In 1942, on the shore of Radji Beach, in what is now Indonesia, 26-year-old nurse Vivian Bullwinkel stood with the tropical ocean lapping at her nurses uniform, listening to the cry of seagulls and wondering about her brother John, who was in the RAAF.
She was savouring the last moments of her life.
Sister Bullwinkel and 21 other Australian nurses had a contingent of the Japanese army at their backs, who had walked the young women into the water at bayonet point.
Behind her, the Japanese soldiers had set up tommy guns and a machine gun.
They fired a stream of bullets along the line, aiming for each woman's heart.
"As we were thigh deep in the surf they opened murderous fire, mowing us down like a scene I saw in a film as a child," Sister Bullwinkel told The Age newspaper in 1945.
Sister Bullwinkel floated amongst them, but much to her surprise, she was not dead.
They lived for service
Sister Bullwinkel ended up a Lieutenant Colonel, but before receiving those honours, she would have to survive insurmountable horrors until the end of the war in 1945.
Most of the people she met along the way didn't make it and are remembered through her testament.
It is an astonishing tale that was documented by author Ian Shaw in his book On Radji Beach: The story of Australian Nurses After the Fall of Singapore.
"She lived a wonderful life," Mr Shaw said.
It's a surprising summary of a woman who was aboard an evacuation ship sunk at sea, had survived on a tropical island, witnessed a massacre, stood in a firing line and endured over three years as a prisoner of the Japanese army.
"When I was doing the research, I had access to a lot of the letters of Vivian's nursing colleagues and friends," Mr Shaw said.
Mr Shaw never met Lieutenant Colonel Bullwinkel but through his research has garnered a sense of her character.
"Vivian was that kind of woman, she could accept what life was throwing at her and she didn't appear to have any regrets," Mr Shaw said.
"She would have been close to the highest ranking woman in the Australian Army when she retired from miliary service."
The horror began on Friday 13th
Lieutenant Colonel Bullwinkel was born in 1915 in South Australia. She spent her childhood in Kapunda and grew to be taller than most.
She had a warm, genuine smile and did well in country towns, training as a nurse in Broken Hill then beginning her career in Hamilton, Victoria.
She enlisted in 1941, as soon as she was 25, and was assigned to the 2/13th Australian General Hospital.
They sailed for Singapore in September 1941.
Mr Shaw said when Pearl Harbour was bombed, everything changed for the Allies stationed in the Pacific, which was fast coming under the control of the Japanese.
"There were a lot of casualties amongst all the Allied forces, and about 10 days before the surrender, senior command began discussing evacuating the nurses," he said.
Lieutenant Colonel Bullwinkel was evacuated on the Vyner Brooke which had 181 people on board, mostly women and children.
"They sailed, believe it or not, on Friday 13th and were sunk the next day by Japanese aircraft off Bangka Island," Mr Shaw said.
He said while there was no red cross on display, like a hospital ship would have had, it would have been clear to Japanese aircraft that this was an evacuation ship, thanks to the efforts of the brave nurses.
"When the Japanese aircraft approached, a number of the nurses would go up on deck and wave, they had quite a distinctive uniform, but the aircraft that sunk the Vyner Brooke just attacked it," he said.
It was 2:00pm when the ship sunk, many people were wounded and killed, but the Australian War Memorial recorded that around 150 survivors made it ashore at Bangka Island, after swimming for sometimes eight, and up to 65 hours.
For many, the fate awaiting them was worse than drowning, as the island was occupied by the Japanese army.
Standing tall in the line of fire
The Vyner Brooke survivors gathered on Radji Beach and lit a bonfire, then tried to decide what to do next.
"They couldn't survive there," Mr Shaw said.
"There was fresh water, a small spring, but food was going to be a problem, a number of people had been wounded in the sinking of the ship."
Mr Shaw describes how a small delegation was sent to the nearest town of Muntok to surrender, and that party survived, but it triggered a series of "cold-blooded and deliberate" massacres.
"The Japanese sent what I believe was a fighting patrol, 16 men ... who were sent back to Radji Beach, and they took no prisoners," Mr Shaw said.
"The first thing was to separate the officers from the civilians and they took them behind a small headline and bayoneted them to death there."
Mr Shaw said the remaining women on the beach saw the Japanese soldiers walking back, cleaning the blood off the bayonets and they realised what had happened.
"They guessed what would be their fate as well," Mr Shaw said.
