Blog Day 210 - Friday 23 October 2020 - Grand Final Public Holiday

Welcome to virus free Friday.

As a way of improving myself and constructively filling in the hours currently being spent at home I have signed up for another FutureLearn course.  This is one that I think that you would all find interesting, it is a four week course titled "From Waterloo to the Rhine: The British Army 1815 - 1945" and is a collaboration between the University of Kent and the National Army Museum.  I am about half way through week one and it looks very interesting and informative.  If you don't need to get your work assessed or receive any acknowledgment of learning these courses are free and are generally extracted from the learning institution's history degree courses.

Currently I am attending two Shrine volunteer zoom sessions per week, a U3A Military & Maritime History zoom group every fortnight, ad hoc Military History and Heritage Victoria zoom presentations and the FutureLearn course as described above.  

That reminds me, I have to watch a documentary on Vivian Bullwinkel before the next Shrine zoom meeting.  For those of you haven't heard of Vivian Bullwinkel she was an Australian nurse in the 2nd World War.  In early 1942 she was stationed with an military hospital in Singapore, as the Japanese advanced down the Malay peninsular on Singapore Bullwinkel with other nurses, military personnel and civilians was evacuated by ship.  Unfortunately on the way to Australia the ship was sunk by the Japanese with large loss of life.  However some survivors of the sinking including Bullwinkel and some nurses made it to an island where they decided that they had no alternative but to surrender to the Japanese.

After surrendering to the Japanese the nurses including Bullwinkel were driven into the sea and machine gunned by the Japanese.  Of 21 nurses Bullwinkel was the only survivor of what has become known as the Banka Island Massacre.  Bullwinkel eventually surrendered again to the Japanese and was a prisoner of war for the next 3 years until the war ended in 1945.

After the war she was very active in ex service and nursing matters and was director of nursing at Fairfield Infectious Diseases hospital.  She passed away in 2000 aged 84.  An interesting story and an interesting lady.

Of course many of the PoWs and civilian internees of the Japanese had similar stories.  

A friend of my father's, Peter McGrath - Kerr was captured amongst many others by the Japanese on Timor in 1942.  He survived the fighting on Timor and was initially in a PoW camp on Timor, then transferred to Changi in Singapore and then the the infamous Thai - Burma railway with all the horrors that involved.  He was then shipped to Japan on one the Japanese "hell ships" which happened to be sunk by an American submarine on the way with great loss of life.  McGrath-Kerr survived the sinking and was rescued by a Japanese ship and continued on his way to Japan.  He was then put to work in a coal mine in Japan in atrocious conditions.  This coal mine just happened to be outside of Hiroshima, so he witnessed the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Japan.

After the war ended he was repatriated back to Australia and married and raised a family in Launceston and lived to a ripe old age.  I met him a number of times and he was a real gentleman.  Amazing how these men and women survived these experiences and came home and got on with life.

Might be some lessons in here for all of us.

Update on figures and things tomorrow.

Cheers......