After a bullet from a Japanese machine gun tore through her body, Australian nurse Vivian Bullwinkel floated face down in the sea and feigned death. She was the sole survivor of the 1942 Bangka Island Massacre, in which 22 nurses were forced to wade into the ocean at gunpoint and then shot in the back. It’s […]
Sixty-eight years ago this month, a German submarine torpedoed the SS Caribou, a ferry travelling from Canada to Newfoundland. Within five minutes, the ferry sank to the bottom of the Atlantic. Margaret Brooke valiantly tried to save her friend Agnes Wilkie, who became the only Canadian nursing sister to die from enemy action in World War Two. […]
My admiration is boundless when it comes to the Canadian wartime nurses who bravely carried out their grim duties — so it was an honour to interview Jessie Middleton of Abbotsford, British Columbia. I was especially keen to meet Jessie because my column has not paid enough attention to wartime nurses — our Canadian women […]
