Japanese troops herded 23 Australian women into the surf from a beach on Bangka Island in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia). All but one of the women were army nurses, captured after Japanese bombers sank the ship on which they were attempting escape from Singapore.
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The nurses wore uniforms clearly emblazoned with the Red Cross. When the captives reached waist-deep water, machine-gun fire echoed across the beach and jungle-covered hills. Screams and splashing accompanied the bursts of gunfire. Then, as abruptly, the firing stopped, and the beach fell silent. Miraculously, one of the nurses was still alive. Wounded in the torso, 26-year-old Vivian Bullwinkel floated in the sea, her head tilted to one side to gulp air as the surf pushed her gently toward the beach.
Minutes earlier the Japanese soldiers had murdered dozens of wounded Allied troops—the very patients Bullwinkel and her fellow nurses had been tending before their ship was blown from under them. Marching the wounded from the beach out of sight around a headland, the Japanese strode from patient to patient, another survivor later recalled, shooting some and driving their long bayonets deep into others. Returning to the beach, the murderers wiped their bayonets clean of blood before turning their attention to the nurses.
Wherever Japanese soldiers deployed during the 1930s and 1940s, they perpetrated barbaric—and well-documented—crimes against humanity. Examples are legion: widespread massacres of Chinese civilians in places like Nanking; the gang rape and murder of captured British and Chinese nurses following the fall of Hong Kong; the murder of Dutch and Indonesian civilians and wounded Allied prisoners throughout the Dutch East Indies; the machine-gunning of Allied sailors who survived the sinking of their ships;
the beheadings of downed Allied airmen; and the thousands of British, Australian, Dutch and American prisoners who perished during forced labor in steaming Southeast Asian jungles or in mines in Japan and Korea. A telling statistic: While just 4 percent of Allied prisoners in German hands perished during the war, 27 percent of those captured by the Japanese died. On an even larger scale, the total number of civilians and prisoners murdered by the Japanese from the 1937 invasion of China through the end of World War II has been estimated to be as high as 20 million.