10 AGH to embark with 120
wounded Australian soldiers on the Wah Sui on February 10th, without seeking
permission, two days after the Japanese had landed on Singapore Island, that
General Bennett agreed to the evacuation of all the nurses.
The next day
the nurses chosen to go on the Empire Star left Saint Patrick’s School first,
and Matron Drummond “kissed every sister goodbye with the tears running down
her cheeks”. She would never see any of them again.
The nurses had
no time to sort through their possessions. Most of the things they had
collected in their months in Malaya and Singapore had to stay in storage.
They left the hospital with essentials only, throwing “a few belongings into a
hand case, iron rations into a gas mask bag”, and carrying the obligatory tin
hat.
Some hastily
wrote the names and addresses of their wounded army patients to pass on news to
their families in Australia. Then they were driven into the chaos of the
Singapore wharves.
“The situation
we met when we arrived at the wharves was just like a nightmare, and we were
living it”. Sister Gunton always vividly remembered the scene of
destruction and disorder that was Singapore harbour. “Storage tanks were
going up in flames all around us. The whole sky was illuminated and there
were thick plumes of smoke”.
The 60 nurses
assigned to the Empire Star (including Tasmanians Brewer, Gunton, Hildyard and
Rayner) were unable to board for several hours as Japanese planes bombed and
strafed the area.. “There was a big crate of Christmas toys on the
wharf. While we were taking shelter from the bombing, troops broke open
the crate and threw teddy bears to us.”
By this time
there were many troops in the docks who had become separated from their units
and were trying to escape. This added to the confusion and the captains
of the last available ships were wary about who they allowed on board.
The captain of the Empire Star was reluctant to permit the nurses on board.
“Thereafter followed a heated argument for some time”, which was resolved when
the senior escort officer with the nurses “drew his revolver – and on we went”.
Things were so
hectic that only some of the nurses were aware of this development. Hilda
Hildyard was so tired, having just come off night duty, that she had little
recollection of events at the wharves. She did remember, however,
watching in anguish as a valued possession she’d managed to salvage at the last
minute was dropped in deep water as the nurses’ bags were loaded on the ship.
Controversy
surrounds an incident in which more than 200 Australian soldiers forced their
way on board the ship just before it was due to move from its docking
berth. They were arrested when the ship reached Java several days later,
but were subsequently released and attached to Australian military units in
Java. They were captured by the Japanese when Java fell a few weeks
later, in March.
These troops
and the nurses were only a small proportion of the human cargo on the Empire
Star when she finally left Singapore early on February 12th. An estimated
2,154 passengers, including civilian women and children and air force
personnel, who were being evacuated in the hope of taking an active role in the
war on Java, were crammed on board the old cargo ship which had accommodation
facilities for 16 people.
They were
forced to anchor until daylight near the entrance to the harbour in order to
negotiate the mines surrounding the approaches to Singapore. “During the
night we were brought on deck in case we had to abandon ship quickly. I
have a vivid memory of the flames silhouetting Singapore against the dark sky”,
said Mollie Gunton.
The delay
exposed the Empire Star and other ships in the convoy to attack by air.
“The Japanese had a habit of attacking Singapore at eight o’clock sharp in the
morning. They came in from all directions, bombing and strafing.
You could set your watches by them”. The same routine occurred on
February 12th, with the evacuating ships still in sight of Singapore.
The Empire
Star took three direct hits during the day which killed 17 and wounded
32. Two Australian nurses tending the wounded on deck used their bodies
to shield their patients from air attacks. Margaret Anderson was awarded
the George Medal and Veronica Torney the MBE for bravery and devotion to duty
under fire.
The nurses
were full of praise for the ship’s captain, who watched the Japanese attacks
from the deck, ordering changes in direction as the bombs fell. Troops on
board used what weapons they had to fight back. One Japanese aircraft was
shot down by small-arms fire, creating some jubilation.
Friday,
February 13th, passed without incident for the Empire Star. “I’ll never
believe the superstition about Friday the 13th being unlucky”, said Harley
Brewer to the press after arriving in Australia. Mollie Gunton speculated
that the ship was ultimately saved because it caught fire. “It is
possible they thought we were sinking. They didn’t attack again”.
Harley Brewer
was right. They were lucky. The Japanese attacked and sank two
other ships in the convoy from the air and another fell victim to a torpedo
from a submarine. The Empire Star hugged the coast of Sumatra, and on
February 14th limped into Batavia, another port in turmoil and disorder.
On this day,
unknown to the nurses on the Empire Star, their 65 colleagues aboard the Vyner
Brooke, which had left Singapore harbour some hours in their wake, were caught
in the open sea by a squadron of Japanese dive-bombers. Until then they
had largely escaped the attention of Japanese planes, although most of their
lifeboats had been wrecked by a lone strafing run by a Japanese fighter the day
before.
The whole
squadron dived on the ship in succession. Jessie Simons counted 27
shuddering explosions of near misses before two bombs hit the ship, one
exploding in the engine room. The Vyner Brooke sank quickly.
