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Sisters Behind the Wire: Reappraising Australian Military Nursing and Internment in the Pacific during World War II

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2012

Angharad Fletcher
Angharad Fletcher
Affiliation:
Angharad Fletcher, MPhil student, Department of History, MB160, Main Building, University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong. Email: h0991033@hku.hk
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During the Second World War, approximately 3,500 Australian military nurses served in combat regions throughout the world. The vast majority were enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS), but after the Japanese advance and the fall of Hong Kong (December 1941) and Singapore (February 1942), a significant number of these nurses spent three-and-a-half years as POWs in Indonesia, Hong Kong, Japan and the Philippines. To date, considerable research has been undertaken on POW experiences in Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand and Japan, albeit primarily focused on the testimonies of men and civilian women. This body of research utilises various methodologies, from Yuki Tanaka and Kei Ushimura's efforts to reconcile Japanese war crimes with the corruption of the Bushido ethic and sexual violence in contemporary Japanese society, to Christina Twomey's work on the imprisonment and repatriation of Dutch, Dutch–Eurasian and Australian civilian women and children. In the past fifteen years, historians have become aware of the need to recognise the multiplicity of these experiences, rather than continuing to focus on individual community, camp or regional case studies. Nurses are by no means absent from the discussion, although the majority of notable works on this subject focus on Hong Kong or the Philippines and adopt a descriptive and somewhat anecdotal approach. At the same time, scant critical attention has been paid to the internment of nurses in Indonesia despite a wealth of material kept in the Australian War Memorial (AWM) and National Archives of Australia (NAA).

Keywords

Australian Military NursingSecond World WarInternmentPacific
Type
Articles
Information
Medical History , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 419 - 424
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2011. Published by Cambridge University Press

References

1 See Jan Bassett, Guns and Brooches: Australian Army Nursing from the Boer War to the Gulf War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Ian W. Shaw, On Radji Beach (Sydney: Macmillan, 2010); Nicola Tyrer, Sisters in Arms: British Nurses Tell their Story (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2008); Catherine Kenney, Captives: Australian Army Nurses in Japanese Prison Camps (St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1986); Lavinia Warner and John Sandilands, Women Beyond the Wire (London: Arrow Books, 1997). Memoirs written by interned nurses include Betty Jeffrey, White Coolies (London: Angus and Robertson, 1954) and Jessie Elizabeth Simons, While History Passed (London: William Heinemann, 1954).

2 For example, Kevin Blackburn and Karl Hack (eds), Forgotten Captives in Japanese Occupied Asia (London: Routledge, 2008); Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific (New York: W. Morton, 1994); Bob Moore and Kent Fedorowich (eds), Prisoners of War and their Captors in World War II (Oxford: Berg, 1996); Bob Moore and Barbara Hately-Broad (eds), Prisoners of War, Prisoners of Peace (Oxford: Berg, 2005).

3 Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn, ‘Japanese Occupied Asia from 1941–1945: One Occupier, Many Captives and Memories’, in Blackburn and Hack (eds), ibid., 1–19.

4 Vivian Bullwinkel’s original sworn statement collected for the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal is held at the AWM in Canberra (AWM54553/6/2) and the original case file can be viewed at the Melbourne Branch of the NAA (MP742/1, 336/1/1976).

5 Yuki Tanaka discusses these events in more detail in ‘Rape and War: The Japanese Experience’, Ch. 3 of Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 73–111.

6 The Australian Women’s Weekly, 29 September 1945, 10

7 See Jeffrey, op. cit. (note 1), and Simons, op. cit. (note 1), as well as Alice M. Bowman’s Not Now Tomorrow ima nai ashita (Bungalow, NSW: Daisy Press, 1996).

8 The Australian Women’s Weekly, op. cit. (note 6), 9

9 Hank Nelson, ‘Beyond Slogans: Assessing the Experiences and the History of the Australian Prisoners of War of the Japanese’, in Blackburn and Hack, op. cit. (note 2), 23–40: 31

10 Yoshimi Yoshiaki published his finding in Japanese in idem (ed.), Jugun ianfu shiryoshu [Documents on Military Comfort Women] (Tokyo: Otsuki shoten, 1992) and analysed them further in Comfort Women (New York: Colombia University Press, 1995). Further work was then undertaken by Tanaka in Hidden Horrors, op. cit. (note 5), and both scholars continue to work on the subject.

11 After Yoshiaki first published his findings, large numbers of former comfort women emerged to testify and seek compensation as part of a large-scale legal campaign against the government in Japan. Various newspapers in Australia then attempted to locate more former comfort women, and it was during this search that the surviving members of the AANS were contacted. However, in interviews conducted as part of a prolonged discourse in The Age and The Australian newspapers between December 1992 and January 1993, the nurses repeatedly denied any sexual involvement with their Japanese guards.