Radji Beach: The Survivors Washed Ashore at Dawn

Irene Drummond is the most senior of the Australian military nurses thrown into the sea two days earlier, when the Vyner Brooke, the last ship to flee Singapore, was sunk by Japanese aircraft in the Banka Strait. As matron, she is the senior figure among the small group of uniformed women who managed to reach the coast by swimming or on rafts.

On the morning of 16 February, some twenty nurses, wounded sailors and soldiers, and a few civilians find themselves on Radji Beach, on Banka Island, an island already in Japanese hands. Without food or water, exhausted, they know the archipelago is occupied. An officer has set off on foot toward the town of Muntok to report their presence and negotiate a surrender; he returns escorted by Japanese soldiers. Drummond has already sent the able-bodied civilian women and children off toward Muntok, away from the shore.

The fate of the main group remains to be decided. Surrender to the Japanese, trusting in the respect owed to the wounded and to medical staff under the conventions; push into the jungle with the wounded to try to escape them; or scatter in small groups to improve the odds that some will survive.