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Re: Lest we forget. Anzac day 07.
| quote: | Originally posted by walter78
Lest we forget. |
+1
spare a thought for what these women had to go through...
| quote: | The womens’ arrival in Australia was a combination of luck and perseverance. The Australian authorities had no idea where the Japanese had taken the nurses during the last months of the war. The search for them had started on 15 August 1945 but since no-one knew where they were, they missed out on the widespread emergency drops of food and medical supplies to the camps located around south-east Asia. By August 1945, they were starving.
Three and a half years earlier, after the sinking of the Vyner Brooke on 14 February 1942, 12 of the 65 Australian Army nurses on board were drowned or killed in the water. The rest struggled ashore on Banka Island, some having been in the sea for more than 60 hours. Japanese soldiers captured one group of 22 nurses, plus a civilian woman, ordered them into the sea and machine-gunned them. The only survivor, Sister Vivienne Bullwinkel, lay still in the shallow water until after the Japanese troops had gone. Days later, she was reunited with her surviving colleagues and interned at Muntok on Banka Island for two weeks before the group was transferred by ship to Palembang in Sumatra.
Japanese attempts to persuade the nurses to join a brothel were resisted by the women and they were eventually put into bungalows with Dutch women and children at the other end of the town. The conditions were dreadful with inadequate sanitation, mosquitoes, scarce food, and unlike many of the Dutch internees, the Australians had no resources with which to purchase supplements for their diet of low-grade rice and vegetables. In 1943 the women were moved again, this time to a desolate spot in the jungle where they eked out an existence in leaking bamboo huts with mud floors and trench toilets. |
full story here.
more Anzac stories at http://www.anzacday.gov.au/
Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anzac_day
| quote: | Originally posted by Thomas Campbell
The patriot's blood is the seed of Freedom's tree. |
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This is trance...
Jose Amnesia - The Eternal (Pulser Remix) / Chicane - Saltwater / Photon Project - Illumination / Gouryella - Tenshi / Altitude - Altitude (SHOKK Remix) / Rank 1 - Airwave / The Thrillseekers - Synaesthesia (En Motion Mix)
Last edited by eRRaTiK on Apr-25-2007 at 06:52
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