Valentine's Day marks the anniversary of a little known World War II massacre, despite it taking up to 300 lives.
The Alexandra Military Hospital in Singapore, also known as the British Military Hospital, had a significant amount of recuperating Australian soldiers and working medical staff on deck when a Japanese assault arrived its doorstep on February 14, 1942.
The storming of the hospital, just prior to the Fall of Singapore, took place across two days, during which terrible atrocities were committed.
Eighty years later, author and researcher Stuart Lloyd has unravelled what happened that terrible weekend, solving the fate of many Australian soldiers for their surviving families.
"The hospital was caught in a no man's land as the Japanese came rampaging forward," Mr Lloyd said.
Patients were bayoneted on operating tables, hospital guards beheaded, and nurses slaughtered.
Living there piqued interest
Mr Lloyd was born and raised a long way from Orange in central west NSW, where he now lives and works.
"I grew up on a farm in Zimbabwe and was blessed with the most idyllic of childhoods," he said
A two-decade advertising career in South-East Asia whetted Mr Lloyd's interest in that theatre of war during WWII.
"I guess living there got me thinking or visualising what would it have been like for those guys fighting here," he said.
His first war history book was about the prisoners of war forced to work on the Thai-Burma Death Railway.
Called The Missing Years, the book would become a best-selling reason to commit to a non-fiction career.
Researching it would also introduced Mr Lloyd to the Valentine's Day Alexandra Hospital Massacre, a horrific two day event seldom discussed in the annals of history.
"The subject of [The Missing Years] was a guy called Captain Pilkington and he happened to have been in this hospital and survived the massacre," Mr Lloyd said.
Airbrushed from history
Mr Lloyd described his research on the massacre as a "morbid fascination".
"The more that I looked at it, the more I realised that so little was known about it," Mr Lloyd said.
"If you look at the official British story of World War II there is no mention of this hospital in that document.
The hospital's location turned out to be an embarrassment for the British army, perilously located amid strategic targets such as ammunition targets and oil tanks.
But there were other uncomfortable factors for the British that would see the massacre effectively airbrushed from history for 80 years.
"One of the key things is that the allies used the hospital as cover in their withdrawal," Mr Lloyd said.
"If you're looking at from a legal war crime perspective, you can't use the protection of the Red Cross [during a military retreat]."
Conspiracy theories flourished in the years following the dreadful event, fanned by the fact the lead investigator on the case, a man called Cyril Wilde, was blown up on the tarmac in Hong Kong in 1947.
"Along with his briefcase full of all his original statements, affidavits, and things like that," Mr Lloyd said.
"And then, suddenly, the case was dropped.
Drowned out by the POW story
Investigative historian Lynette Silver has spent the past thirty years ruthlessly interrogating the experiences of Australian soldiers on WWII's South-East Asian front.
Her work has seen her awarded the first civilian Defence Force commendation and medal, and a Member of the Order of Australia (AM), despite the fact she's often uncovering military and government mishandling.
As she put it, "I investigate things that other people don't spend time investigating".
For Mrs Silver, another major reason stark events like the Valentine's Day Massacre were not widely reported on was the predominance of prisoner of war (POW) stories emerging from Singapore.
"As more evidence came to light and more stories were told, the POW experience post-war pretty much overwhelmed anything that happened just before the fall of Singapore," Mrs Silver said.
The Fall of Singapore was a scene of unimaginable chaos, burying any first hand accounts for years with a handful of survivors.
"For information to get out with anybody who was being evacuated, or to be sent on a cable, was basically impossible," Mrs Silver said.
Historical justice
For both Stuart Lloyd and Lynette Silver, the ability to provide closure for families left behind has been an unexpected but ultimately fulfilling responsibility.
"Not a week goes past now — 80 years after Singapore surrendered and these men became prisoners of war — where I don't receive an email from somebody asking me do I know anything about my uncle or my grandfather," Mrs Silver said.
"The lack of knowledge is absolutely astounding."
Both of the historians' research has led them to be able to assist with personal quests, such as assuaging a family's belief about the way their loved one died or even the existence of a grave.
"We say the Second World War ended in 1945, but it's still going on in some peoples' heads," Mr Lloyd said.
The role of investigative history is a vital one, according to Lynette Silver.
"The victors write the war history and they put a spin on it," she cautioned.