The nurses decided not to try to escape, and the Japanese soldiers turned their already bloodied bayonets toward the servicewomen.
The Japanese soldiers then raped most of the nurses, including Lieut. Bullwinkel, a crime only revealed by journalist Tess Lawrence in 2017.
"They, at bayonet point, made the nurses walk into the water, and they had a light machine gun with them which had been set up, and they machine-gunned them in the back," Mr Shaw said.
Mr Shaw said Lieutenant Colonel Bullwinkel was a bit taller than average, which is what saved her.
"She was hit by a bullet and just pitched forward into the water, she may have lost consciousness for a brief while but just drifted away and was presumed dead by the Japanese."
Lieutenant Colonel Bullwinkel's own account of the subsequent hours, as told to the Age in 1945, offers the only glimpses we have of how being witness to the massacre of her fellow nurses truly broke her spirit:
"I found I was on the beach. Bodies of men and women were lying around me. The Japanese bayoneted the men's bodies, but left the women's alone. That is the only reason I am alive today. I lay still, partly because something told me I would be killed if I moved and partly because I did not care, anyway."
Lieutenant Colonel Bullwinkel described how she then dragged herself to the jungle and spent several days lying unconscious beside a spring. She eventually walked into town and surrendered to the Japanese, where she was taken as a prisoner of war along with dozens of other Australian nurses.
Lieutenant Colonel Bullwinkel had to hide all evidence of her knowledge of the massacres on Radji Beach, including her wound and a hole in her nurses uniform made by the bullet that struck her.
"If the Japanese learnt that there was one survivor and it was Vivian, they would have executed her," Mr Shaw said.
The nurses were held prisoner for another three and a half years, many of them dying from tropical diseases and malnutrition.
'Fatten them up'
When the Japanese capitulated, the prisoner of war nurses were freed, but not immediately sent home.
They were too thin.
"Vivian and the other nurses were taken back to Singapore rather than back to Australia directly," Mr Shaw said.
"You had women like Vivian 170cm tall weighing 32 kilos," he said.
"The army representatives said if we send these nurses back to Australia with an average weight of 30 kilos, the people will demand that we start mass execution of Japanese prisoners."
Articles from 1945 describe the POW nurses' homecoming as a very cheery event, The Argus reported that the nurses disembarked their hospital ship accompanied by a band playing The Rose of No Man's Land, and were welcomed by a cheering crowd who stood in heavy rain, calling 'give us the girls!'.
But when reporters wanted to hear about their hardships at the hands of the Japanese, the POW nurses didn't give them much.
"They were diffident to talk about their treatment. They dismissed it with a casual, 'there was a fair bit of face slapping', or 'we were made to stand in the sun for not bowing enough'."
A truer account of what the nurses endured can be found in Lieutenant Colonel Bullwinkel's military recommendation for the award of Associate Royal Red Cross (ARRC), held in the National Archives.
"The nurses had to carry out many heavy tasks of manual labour on Japanese working parties and were under threat of molestation and personal violence from the brutal Japanese ... Lieut. Bullwinkel exhibited outstanding courage, selfless devotion to duty and a magnificent example."
Bearing witness to horror
Throughout each ordeal that Vivian Bullwinkel experienced, it seemed her determination to survive was fuelled by her commitment to all the men and women who she had seen brutally murdered.
"She gave evidence at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials about what happened on Radji Beach," Mr Shaw said.
"In the end, the Japanese sergeant was charged and served 12 years imprisonment for his part in the killings, and the captain in charge of the murderous troop suicided while he was being held for questioning."
The rape crimes were not included in Bullwinkel's statement before the tribunal and are currently still omitted from the Australian War Memorial's website.
In an article published in the Independent Australian, journalist Tess Lawrence wrote that Bullwinkel"… confirmed the ill-kept secret that most "of us" – meaning she and the women who had been gunned down – had been "violated" by the Japanese soldiers beforehand.'
The secrets were revealed by Bullwinkel late in life to Lawrence in confidence, over lunches leading to a formal interview.
In the same article, Lawrence also tells how Bullwinkel revealed to her that she wanted to include the rape crimes in her statement to the war crimes tribunal, but was ordered not to by the Australian Government.
Lieutenant Colonel Bullwinkel was awarded the Florence Nightingale Medal, the MBE, and Order of Australia and was appointed the first woman trustee of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
