Sister Bullwinkel and a Nuclear Japan

By Major Van Harl USAF Ret

Nuclear Japan
Nuclear Japan
AmmoLand Gun News
AmmoLand Gun News

Wisconsin –-(Ammoland.com)-  Vivian Bullwinkel was a young Lieutenant in the Australian Army Nursing Service.

She joined the Army in 1941. Australia had been at war since 1939 fighting with the British in North Africa. In the British / Australian medical world a Registered Nurse, what in the US we refer to as an RN, is called a Sister.

It is a title left over from the days when Nuns staffed hospitals working in patient care. Vivian was addressed as Sister Bullwinkel by the medical staff, the Army troops she served with and her patients. She was posted in Singapore when it was attacked by the Japanese in December of 1941 along with Pearl Harbor.

It was decided to evacuate civilians and women military medical staff from that besieged city. On 12 February 1942 Sister Bullwinkel, sixty-four other Australian Army nurses and over two hundred civilian evacuees sailed from Singapore. Their ship was sunk off of Sumatra by Japanese aircraft. The survivors were strafed in water. Sister Bullwinkel drifted to shore clinging to a partly submerged life boat.

Once on shore they were rounded up on shore by Japanese soldiers and the British soldiers were separated from the women. The men were taken down the beach out of site of the Sisters. There was gunfire and then the Japanese come back wiping blood off their bayonets.

The Sisters were non-combatant medical officers and in protected status under the Geneva Convention. Some even still had their Red Cross armbands on their uniforms.

The Japanese then ordered the twenty-two Sisters to form a line and walk into the sea. When the water reached the nurse’s waists the Japanese opened fire and shot all of them. Between the sudden wound she received and the force of the waves Sister Bullwinkel was knocked off her feet and floated in the ocean. The Japanese just left the bodies in the water and eventually Sister Bullwinkel drifted to shore.

Again back on shore she found one of the British soldiers, a Private, Pat Kingsley, who had been bayoneted, but was still alive in the jungle. He was already severely injured when his ship was attacked. Sister Bullwinkel cared for him as best she could without any medical supplies or food. They both eventually were forced to surrender to the Japanese.

Bullwinkel hid her wound because she knew, if the Japanese found out she had survived the Bangka Island Massacre of twenty-one Army nurses, she would be shot. You cannot leave witnesses when you commit atrocities.

Wartime atrocities were committed by the Japanese through out the Pacific region of WW II.

Today’s problem is Japan is working hard to re-write history. Every student in Japan has been well taught about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and what a horrible thing the US did to the people of those cities. However next to nothing about the atrocities that were systematically conducted by the Japanese military in China, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand and other Asian countries is even found in Japanese textbooks.

Japanese who come to the US and turn on the History Channel are shocked at what they learn. When Japanese tourists visit Australian WW II memorial sites they are also shocked at what they learn about their country’s actions during the war. A classic message that they leave in visitor logs at those memorials is “so sorry-we did not know.”

They do not know because they are not taught by their system and our system does not want to offend anyone so we fail to remind them.

Now North Korea has nuclear weapons and Japan is getting very worried. If Japan changes its constitution and builds up an offensive military they will take their world class missiles that we know about and marry them to their world class nukes that we act like we do not know about.

They will then become a first world player in the nuclear game and the US is obligated by treaty to defend Japan if it is attacked.

Is a nuclear armed Japan really a good thing even if they are supposed to be our best ally in that part of the world?

They do not remember their own violent history. Do we need them creating any new violent history, especially with nukes? Sister Bullwinkel was taken prisoner and spent three and a half years as a POW in Japan. She was the only one of those twenty-two machine-gunned nurses who got home to Australia.

She was retired from the Army in 1947 as a Lieutenant Colonel and continued civilian nursing until 1977 when she married an Army officer. She returned to Japan in 1947 to testify at a war crimes trail for the massacre of her fellow twenty-one Sister-Nurses. Including shipwrecked victims, thirty-two of the sixty-five evacuated nurses died on that beach. Eleven more died while being held as POWs. Japan was good at atrocities, do we need more?

If they amend their constitution and go nuclear that is a game changer as far as I am concerned. The US should not be obligated to defend Japan if they push too hard and start a shooting war just so they can save “face” dealing with China.

Please remember the over 10 million Chinese, Koreans, Indonesians, Filipinos and Indo-Chinese who died at the hands of Japan in WWII. These were civilian not military causalities. Japan makes great cars and really horrible war.

Major Van Harl USAF Ret.
[email protected]

About Major Van Harl USAF Ret.:
Major Van E. Harl USAF Ret. , is a career Police Officer in the U.S. Air Force was born in Burlington, Iowa, USA, in 1955. He was the Deputy Chief of police at two Air Force Bases and the Commander of Law Enforcement Operations at another. Now retired, these days he enjoys camping, traveling, volunteering with the Girl Scouts and writing. [email protected]

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bob

I was in the 7th grade when a fellow class mate passed around a photo of a fenced in lot covered deep in heads. Whose I don’t know and didn’t ask. My dad fought in ww2 and told me some didn’t take prisoners. He fought the Germans and was American. Both my uncles fought the Japanese. I use to work in mill with a girl for 15years who grew up a Foster child after years working with her she told me her Foster dad was a Co piolt in the plane that drooped Thea bomb on Japan how he woke… Read more »

Langer

My father was a POW in Osaka (Umeda Bunsho and Tsuruga). Yes, the POWs were treated brutally, and the culture is largely one of denial, but there are a few young Japanese who recognize and even publicize the wrongs that were done. A few of our surviving POWs have returned to Japan and have been met with understanding.

I had thought there was some movement in the right direction until the Mayor of Osaka said just a few days ago that comfort women (forced prostitutes) were necessary for the Japanese military during WWII.

Buck

I don’t want to shock anyone , but our own system does basically the same thing , the major difference is that we have American hating progressives in out indoctrination system , so they expose all the atrocities and hide all the good this country has done world wide since its inception .

John Hanig

I was born in Japan as a service brat right at the end of the Korean War. That being said, the comments of Dr. William Wong about the difference between how the Germans and the Japanese handle their WWII history is spot on. The Germans I know acknowledge the Nazi past of their parents and grandparents and are extrememely apologetic and embarrassed by it. The Japanese I know consider themselves the victims of WWII. In the words of George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.

Dr. William Wong

Howdy: Anyone doubting Nip atrocities in WW2 need only read Iris Chang’s book ‘The Rape Of Nanking’. Then remember the tens of thousands of civilians in northern China who were victims of Japanese CBW testing on unsuspecting Chinese villages. The Japanese being prolific picture takers, documented their own actions. My grandmother was strafed off the streets in Hong Kong and the majority of my dads kin executed and thrown into they bay as an act of rule by terror. The Japanese have spent the last 60 years in denial and wiping their consciences clean. Unlike the Germans, the Nips have… Read more »