On 14 February 1942, Vyner Brooke, a small evacuation vessel carrying civilians and military personnel fleeing Singapore, was among a large number of craft attacked and sunk by Japanese planes near Bangka Island, off the east coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

On board were 65 Australian army nurses. Twelve did not survive the sinking, but the remainder reached Bangka Island, where they came ashore at various places. One group of 22, along with civilian castaways and male military personnel, landed on Radji Beach.

On 16 February, with the island in enemy hands, they decided to surrender to occupying Japanese forces. The civilian women and children, accompanied by a few men, walked to the town of Muntok, where they were taken into custody.

The nurses, who had set up a rudimentary aid station to assist the wounded, waited with the rest of the men and a civilian woman, who had refused to leave her injured husband.

In due course Japanese troops arrived. They had a track record of rape and murder in Hong Kong and were not taking prisoners. Herding the men in two groups around a small headland, they shot or bayoneted them.

The women were then massacred. According to the sole survivor, Sister Vivian Bullwinkel, the nurses linked arms and walked calmly into the water, where they were cut down cleanly by machine gun fire.

By early October 1945, just days after Bullwinkel’s story appeared in the press, a senior army officer collating information on the fate of the slain nurses noted that ‘it has been suggested to this office that the machine gunning of the party may not have taken place as described’.

However, although Vivian had also said, in an unguarded comment to a journalist, that she and other nurses had run ‘madly’ into the sea, and that, when thigh deep in the surf, a machine gun had opened up and the women around her ‘shrieked, stiffened and sank’, the story of the nurses’ noble and quiet acceptance of their fate caught the imagination of the public and became accepted as the truth.

In September 1946, accounts of male eyewitnesses, who had come ashore from other bombed ships or had survived the massacre of the men, were published in The Sun, a Sydney newspaper. They had arrived at the beach some hours after the massacre. Although by this time the bodies in the water had been taken out to sea by the tide, the men reported that 10-12 nurses, who had run for their lives up the beach, lay strewn upon the sand, cut down savagely by sword and bayonet. The article, written by Hal Richardson, a notable war correspondent and POW, who had interviewed the eyewitnesses while in captivity in Sumatra and had kept notes, was not picked up by other newspapers and it appears that pressure was exerted by the authorities on the media to prevent further exposure of the facts.

Consequently, the myth of the nurses walking calmly into the sea persisted, even though an article published in 2017 by ethicist and journalist Tess Lawrence in whom Vivian Bullwinkel had confided, revealed that most of the nurses had been ‘violated’ and that Vivian had been ordered to say nothing.

The myth that began in 1945 lasted for almost 75 years. However, in 2019 Lynette Silver published her book Angels of Mercy, in which she revealed the secret that Vivian Bullwinkel had kept for decades. She presented sufficient evidence, gathered over years by her, Tess Lawrence and another writer, Barbara Angell, to show that, before being killed, the nurses were raped and that Bullwinkel, against her wishes, had been ordered by Australian authorities to remain silent, to protect the sensibilities of the slain nurses’ families from the stigma of rape.

Lynette also revealed that there was no calm acceptance.

The scene on the beach had been one of utter terror.

News of this research, widely reported in Australia, circled the globe.

As a result, Lynette received vital information from two more people in whom Vivian Bullwinkel had confided, former prisoner of war whom she knew well, and a female army officer. Both confirmed the sexual assaults. The army officer also stated that Bullwinkel had revealed that nurses had also been tortured. A female clerk, who had worked for The Repatriation Department (now the Department for Veterans’ Affairs), also came forward, stating that Bullwinkel’s file, which revealed that she had been a victim of rape on Bangka Island, had been kept securely locked in a safe in the private office of the Repatriation Commissioner. As the clerk later remarked, the file ‘was more closely guarded than the nuclear codes’.

Determined to give Vivian Bullwinkel the voice that she had been denied for so long, in 2025 Lynette Silver published her new research in full in Sister Bullwinkel. The Untold Uncensored story, which also revealed the name of the army officer responsible for her gagging.

In June 2026, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Compass program screened a documentary, The Myth of the Nurses on the Beach. Lynette’s research was used to dispel the story that Vivian Bullwinkel had been forced to tell, to reveal what had really happened on the beach.

This moving and powerful documentary can be viewed on YouTube:

Viewers, who learned during the documentary that the dozen nurses who had run up the beach had been ruthlessly cut down by bayonet and sword, were unaware that new details of the deaths of the other nurses had also emerged, just before the program went to air.

On 5 June, Vivian’s confidante Tess Lawrence published a new on-line article, Japan Must Apologise for Bangka Rapes/Massacre, on the Australian Independent Media Network website. In it she revealed that the nurses who ran into the water had also been savagely attacked, in the same way as their colleagues who had run up the beach.

“Decades later Bullwinkel told me the machine-gunning (they also used rifles) by the Japanese troops was relentless and she later saw floating corpses of her friends and colleagues seemingly almost cut in two, their entrails and semi-detached limbs floating alongside them; the wounded nurse was bumping into body parts of her friends and colleagues as the currents eased her – along with the corpses – back to the shores of Radji Beach.”

On 24 June 2026, Australian Independent Media Network revived Lawrence’s original article, published in 2017, in which she stated that the nurses had been ’violated’ and that Vivian Bullwinkel had been forced to remain silent.

“The shocking truth about the Bangka Island Massacre, where over 80 nurses and servicemen were murdered by Japanese soldiers, was re-examined this week by ABC’s Compass program, citing the following Independent Australia article. In this important report, Tess Lawrence – one of two people to whom nurse and survivor Vivian Bullwinkel confided – revealed the truth about the infamous massacre, and was originally published in 2017.

*CONTENT WARNING: This article discusses rape WAR.”

The confirmation by Vivian Bullwinkel that those who ran into the sea were cut down in such a brutal fashion, serves to underline the strength and resilience of this amazing Australian woman, who had been denied a voice and the right to speak out for so long. Despite the stigma of rape, this sole survivor of the outrage had wanted to tell the world what really happened at the International Military Tribunal in the Far East. Instead, she was forced to deliver a sanitised version, one that has taken eighty years to eradicate.

Her voice, now heard loud and clear, has destroyed, for once and for all, the myth of the nurses on the beach.