A WARTIME nurse is part of a very select group of women still alive today to have been awarded the Burma Star medal.

Winnie Roberts, aged 92, now lives in Pershore and was one of a small number of British nurses who treated injured soldiers in the Far East during the war with Japan.

Many of her friends and colleagues have now passed away and she believes she is the only woman in the area to have the medal as the number of women in Burma at the time were ‘few and far between’.

But it comes as no surprise that Mrs Roberts is still going strong; what more would you expect from a woman who had stared down the barrel of an enemy soldier’s gun without flinching?

She originally trained as a nurse in Chesterfield where the matron had been a nurse in the First World War. After coming towards the end of the training programme she was asked if she would like to join the reserves and agreed in 1936.

Mrs Roberts was only six months into her career when she was sent to India to the city of Puna near Bombay. After her time in Puna, she moved on to Dhaka in Bangladesh.

She said: “We were asked if we wanted to take part in active service and I was happy to do that, so soon we were treating soldiers who had been injured in battle and were suffering from various illnesses.

“In fact we had to treat far more people with illnesses such as malaria and gangrene than with wounds.

“Dhaka is the capital of Bangladesh now but in that time it was only one long street with a few shops on either side. Everywhere we went we had to have an armed guard with us as the locals were quite hostile towards us at first and saw us as interlopers.”

Mrs Roberts said that the Japanese were ruthless fighters and she witnessed several acts of brutality.

On one occasion she says she came within inches of losing her life when enemy soldiers lined up a number of nurses and shot them.

But Mrs Roberts was not hit and dived into a nearby trench to avoid any follow-up bullets. Miraculously, she survived her terrifying ordeal.

“Another time, a group of around nine or 10 Australian nurses were taken to a beach on one of the nearby islands and made to wade out into the water where they were shot and killed.

“They also captured a hospital in Hong Kong and killed a number of the people working there and some of the patients.”

Despite the bloodshed, she says she wouldn’t change her time in the Far East for a second and has no regrets about going out there to serve. “We had a job to do and we did it. We had a good social life and the soldiers would do anything for you, like build a shower and bathroom and buy you dinner every evening. We never had to pay.”

On her return from the conflict, she received her Burma Star and remains humble about the work she did there, saying she never expected to get a medal.

Her return also coincided with that of her school sweetheart Bert. They had met in Barrow-in-Furness, where Mrs Roberts was born, and he had trained to become a chemist before joining the Army to fight in the war.

Recalling her meeting with Bert after many years apart, she said: “My sister Dorothy invited me to her tennis club but I was more interested in swimming so I turned her down originally. I changed my mind later and went to the club. The first face I saw was Bert’s and we were so happy to be reunited.”

She married Bert in 1940. He was a Dunkirk veteran and in his later years became a member of Fladbury Royal British Legion, in 1940. He died four years ago, aged 90.

The conflict in the Far East ended with the Japanese surrender on August 15, 1945, now known as VJ Day.