d.
A full account of all massacres of Filipinos by Japanese troops would fill several books. In Manila, 800 men women and children were machine-gunned in the grounds of St. Paul's College. In the town of Calamba, 2,500 were shot or bayoneted. Around 100 were bayoneted and shot inside a church at Ponson and 169 villagers of Matina Pangi were rounded up and shot in cold blood. At the War Crimes Trial in Tokyo, document No 2726 consisted of 14,618 pages of sworn affidavits, each describing separate atrocities committed by the invading Japanese troops. The Tribunal listed 72 large scale massacres and 131,028 murders as a bare minimum.
BANGKA ISLAND MASSACRE (St. Valentine's Day, February 14, 1942)
On board the liner SS Vyner Brooke (Captain R. E. Borton, OBE) named after its onetime owner Sir Charles Vyner Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak, and in peacetime had sailed between Singapore and Kuching, were 65 Australian Army nurses of the 2/10 and the 2/13th Australian General Hospitals in Singapore who, together with other civilian women and children, made up the 330 persons being evacuated from the city. In the Banka Strait, a narrow strip of water between the islands of Bangka and Sumatra, the Vyner Brooke was bombed and sunk by Japanese planes. A few lifeboats managed to reach the mangrove lined shore of Bangka Island. On advice from some islanders they were advised to give themselves up to the Japanese as there was no hope of escaping. That night another lifeboat arrived on the shore containing between 30 and 40 British servicemen from another ship sunk earlier. The civilian women, some nurses and children, then set out to walk to the nearest Japanese compound to give themselves up. When the Japanese arrived at the beach the men and women were separated, the men were marched into the jungle, never to be heard of again. The soldiers returned and forced the remaining 22 nurses to wade out into the sea. There, in waist deep water, they were machined-gunned to death, leaving only one survivor, Sister Vivian Bullwinkle, who later managed to reach the island's Japanese Naval Headquarters where she was put to work in the hospital. For over three years she kept the secret of the massacre to herself and a few friends. To speak openly about it would have been a certain recipe for execution. Of the 65 nurses from the Vyner Brooke, 12 had drowned, 21 shot in the water at Radji Beach and 32 had gone into prison in Muntok before being shipped to Palembang in southern Sumatra to serve three-and-a-half years of privation and punishment as prisoners of war. Sadly, only 24 survived the war. (Sister Bullwinkle died in Perth, Western Australia, in 2000, aged 84).
THE PARIT SULONG MASSACRE
In January, 1942, a company of Australian, British and Indian soldiers were captured by the Japanese during the desperate fighting retreat in the Malayan campaign. They were interned in a large wooden building in the village of Parit Sulong. in the afternoon of January 22, 1942, they were ordered to assemble at the rear of a row of damaged shops nearby. The wounded were carried by those able to walk, the pretext being the promise of medical treatment and food. While waiting at the assembly point, either sitting or lying prone, their hands tied with signal wire or rope, three machine guns, concealed in the back rooms of the wrecked shops, started their deadly chatter, their concentrated fire chopping flesh and limbs to pieces. A number of prisoners whose bodies showed signs of life, had to be bayoneted. In order to dispose of the bodies, which totalled 145, the row of shops was blown up and the debris bulldozed into a heap on top of which the corpses were placed. Sixty gallons of gasoline was splashed on the bodies and then a flaming torch was thrown on the pile. Just before midnight, the debris of the nine shops had burned into piles of grey ash two feet high, the 145 bodies totally incinerated. In 2003 an examination of the site was done but no trace of the massacre was found. Later it was found that the drains in the area emptied at low tide making them a perfect m