Description
Title: One Life is Ours – The Story of Ada Joyce Bridge
Author: Crouch, Joan
Condition: Near Mint
Edition: 1st Edition
Publication Date: 1989
ISBN: 0731670469
Cover: Soft Cover without Dust Jacket – 36 pages
Comments: The story of Ada Joyce Bridge and the nurses who were on the motor vessel Vyner Brooke.
On February 14, 1942, the small motor vessel Vyner Brooke, on which 65 Australian Army Nurses and 250 civilians were evacuated, was attacked by Japanese dive bombers and sunk, with heavy loss of life, near the Indonesian Island of Bangka.
Of the 65 Army Nurses on the Vyner Brooke, 12 were lost in the sinking, including one of their two beloved Matrons, Matron Olive Paschke.
Of the 53 nurses who were able to swim or float to shore, 21 (including their other Matron, Irene Drummond) were massacred by a squad of Japanese soldiers who captured them on Radji Beach, Bangka Island.
Thirty-two nurses who came ashore elsewhere on Bangka Island were taken prisoner and, of these, one in four died of ill treatment, malnutrition or tropical diseases during the next three-and-a-half years spent in squalid prison camps.
Only 24 of the original 65 Army Nurses evacuated on the Vyner Brooke survived to return to Australia at war’s end.
Ada Joyce Bridge was one of the nurses who were executed on 16th February, 1942 on Radji Beach.