The Postcard
A postcard that was printed and published by J. Salmon of Sevenoaks, England. The artwork was by Reg. Carter.
An identical card on this photostream features the delights of a place called Grove Park. To see it, please search for the tag 23GRV24.
The card was posted in Tweseldown using a ½d. stamp on Saturday the 18th. December 1915. It was sent to:
Miss L. Pridham,
301, Queen's Road,
Buckland,
Portsmouth,
Hants.
The message on the divided back of the card was as follows:
"Dear Lily,
Just a card for the album.
Shall be home in time for
dinner on thursday.
Yours,
Wink."
Queen Elizabeth Barracks
Tweseldown in Church Crookham, Hampshire was the location of the Queen Elizabeth Barracks.
The barracks, which were originally known as Boyce Barracks after Major William Wallace Boyce, DSO, RAMC, were built as a training depot for the Royal Army Medical Corps.
The barracks were renamed Queen Elizabeth Barracks following a visit by Queen Elizabeth in 1948. The wooden hutted camp, with barrack blocks arranged as 'spiders', could accommodate 2,500 soldiers.
Between January 1963 and January 2003, 9 Parachute Squadron, Royal Engineers was based at Haig Lines.
The Royal Army Medical Corps moved their depot to the Barracks in 1964, and were replaced by training regiments of the Royal Corps of Transport in 1965, and by the Gurkha Regiments in 1970.
After the Gurkha Regiments left in 2000, the site was decommissioned and acquired by Bryant Homes in 2002. It was initially renamed Khukri Park, but following acquisition by Taylor Wimpey, it was renamed Crookham Park. The main administration building was moved to the Aldershot Military Museum.
Woodrow Wilson
So what else happened on the day that Wink posted the card to Lily?
Well, on the 18th. December 1915, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson married Edith Bolling Galt in Washington, D.C.
Charlie Chaplin
Also on that day, Charlie Chaplin's thirteenth and final film for Essanay Studios, A Burlesque on Carmen, was released.
The film was a parody of the overacted film Carmen by Cecil B. DeMille, which was itself an interpretation of the popular novella Carmen by Prosper Mérimée.
The Armenian Genocide
The 18th. December 1915 also marked the death of the American physician Fred D. Shepard.
Fred, who was born in 1855, was one of the key eyewitnesses to the Armenian genocide.
The Armenian genocide was the systematic destruction of the Armenian people and identity in the Ottoman Empire during the Great War.
Spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), it was implemented primarily through the mass murder of around one million Armenians during death marches to the Syrian Desert and the forced Islamization of others, primarily women and children.
Before the Great War, Armenians occupied a somewhat protected, but subordinate, place in Ottoman society. Large-scale massacres of Armenians had occurred in the 1890's and 1909.
The Ottoman Empire had suffered a series of military defeats and territorial losses—especially during the 1912–1913 Balkan Wars—leading to fear among CUP leaders that the Armenians would seek independence.
During their invasion of Russian and Persian territory in 1914, Ottoman paramilitaries massacred local Armenians. Ottoman leaders took isolated instances of Armenian resistance as evidence of a widespread rebellion, though no such rebellion existed. Mass deportation was intended to permanently forestall the possibility of Armenian autonomy or independence.
On the 24th. April 1915, the Ottoman authorities arrested and deported hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and leaders from Constantinople. At the orders of Talaat Pasha, an estimated 800,000 to 1.2 million Armenians were sent on death marches to the Syrian Desert in 1915 and 1916.
Driven forward by paramilitary escorts, the deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to robbery, rape, and massacres.
In the Syrian Desert, the survivors were dispersed into concentration camps. In 1916, another wave of massacres was ordered, leaving about 200,000 deportees alive by the end of the year.
Around 100,000 to 200,000 Armenian women and children were forcibly converted to Islam and integrated into Muslim households. Massacres and ethnic cleansing of Armenian survivors continued during the Turkish War of Independence after World War I, carried out by Turkish nationalists.
This genocide put an end to more than two thousand years of Armenian civilization in eastern Anatolia. Together with the mass murder and expulsion of Assyrian/Syriac and Greek Orthodox Christians, it enabled the creation of an ethnonationalist Turkish state, the Republic of Turkey.
The Turkish government maintains that the deportation of Armenians was a legitimate action that cannot be described as genocide. However as of 2023, 34 countries have recognized the events as genocide, concurring with the academic consensus.
Vivian Bullwinkel and the Bangka Island Massacre
The day also marked the birth, in Kapunda, Australia, of the Australian army nurse Vivian Bullwinkel.
