The Japanese didn’t respect the Geneva convention laws and caused further negative sentiment as a result of the atrocities caused in the prisoner of war camps.

The Japanese were involved in many battles, Solomon Islands, Battle of midway and the kokoda trail. towards the end of the war, the Japanese had heavily fortified the island of Okinawa with forts, pillboxes and most famously, tunnels. they used hit and run tactics until the odds were heavily in their favour and they would engage in convention warfare.

Vivian Bullwinkel, sole survivor of the 1942 Banka Island massacre, was born on 18 December 1915  Kapunda, South Australia.

Vivian Bullwinkel was born in Kapunda, South Australia, and trained as a nurse in Broken Hill, New South Wales. In 1941, aged 25, she enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service. She was posted to the 13th Australian General Hospital and sailed for Malaya. Faced with the Japanese invasion of the Malay Peninsula, the hospital shifted to Singapore Island in January 1942.

The fall of the singapore imminent caused there to be the decision to evacuate the nurses. On the 12th of February Bullwinkel was the last remaining group of nurses, standing among other patients and women and children, to sail from the island on the SS Vyner Brooke. The next night Japanese bombers found the ship in the Banka Strait. It was attacked and sunk. Bullwinkel drifted for hours clinging to a lifeboat before she struggled ashore on Banka Island with other survivors.

When Japanese troops arrived, they gathered 22 nurses together and ordered them into the sea, where they machine-gunned them. “The girls fell one after the other.” Sister Bullwinkel, badly wounded and feigning death, was the only survivor.