The death railway

The River Kwai will be forever associated with a small bridge and a bloody railway.

For the Japanese high command during the Second World War, the logic of building a rail link between Siam and Burma was clear – it would cut almost 2000km off the sea journey from Japan to Rangoon making easier to supply their far-expanding empire. The problem was that the Japanese lacked the labor to construct the line through some of the wettest and most inhospitable land in the region. They estimated that it would take five to six years to finish. The solution to their dilemma was simple: employ some of the 300,000 POWs who were being unproductively incarcerated in Singapore.

Work began in June 1942. More than 3,000,000 cu m of rock was shifted, 15km of bridges built and 415 km of track laid. The workforce, at its peak, numbered 61,000 Allied POWs and an estimated 250,000 Asians. Work was hard; a prisoner Naylor wrote: “We started work the day after we arrived, carrying huge baulks of timber. It was the heaviest work I have ever known the Japanese drove us on and by nightfall I was so tired and some that I could not eat my dinner and just crawled on to the bed and feel asleep. The next say was spent carrying stretchers of earth, also heavy work and incredibly monotonous. The house 08:30 to 19:30 with an hour for lunch.”

The Japanese, but particularly the Korean overseers, adopted a harsh code of discipline – face slapping, blows with rifle butts, standing erect for hours on end, and solitary confinement for weeks in small cells made of mud and bamboo. By 1932, after years of torturous work combined with poor diet, most of the men were in an appalling state.

The Colonel Toosey’s report of October 1945, he wrote:
On one occasion a party of 60, mostly stretcher cases were dumped off a train in a paddy filed some two miles the Camp in the pouring rain at 03:00 hours. As a typical example I can remember one man who was so thin that the could be lifted easily in one arm. His hair was growing down his back and was full of maggots; his clothing consisted of ragged pair of shorts soaked with dysentery excreta; he was lousy and covered with flies all the time. He was so weak that he was unable to lift his head to brush away the floes which were clustered on his eyes and on the sore places on his body. I forced the Japanese Staff to come and look these parties, which could be smelt for some hundreds of yards, but with the exception of the Camp Comdt they showed no sighs of sympathy, and sometimes merely laughed.” (Quoted in Peter Davies, The man behind the Bridge, 1991:116).

The Railway was finished in late 1943, the line form Nong Pladuk being linked with that from Burma on 17 October. For the POWs it was not the end, however; even after the Japanese capitulated on 10 August 1945, the men had to wait for some while before they were liberated. During this period of Limbo, Allied officers were worried most about venereal disease, and Colonel Toosey radioed to Delphi for 10,000 condoms to be dropped by air – an incredible thought given the physical condition of the former POWs. IN all, 16,000 Allied prisoners lost their lives and Kanchanaburi contains the graves of 7000 lf the victims in two war cemeteries. Less well known are the 75,000 Asian forced laborers who also died constructing the railway.