Image TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage Tile
Image size: 5632x7168 Scale: 35% - PanoJS3
Page overview thumbnail

Article text

NURSES’ FATE
REVEALED
Party Shot In Back
By Japanese
From Our Special Representative
BANGKOK, September 13
A first-hand story of the fate of
Australian nurses with the 8th
Division in Malaya was told today
by Sub-Lt. R. J. Murray, a New
Zealand naval man from Penang,
who was in hospital in Java after
Singapore’s fall, where he met an
Australian nurse who was a sur-
vivor of a ship sunk in the Banka
Straits.
The nurse told him that she left
Singapore just before its fall on a
ship carrying 60 Australian nurses.
When the ship was bombed by
Japanese planes, it was sunk
and about a third of the nurses
drowned, with many of the crew.
A group of officers got ashore with
the nurses, but ran into a Japanese
patrol on an island near the Java
coast. The Japanese took the naval
officers into the jungle and re-
turned without them.
They next marched the group of
nurses away from those who
reached shore and ran them into
the water, and then machine-
gunned them in the back.
One nurse survived out of this
group with bullet wounds in the
shoulder. She escaped to Java,
where the Japanese found her
again working in a village hospital
and tried to make her their officers’
Geisha girl. She refused, and a
German woman doctor in the same
village made secret arrangements
with friends and had her removed
to another hospital in Bandoeng,
where Lt. Murray met her
and heard her story.
Certified reports of this atrocity
have been made and are now in
Singapore. Lady Mountbatten is
also investigating.
$