SISTERS in COURAGE

On February 12, 1942, as Singapore burned, 65 Australian army nurses and 130 civilians set sail on the Vyner Brooke, hoping to head home. Instead, they faced a terrifying ordeal at sea only to be delivered to the notorious POW camps of Sumatra. Now, a new book charts their course.

- COLIN BURGESS

They left behind, in Singapore, thousands of patients. “We had to put them on the floors, in the quartermaster’s store, even in the tiny chapel, where we boarded off the altar,” one nurse, Sister Frances Cullen, later reported. “The boys were marvelous … In the last days on the island, they were begging us to let them leave the hospital. Even the ones with limb injuries said they could be carried to a gun and could lie beside it to fire it.

“We hated leaving the boys. The night we left, we were all in tears. Matron Drummond said, ‘Stop crying and try to look bright,’ ignoring the fact that tears were streaming down her own face.”

Betty Jeffrey was serving at the Manor House Casualty Hospital as Singapore fell.

“When the bombs began to fall,” she wrote in her diary, “some of the patients put their tin hats on, and for those who didn’t have tin hats, we put bed pans on their heads. The planes were firing streams of bullets. I had a tray with a cloth on it marked with a big red cross and I stepped out and lifted it up.”

When they were ordered to evacuate, all the nurses refused to go. “But our refusal was useless,” Betty added. “We were ordered to leave and just had to walk out on those superb fellows lying there – not one complaining and all needed attention.”

With their few essential possessions, the nurses were thrust into a convoy of ambulances. It was a perilous journey through dense palls of smoke, past bombed-out buildings on rubble-filled streets, seeing the unleashed fury of huge uncontained fires and watching frightened people running aimlessly in sheer terror. The ambulances finally stopped near the waterfront but with destruction everywhere, the nurses had to walk the rest of the way to the wharf.