Bangka massacre

Location of Bangka Island on Banga Street

As Bangka Island Massacre ( English Bangka Iceland Massacre ) is a war crime referred to that in World War II on 16 February 1942 the Indonesian island of Bangka was committed. Dozens of British soldiers and Australian nurses who had recently been shipwrecked on the island were shot or stabbed by Japanese soldiers on Bangka Beach. Some survivors spent the remainder of the war in Japanese captivity .

backgrounds

Escape from Singapore on board the Vyner Brooke

Because of the battle for Singapore and the subsequent siege of the city by the Japanese in February 1942, numerous ships with refugees on board left the city. The 1679 GRT steamship Vyner Brooke was immediately converted into a refugee ship and its hull was painted gray. The ship was equipped with a four-inch cannon on the foredeck, depth charges and a Lewis Gun on the stern .

The Vyner Brooke was a 1928 passenger and cargo ship of the Sarawak Steamship Company, which was used in trade between Kuching and Singapore . The cabins originally had space for 44 first-class passengers. In addition, 200 deck passengers could be taken on board. Later, the first class passenger capacity was reduced to 12. The ship carried lifeboats , rafts and life jackets for 650 people. The Vyner Brooke was named after Charles Vyner Brooke , the last white raja of Sarawak on the island of Borneo . The ship belonged to the Sarawak Steamship Company Ltd., founded in 1875, which was formed after the establishment of the Sarawak Chamber of Commerce to promote the merchant shipping of Kuching. The shipping company's ships operated between Singapore and Kuching, the capital of Sarawak, a Malaysian state. The majority of the shareholders were Chinese traders.

Captain RE Borton (1890-1965), a bearer of the Order of the British Empire , was ordered to bring the Vyner Brooke to Batavia , the capital of Indonesia . She should only drive at night and seek shelter during the day. On Thursday, February 12, 1942, the steamer cast off in Singapore and was completely overloaded with 330 people on board. These included 265 civilians, mostly women and children, wounded soldiers and 65 Australian nurses from the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS). They had served there in the 10th and 13th Australian General Hospitals. These were the last of the 140 Australian nurses to leave Singapore before the Japanese invaded. Their evacuation began on February 10th. Despite the shortage of water and supplies, the ship ran out at nightfall.

Sinking in the Bangka street

A Japanese Mitsubishi Ki-21 medium bomber bombs over Chongqing near the Yangtze River, China, Sep 14. 1940

In the dark, Captain Borton steered the ship straight into a minefield , so the Vyner Brooke had to stop overnight. The journey was resumed on February 13th. On February 14, the Vyner Brooke had reached the Bangka Strait , a narrow inlet between the Indonesian islands of Bangka and Sumatra . There the ship was attacked around 2 p.m. in the afternoon by six twin-engined Japanese fighter- bombers, which formed into three groups of two and dropped bombs. They also opened machine gun fire on the ship, damaging some lifeboats and rendering them unusable.

The Vyner Brooke was able to avoid the first five attacks by sharp changes of course, but after that she received three direct hits. A bomb hit the bridge , another the chimney, and a third hit close to the stern, the loading hatch Nos. 2 and exploded in the underlying cargo space. The radio system was destroyed by the attack, so that no emergency call could be made. The fire hoses didn't work either.

Captain Borton ordered abandon ship, which with severe flip side went down within 15 to 20 minutes. The civilians went overboard first, with the nurses helping them. They also helped the wounded soldiers. There was great chaos on board the rapidly sinking ship. A lifeboat with women and children on board capsized and two others, riddled with shelling, fell empty into the water. Several passengers perished when the ship lay on its side and buried them under itself. Others fell victim to machine gun fire in the water or disappeared without a trace.

Even so, one of the nurses sang the song We're Off to See the Wizard from the 1939 musical The Wizard of Oz , and others joined in.

The Radji Beach massacre

Vivian Bullwinkel (1915–2000) was the only nurse who survived the firing squad

The occupants of three full lifeboats and a few survivors who had clung to debris and rafts in the water gradually reached the mangrove- wooded shore of Radji Beach on the northeast corner of Bangka Island. They were helped by a fire that the first survivors who came ashore had kindled on the beach to serve as a guide. A Japanese destroyer passing the island ignored the castaways' cries for help . Only 66 civilians and 22 nurses reached the beach. All other passengers had died. The following night, more lifeboats landed on the island, which British soldiers from another sunk ship had on board.

The island's native residents advised survivors to surrender to the Japanese as there was no way of escape. The survivors therefore decided to surrender. The civilian passengers set off to run towards the Japanese. The civilians were sent forward because it was believed that the Japanese would behave more graciously towards them than towards the soldiers. The soldiers and nurses stayed behind at Radji Beach and waited. When a Japanese patrol reached the beach on February 16, the men and women were separated. The men were then taken into the jungle and stabbed with bayonets . The Japanese then returned and forced the 22 nurses who remained on site to go into the water. When they were about up to their waist in the water, they were shot from behind with machine guns.

Of the 65 Australian nurses on board the Vyner Brooke , twelve drowned in the sinking (including head nurse Olive Dorothy Paschke); 21 were shot on the beach (including head nurse Irene Melville Drummond) and 32 were interned in Muntok , from where they were shipped to Palembang , where they spent three and a half years in Japanese captivity. Eight of them died in captivity. The entourage of surviving women and children was finally picked up by a Japanese ship.

Of the 22 nurses who were shot at on Radji Beach, Vivian Bullwinkel was the only sister to survive. A bullet pierced her hip, but she only passed out and woke up on the beach after the Japanese disappeared. She hid in the trees where she came across the soldier Cecil George Kinsley of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps (RAOC), who had survived the Japanese attack, badly wounded. They hid together in the jungle for twelve days and Bullwinkel cared for his wounds until they both surrendered on February 28 due to the hopeless situation and were taken to a prison camp. Kinsley succumbed to his injuries shortly thereafter. Bullwinkel was brought together with other Vyner Brooke survivors and told them about the massacre. In 1947 Bullwinkel testified in Tokyo about the events on Bangka. In 1992 she visited the island with other survivors and unveiled a memorial to the 21 nurses killed on Radji Beach.

Among the survivors of the sinking were Mary Hobbins Brown and Dorothy Shelagh Brown, wife and daughter of Edwin Arthur Brown (1878–1955), a prominent British businessman, councilor and promoter of music and theater in Singapore.

literature

Norman G. Manners. Bullwinkel - The True Story of Vivian Bullwinkel, a Young Army Nursing Sister, Who Was the Sole Survivor of a World War Two Massacre By the Japanese . Perth , Western Australia. Hesperian Press (1999)
Ian W. Shaw. On Radji Beach . Sydney . Pan Macmillan Australia (2010)

Web links

Individual evidence

↑ United States Library of Congress

[1] United States Library of Congress