White Coolies: A Graphic Record of Survival in World War Two by Betty Jeffrey

Sixty-five Australian Army nursing sisters, serving with the 8th Division in Malaya, were evacuated from Singapore in the dark days of February 1942, just before the surrender. Two days later their ship was bombed and sunk. Out of the fifty-three survivors who reached the shore on rafts or swimming, twenty-two were slaughtered on the spot by the Japanese and the remainder taken prisoner.

   This is the story of those survivors. Written in the prison camps, under the constant threat of discovery, it tells of the privations, the hunger, the sickness; the attempts to force the nurses to 'entertain' Japanese officers; and the misery of forced labour under these appalling conditions.