On Radji Beach. The Story Of The Australian Nurses After The Fall Of Singapore
Shaw Ian W
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Cover Type: Softcover
Book Condition: Fine
Jacket Condition: None Issued
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Publisher Place: Sydney
Publisher Year: 2010
Edition: First Edition
Description: 360 pages. Book appears to have hardly been read and is in Fine condition throughout.
Publishers Description: When Singapore fell dramatically to the Japanese on 15 February
1942, hundreds of people scrambled to the docks to flee. Amongst the
evacuees were 65 Australian nurses who boarded a coastal freighter
named the Vyner Brooke. They only made it as far as the
waters off Muntok Island near Sumatra. There, Japanese bombers sank the
small ship. Those who survived the sinking drifted for up to three days
before making landfall on one of the many beaches on Muntok. A group of
about 60 shipwreck survivors, including 22 nurses, gathered at Radji
Beach. They voted to surrender to the Japanese rather than slowly
starve to death, but the Japanese patrol that found them did not accept
their surrender. Instead, it divided the Europeans into three groups
and killed them all in turn. The Australian nurses were in the third
group, and 21 of them died in a hail of bullets as they walked,
abreast, into the sea. Miraculously, there was one survivor, Vivian
Bullwinkel, who brought the truth about this appalling atrocity to
light, and who went on to experience the internment camps, starvation
and disease that took away many of her friends. On Radji Beach tells the story of the 65
nurses from the Vyner Brooke: their service in Singapore and
on the Malay peninsula, their desperate voyage to escape capture by the
Japanese, and their courage, compassion, ingenuity and fortitude in the
unthinkable events that followed.
ISBN: 9781405040242
(208397)