Re: Executed Female POW Remembered

Date: January 22, 2004

"Ballarat female PoW to be remembered

A YOUNG Ballarat nurse killed by a Japanese firing squad during World War II will be honoured by her home town more than 60 years after her death.

Mary Elizabeth Cuthbertson, known by her loved ones as Beth, served as a nurse for six months during the war before she was captured and killed in the infamous Bangka Massacre, where 22 nurses were marched into the ocean by the Japanese and shot in the back.

Beth was the only female PoW from Ballarat.

Her name will appear on Ballarat's Australian Prisoner of War Memorial, to be officially opened by the nation's defence chief General Peter Cosgrove next month.

Beth's Ballarat-based sister Joan Charles will be at the opening.

"This memorial means so much to me, Beth has never had a grave, she was shot in the water and left there," Mrs Charles said.

The 90-year-old said it was hard to watch her sister go to war.

"We didn't know a thing until the war was over about her death. It was a terrible thing for my parents to wait for the news. We only knew that Beth was missing. It really was a terrible time for our family."

But Mrs Charles continued to write to her only sister, then 29, telling her about her young children and what life back in Ballarat was like.

Beth was deployed on Bangka Island off the coast of Indonesia, tending to Australia's wounded soldiers with 21 other nurses when they became the target of Japanese soldiers.

The nurses were ordered to walk into the sea on February 15, 1942, before being machine gunned down. Only Sister Vivian Bullwinkel survived. Her story of survival became legend.

Mrs Charles was lying in her hospital bed after giving birth to her fourth baby when she heard that the war had ended.

She and other family members listening to the radio for news of their beloved Beth were told by reporters that she had been shot 3 1/2 years earlier.

"I remember hearing Vivien (Bullwinkel) being interviewed and she told the reporters the names of those who had been killed, and Beth's name was read out.
It was the army's job to tell us, but they never did."

While the family say they didn't receive any official word on Beth's death, they did receive her kit bag, which her mother couldn't bring herself to open.

Mrs Charles returned to the shores of Bangka Island a decade ago with her daughter Beth, whom she named in her sister's honour. Together, they walked the beach where Beth had been killed decades earlier.

Mrs Charles gathered 22 shells from that beach in memory of each nurse killed there. She keeps them at home in a box.

Beth would have been 93 if she had survived the war."