“Within fifteen minutes of the first hit, no sign remained of the Vyner Brooke
but a pair of leaking boats, a few rafts, scattered wreckage and scores of
human heads bobbing on the oily sea”.
In the ensuing
hours and days 12 of the Australian nurses drowned or were killed in the sea,
including Matron Paschke and Kathleen Kinsella, the senior nurse of the 2/4
CCS.
One group of
about 75 people, including 22 of the Australian nurses, managed to get to a
beach on Banka Island, just off the coast of Sumatra. Sister Vivian
Bullwinkel of the 2/13 AGH described, after the end of the war, what happened
next. The Japanese “took half the men away down the beach behind a bluff,
came back and took the other half away… After the second party they came
back and cleaned their rifles and bayonets in front of us, and then lined us up
and signed to us to march into the sea. Then they started machine gunning
from behind. Matron Drummond, Sister Casson and Sister Wight were killed
before they reached the water’s edge…”
Bullwinkel
feigned death and was the sole survivor of the 22 nurses. She hid in the
jungle briefly, and after finding and helping a seriously wounded English
soldier, was finally captured. She was reunited in captivity with 31
other Australian nurses who had survived the sinking of the Vyner Brooke
(including Tasmanians Jessie Simons, Dora Gardam and Wilhelmina Raymont), and
they spent the rest of the war trying to survive in prison camps in Sumatra.
Dora Gardam
and Wilhelmina Raymont died in captivity, in April and February 1945 respectively,
as did six other Australian nurses.
Only 24 of the
65 nurses who left Singapore on the Vyner Brooke survived the war. Two of
them, including Jessie Simons, wrote books of their experiences as prisoners of
war. Simons’ book, While History Passed, was published in 1954, dedicated
“To the memory of the girls who did not return.
At the time
that disaster struck the Vyner Brooke in mid-February 1942, the Empire Star
underwent some rapid emergency maintenance work in Batavia, then left for
Australia with one other ship, carrying between them 3,000 people. After
clearing the Sunda Strait the Empire Star sailed independently for Fremantle,
the other ship making for Colombo. On the way out they passed the Orcades
with its ill-fated passenger cargo of Australian troops bound for Java.
The Orcades was the advance ship bringing Australian troops home from the
Middle East to meet the Japanese threat, but was diverted to Java.
They were all
captured in early March. But the Orcades escaped, leaving Batavia on
February 21st, carrying to safety the nurses who had been evacuate from
Singapore on the Wah Sui.
The Empire
Star arrived safely in Australia, but although the nurses were glad to have
escaped, “it didn’t mean a lot because we were all too worried about what might
have happened to the other girls”. They were not to learn about the fate
of their colleagues on the Vyner Brooke until September and October 1945.
Some of the
returned nurses wrote to relatives of soldiers they had nursed in Singapore,
either forwarding letters from wounded men or informing their parents and wives
of their welfare just before the fall of Singapore. Many of the relatives
responded, expressing their gratitude for the correspondence, as well as their
anxieties and their deep anguish and overwhelming helplessness in the face of
the wall of silence that had descended since the Japanese victory.
The letters
demonstrate, in microcosm, the innermost feelings of a nation at war in the
months of 1942 after more than 10,000 of its people had been killed, wounded or
captured in the south-west Pacific area from Malaya in the west to Rabaul in
the north east.
Mollie Gunton
kept letters written to her from all parts of Australia in the months that
followed her return. One mother wrote from Sydney: “Words fail to
express my appreciation of the very kind thoughts in reporting the whereabouts
of my dear son (one and only). Naturally I have been unable to rest with
the continual thought of him on my mind. Now you set me at rest…”
A father wrote
from Brisbane in late August, 1942: “Your letter was not answered due to
the very serious illness of my wife who has since passed away. You were
very good in giving what information you could about my son. We had a
letter written by him on February 8th but we have not heard anything
since. When I do I hope the news will be good. I wrote to him
through the Red Cross Bureau in Melbourne and I will not know anything until
the names appear in the papers. I do hope for his return as I am left
entirely on my own. He is our only son and it will be a problem for me to
let him know his mother has passed on. He will take it very badly as his
mother was all to him and he to her.”
A wife wrote
from Bundaberg: “Sister, you can imagine my joy on opening your letter.
It was the first news of any kind I had regarding my husband since the fall of
Singapore. I am indeed grateful to hear you say in your letter that he
was not badly wounded.”
Another wife
wrote from Bondi in New South Wales: “It is so much better to know that
my husband is probably a prisoner of war than not to know anything at
all. It is the suspense and waiting that gets one down… I wish to
thank you and say I am just as proud of you and your nurses as I am of the AIF
boys. I’m sure everyone else is too.”
One of the
burdens borne by the nurses who returned on the Empire Star was the ignorant
hostility by some sections of the Australian civilian population. Sisters
Gunton and Rayner were presented with white feathers in a Hobart street soon
after their return to Tasmania in March 1942. Their reaction was one of
“stupefied shock and disbelief”. But they were not the only ones to
receive such treatment. Nurses in other states were welcomed by the white
feather brigade.
