The Japanese then shot them from behind.Official histories, however, can leave much unsaid. "If history uncovers that something is uncomfortable, we need to have the courage to engage with it and accept truth and facts and sit with that," Department of Defence Group Captain Kath Stein says.What happened to those brave nurses before they were shot on a quiet tropical beach 84 years ago is confronting.Rape was never mentioned in the official accounts.Georgina Banks has been on a quest to uncover the truth of what happened to her great aunt Dorothy "Bud" Elmes, an Australian army nurse from Cheshunt in Victoria, who was killed on Radji Beach that day. "As a contemporary woman and a mother of daughters, there was no way that I was not going to turn over every stone I could to find out as much as I could about what really happened that day on the beach," she tells Compass.Her voice catches as she swallows a sob: "And for me, that's justice for my great aunt.''One nurse, Vivian Bullwinkel, survived the massacre.Bleeding from a bullet wound, she pretended to be dead in the water before crawling into the trees, where she was joined by a wounded soldier And once the water was almost up to their knees the shooting started.For some, Sister Bullwinkel's evidence didn't ring true."I thought this is very strange testimony," says historian Yuki Tanaka."Because … she said they [the Japanese troops] separated nurses and British soldiers