D

The Death Railway got its name from the horrifying number of people worked to death by the Japanese in their rush to build a railway connecting Thailand and Burma. At the beginning of WWII the Japanese had captured Burma. Later British-American forces counter attacked and cut off shipments of military supplies by sea from Japan. To remedy this problem the Japanese worked about 100,000 asians and about 60,000 allied prisoners of war night and day to build a connecting railway. Lack of proper rest, nutrition, and medical care led to 90% of the asians and about 25% of the POWs dying.

Our first taste of the story came as we visited the War Cemetery near the railway station and a ten minute walk from our hotel, the River Kwai. There lie the collected and relocated remains of about 7000 British, Australian, New Zealand, and Dutch POWs. It is now a beautifuly maintained site that reveals not a trace of the horrors of war. For that one must go across the street to the Thailand-Burma Railway Centre or Death Railway Museum. We did that in the same day and there the whole story is presented calmly and without bitterness. The Japanese viewpoint is presented: this was an unavoidable necessity of war. The Allied viewpoint is presented: this was horrible, inhuman treatment.

After touring the wat I went over to the JEATH War Museum. It is owned by the wat and was founded by the head. It consists of a large u-shaped building that re-creates the type of building or dormitory in which POWs lived during construction. Each wing was about 60 meters long and 4 meters wide. One side was a 2 meter wide walkway; the other side was a continuous platform, made of bamboo, on which the men lived and slept, hardly more than two feet to a person. This was the most impressive part: seeing and feeling how the men lived. Along the bamboo walls there were dozens of photographs, many of which I had already seen before in the other museums, showing life as it was lived. Several times there were letters from survisors describing their lives in the period. One of the letters was from the widow of a surgeon, Weary Dunlop who as a prisoner had done so much for the other POWs; she described his funeral.

JEATH is just above the river bank and I went down and sat on a bench on a floating pier. The breeze made sitting there very enjoyable, watching the world go by. Part of that world was a fleet of long tailed boats that I saw far across the river going downstream. I hardly guessed that twenty minutes later, while I was still there, the fleet would arrive where I was and from each boat five Dutch tourists would disembark.

On another day we went about 90 minutes northwest to Hellfire Pass. This is where some of the roughest work was done and the deathrate was the highest. Much of the railway covered relatively level ground and was of comparatively easy construction. Here, however, it was necessary to alternatively cut through solid rock and build trestles for about 15 km. The Japanese would not bring in any heavy equipment and all work was done as it might have been done in the 18th century with men breaking rock by hand and with explosives. Only when the work seemed so far behind that getting supplies to Burma on time seemed threatened did the Japanese bring in a jack-hammer. We visited the museum at the site — a very modern, tasteful building subsidised by the Australian Government — and then walked about 4 km of the route of the roughest work. Almost no trace of the railway remains today except for the cuts themselves; standing above it and looking at the greatest of them, one has pity for those forced to work there. Anyone going out to see the remains is required to carry a two-way walky-talky and report in every 30 minutes. Our supposition is that a high proportion of visitors are survivors, many of whom would be 80-90 years old now. Their tolerance of the heat and exertion on this walk would be much less than ours, and we found it strenuous.

Our last excursion related to the Death Railway was to the bridge itself, the Bridge on the River Kwai. There were actually two bridges. The famous, and still existing one, is a steel bridge that was originally in Indonesia. The Japanese dismantled it and shipped the pieces to Kanchanaburi for re-assembly at a site where the railway would cross a main branch of the river. As part of the construction process a wood-bamboo bridge was first built and then used to carry construction material. After the completion (really assembly) of the metal bridge it was put out of action by allied bombing. While being repaired the wood bridge was put back into use.

The atmosphere today at the metal bridge is one of tourism, not remembrance of war and suffering. Nearby are a dozen restaurants, large and small. Below the bridge the river flows as always, but now the traffic is long tailed boats carrying tourists. We walked across the bridge, as did most of the people around. One large group was obviously Japanese; we would have liked to talk to them and understand what was on their mind. In one museum we saw that all Japanese do not think the same about the railway: some are apologetic about the suffering they and their colleagues caused. Other Japanese are proud of their contribution to the Japanese war effort.