The nurses
were assigned to other army hospital units for the rest of the war, being moved
around Australia as circumstances demanded. Then, in September 1945, some
of them, including Harley Brewer and Mollie Gunton, returned to Singapore as
part of the 2/14 AGH, to tend to the large numbers of sick and injured
prisoners of war as they were released from camps across south-east Asia.
They
re-established their hospital in the same location they had left in 1942, in
the buildings of Saint Patrick’s School, and experienced a “terrible shock”
when first confronted with the physical condition of the emaciated
ex-prisoners. On one occasion some of the nurses were invited to visit a
group of Australians at Changi. “They served us what they’d been eating during
the war. It consisted of things they could scrounge, bits of grass,
leaves and weeds, which was then boiled. It was nauseating.”
The highlight,
and at the same time the saddest moment for nurses who had escaped Singapore in
1942, occurred with the arrival of their colleagues who had survived the prison
camps on Sumatra. “We were overjoyed to see them, but they were almost
unrecognizable, and so many of them had died.”
The sight of
the starved and ill women outraged many of the patients, all former prisoners,
and the hospital staff were kept busy controlling those most upset. The
news spread, prompting a decision to post extra guards where Japanese troops
were being detained.
Jessie Simons,
the one surviving Tasmanian nurse of those who had been on the Vyner Brooke,
wrote later: “Wonder of wonders! The hospital was our old stamping
ground… Past the admitting officers we went and wearily climbed the
stairs. What a welcome we got at the top from the nursing staff.
Quite a number of the girls had been in Malaya with us before the fall of
Singapore. Tongues wagged a welcome, and these girls opened their
wardrobes and showered gifts on us… I’ll never forget their love and
kindness to us – something too wonderful to describe.”
The nurses
left Singapore for the second and last time, in October, 1945, aboard the
hospital ship Manunda. “On this trip we had three happy, care-free weeks
of peace”, said Jessie Simons. “But what a thrill at last to step on Australian
soil again. It had taken us three years and ten months to get
there.” By now they knew they were no longer “staff nurses” or “sisters”,
but Lieutenants and Captains. Their new uniforms were amazingly different
(“what on earth had happened to everything, fancy sisters in pants!”).
But they were home.
The work and
service of all the nurses who served in Singapore is summed up in the citation
for an award to Mollie Gunton. Australia’s senior military officer,
General Thomas Blamey, wrote: “Your devotion to duty and keen sympathetic
interest have been an outstanding example to those working with you and have
been well in keeping with the reputation enjoyed by the Australian Army Nursing
Service”.
During World
War II 71 Australian nurses died on active service. 137 received
decorations. Forty years after the war, in 1985, a study revealed that
nearly a third of Australian women who had served overseas during World War II
were “in difficult financial circumstances”, and that 80% of them were
recognized as needing help for war-related injuries and illnesses. It was
acknowledged that they had been disadvantaged by discriminatory rates of pay,
and discriminatory application of repatriation benefits on the basis of gender,
including ineligibility to receive nursing-home care from the Department of
Veterans Affairs.
Peter Henning
Postscript:
The Japanese officer in charge of the unit which massacred people on the beach
on Banka Island in 1942 committed suicide in custody in 1948. The
Japanese commander of the prison camp in Sumatra where nurses had died through
ill-treatment was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment in 1948.
Sources:
Jessie Simons, While History Passed, 1954.
Mollie Gunton, photos, letters from relatives of POWs, interviews with author.
Hilda Hildyard, interview with author.
Newspaper reports, 1942 and 1945.
Jan Bassett, Guns and Brooches, 1992.
Rupert Goodman, Our War Nurses, 1988.
Stephen Garton, The Cost of War: Australians Return, 1996.
Peter Henning, “Against All Odds”, Leatherwood, No. 8.
Peter Henning
One group of
about 75 people, including 22 of the Australian nurses, managed to get to a
beach on Banka Island, just off the coast of Sumatra. Sister Vivian
Bullwinkel of the 2/13 AGH described, after the end of the war, what happened
next. The Japanese “took half the men away down the beach behind a bluff,
came back and took the other half away… After the second party they came
back and cleaned their rifles and bayonets in front of us, and then lined us up
and signed to us to march into the sea. Then they started machine gunning
from behind. Matron Drummond, Sister Casson and Sister Wight were killed
before they reached the water’s edge…”
Bullwinkel
feigned death and was the sole survivor of the 22 nurses. She hid in the
jungle briefly, and after finding and helping a seriously wounded English
soldier, was finally captured. She was reunited in captivity with 31
other Australian nurses who had survived the sinking of the Vyner Brooke
(including Tasmanians Jessie Simons, Dora Gardam and Wilhelmina Raymont), and
they spent the rest of the war trying to survive in prison camps in Sumatra.
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