Vivian was a survivor of the Bangka Island massacre in 1942, and recipient of the Order of Australia and Order of the British Empire. Vivian died in 2000.
The Bangka Island massacre was the killing of unarmed Australian nurses and wounded Allied soldiers on Bangka Island, east of Sumatra in the Indonesian archipelago on the 16th. February 1942.
Shortly after the outbreak of World War II in the Pacific, troops of the Imperial Japanese Army murdered 22 Australian Army nurses, 60 Australian and British soldiers, and crew members from the Vyner Brooke. The group were the only survivors from their steamship which had been sunk by Japanese bombers just after the defeat of Singapore.
After surrendering to local Japanese forces on Bangka Island, which was then part of the Dutch East Indies, the group and its wounded were taken to a beach where they were killed by being bayonetted and machine gunned in the surf.
Only South Australian nurse Sister Lieutenant Vivian Bullwinkel, American Eric Germann and Royal Navy Stoker Ernest Lloyd survived.
For almost 80 years, the fact that the Japanese troops raped the Australian nurses before they were murdered was suppressed. It was never reported at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal in 1947, or included in subsequent post-war re-tellings of the massacre.
Evidence that the Australian women had suffered violent sexual assault before their deaths was only reported in 2019 after being uncovered by research. Lt. Bullwinkel said that she was told by the Australian government to never to speak about what happened on Bangka.
The Massacre
On the 12th. February 1942 the royal yacht of Sarawak Vyner Brooke left Singapore just before the city fell to the Imperial Japanese Army. The ship carried many injured service personnel and 65 nurses of the Australian Army Nursing Service from the 2/13th Australian General Hospital, as well as civilian men, women and children.
The ship was bombed by Japanese aircraft and sank. Two nurses were killed in the bombing; the rest were scattered among the rescue boats to wash up on different parts of Bangka Island. About 100 survivors reunited near Radji Beach at Bangka Island in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), including 22 of the original 65 nurses.
Once it was discovered the Japanese held the island, an officer of the Vyner Brooke went to surrender the group to the authorities in Muntok. While he was away army matron Irene Melville Drummond, the most senior of the nurses, suggested the civilian women and children should leave for Muntok, which they did.
The nurses stayed to care for the wounded. They set up a shelter with a large Red Cross sign on it.
At mid-morning the ship's officer returned with about 20 Japanese soldiers. They ordered all the wounded men capable of walking to travel around a headland. The men were lined up and the Japanese set up machine guns.
Stoker Lloyd, realising what was going to happen, ran into the sea as did a few others. The Japanese then began shooting at the escaping men. They were all killed apart from Lloyd, who despite being shot managed to get away. He lost consciousness, and later was washed up on the other side of the beach.
After the nurses had heard a quick succession of shots, the Japanese soldiers came back, sat down in front of the women and cleaned their bayonets and rifles.
Evidence collected by historian Lynette Silver, broadcaster Tess Lawrence and biographer Barbara Angell, found that most of the nurses were then raped by soldiers before they were murdered.
Although Bullwinkel survived, she was not permitted to speak about the rapes after the war because she had been "gagged" by the Australian government. According to the Australian government, the perpetrators of the massacre remain unknown and "escaped any punishment for their crime".
After being violently sexually assaulted, a Japanese officer ordered the 22 nurses and one civilian woman to walk into the surf. A machine gun was set up on the beach; the women were machine-gunned when they were about waist deep in the sea. All but Bullwinkel were killed. Wounded soldiers left on stretchers were then bayoneted and killed.
When Stoker Lloyd regained consciousness he made his way back to the scene of the massacre and discovered the bodies of those who had been shot.
Bullwinkel, who had been shot in the diaphragm, lay motionless in the water until the Japanese left. She crawled into the bush and lay unconscious for several days.
When she awoke, she encountered Private Patrick Kingsley, a wounded British soldier from the ship who had survived being bayoneted by the Japanese soldiers. She dressed his wounds and her own, and met Stoker Lloyd.
They both agreed it would be better to surrender as they couldn't survive much longer in such harsh conditions. Twelve days later Bullwinkel and Kingsley surrendered to the Japanese. Kingsley died before reaching a POW camp, but Bullwinkel spent three years in one.
Lloyd surrendered after them, and spent the rest of the war as a POW. When his camp was liberated he ensured that the authorities knew of the surviving nurses and kept looking for them. This was instrumental in them being found as the Japanese denied any knowledge of them and their camp was deep in the jungle.
Bullwinkel survived the war and gave evidence of the massacre at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal) in 1947.
