When the prisoners of war who built the notorious Burma-Thailand railway in
1942 and 1943 are remembered now, each year on Remembrance Sunday, it is by
the words they left behind:
When you go home
Tell them of us and say
For your tomorrow
We gave our today
What tells us of them now, 60 years on, are the cemeteries and museums in
Burma and Thailand which have become places of pilgrimage for their widows,
their sons and grandsons, daughters and granddaughters who come to pay
homage to them and to try to comprehend the nature of their ordeal so long
ago.
The 260 miles (418km) of the railway were built through some of the most
inhospitable jungle in the world by 61,000 prisoners of war — British,
Australian, Dutch and about 700 Americans — and another 200,000 Asian
labourers. The work involved moving four million cubic metres of rock and
the building of nearly nine miles of bridges, across rivers and ravines. The
human toll was horrifying — it is esti mated that 12,399 of the prisoners
died, including 6,318 of the 30,000 British.
Nowhere is their ordeal relived more vividly than at the Hellfire Pass
Memorial, a few miles north of Namtok, which was opened in 1998 on Thai
military land and is maintained by the Australian Department of Veterans’
Affairs and the Office of Australian War Graves.
The railway no longer goes to Hellfire Pass, 50 miles north of Kanchanaburi,
but stops a few miles away at Namtok. Today, as you walk along the narrow
jungle plateau that drops dizzyingly to the Kwae-Noi river hundreds of feet
below — the River Kwai of the David Lean film, The Bridge on the
River Kwai — all you hear is the song of the birds. Yet it was here in
1943 that some of the British and Australian prisoners of war were beaten to
death by their Japanese captors. The years from 1937-45 are neglected in
Japan’s textbooks, and when young Japanese visitors come to the museum some
of them cry.
The job given to 400 Australian and 200 British prisoners by their captors was
to blast the railway’s longest and deepest cutting through a towering, rocky
spur at Konyu. The pass joined one section, about 460 metres long by 7.6
metres high, to another that was 73 metres long and 9 metres high and so
narrow that a train could only just squeeze through. Their tools were picks,
shovels, drills and dynamite.
After 14 months of captivity they were emaciated, starving on their meagre
diet of rice, and many were suffering from cholera, dysentery, malaria or
tropical sores. But the railway had to be built and the sick were forced to
work. Monsoon rain fell unceasingly and the men were flogged on by their
guards as they worked 18-hour days. At night the cutting was lit by bamboo
fires, containers filled with diesel fuel oil and hessian wicks and carbide
lights. The prisoners of war said it was like a scene from Dante’s Inferno.
From the top of the cutting the torches could be seen at intervals of about
six metres. The lamps cast flickering shadows over the toiling men and
earned the Pass its lasting soubriquet.
As a video sold by the Memorial says, it will probably never be known
precisely how many lives were lost to build Hellfire Pass. Some claim that
at least 68 men were beaten to death here. Many others died from disease,
starvation and sheer exhaustion. Non-stop shifts, some lasting for 150 days,
were referred to as Speedos and strong men faded to shadows as they toiled
through the hours of unremitting, backbreaking work in the heat, humidity
and rain.
This is the story told by a tour of the museum through photographs, video
clips, artefacts and models, and especially the vivid drawings of the
British artist Jack Chalker, who now lives in Somerset.
Below the museum is a three-mile walking trail which follows the alignment of
the railway and passes the site of the Pack of Cards bridge, which fell down
six times while it was being built. Thirty-one men were killed in falls and
another 29 beaten to death. Their toil was all for nothing — the bridge was
bypassed by a permanent stone embankment and the Pack of Cards had
disappeared back into the jungle by mid-1944.
A tour of the railway usually begins farther south of Namtok, in Kanchanaburi,
a two-hour bus ride north from Bangkok, at the JEATH museum, the letters
standing for Japan, England, Australia, Thailand, Holland. It is set in a
reconstructed bamboo prisoner-of-war hut and has a good collection of vivid
photographs and paintings of the men — gaunt, dressed only in Jap-happies,
the flimsy loin cloths that were all they had to wear, the cholera victims
squashed side-by-side, their bodies covered with sores.
The pictures also show methods of torture — men kneeling holding large rocks
above their heads, or hung from trees. The cemetery at Kanchanaburi is
immaculate, an acre or two of carefully mown lawn, dotted with trees and
with row after row of carefully tended graves, each with a flowering shrub.
Most of the British men commemorated in this peaceful plot died in their
twenties.
It is then a short journey by longboat to the “Bridge on the River Kwai”, the
setting of the famous film starring Alec Guinness, albeit that it was filmed
in Sri Lanka and that Pierre Boulle’s story is fiction. There were two
bridges, not one, over the Kwae-Noi river, a tributary of the Mae Khlaung
river. One was made of wood, the other of steel and concrete and
Lieutenant-Colonel Philip Toosey, the British commander of the camp at
Tamarkan, was not Alec Guinness’s Colonel Nicholson but a fine British
officer who constantly resisted the Japanese. Both bridges were destroyed by
Allied bombers and not by commandoes.
Apart from the daily flock of tourists, Tamarkan is now a sleepy town. There
is a memorial built by the Japanese to commemorate the Fepows (Far East
Prisoners of War) and another small museum. But visitors travel here to walk
the bridge and to take the train to Namtok along the track originally laid
by the prisoners. It is an hour’s journey through rich agricultural land
stocked with tapioca, corn, pumpkin, sugar cane and banana trees which ends
shortly after the dizzying viaduct at Wampo, built as if from matchsticks
across a mountainous ridge with the river far below. It is then a short
journey to Hellfire Pass. Most of the railway built by the prisoners has
disappeared under the jungle.
For most prisoners, their ordeal had started in Singapore when 50,000 went
into captivity at Changi after the fall of the “impregnable fortress” on
February 15, 1942. It was at Changi that they first realised that their main
diet was going to be rice for breakfast, lunch and supper and where food —
the lack of it, the finding, looting or trading of it — became a daily
obsession.
Thousands of PoWs were at Changi throughout the war and many who worked on the
railway returned there in 1944 during which they moved to Changi jail.
The drama of the fall of Singapore is captured in the Box Room at Fort
Canning. It was here in the underground network of bunkers — which have a
similar feel to the Churchill’s underground Cabinet Rooms in Downing Street
— that Lt-Gen A. E. Percival, the GoC, set up his HQ during the last days
before the surrender. There is a vivid re-enactment of the frantic signals
traffic as the Japanese advanced, as well as the 9.30am conference with his
senior officers on February 15, 1942, at which they voted despairingly but
unanimously for a humiliating surrender.
One of the three monster guns at the Johore Battery, then the biggest and
heaviest pieces of coastal artillery in the British Empire and which
contributed to the myth of impregnability, can now be seen near Changi jail.
This summer saw the opening of the Labrador Park battery to the south of the
island where the underground ammunition bunkers were recently discovered
after 60 years of neglect.
The two six-inch guns, which had a range of ten miles, were destroyed before
the capitulation but one has now been recovered and the underground
ammunition bunkers, sealed in the 1950s, have recently been reopened. The
main underground rooms have been left in exactly the state they were left in
1942 with crumbled masonry and cracked ceilings reached through murky and
claustrophobic low tunnels.
The family tragedies of the war in the Far East are recorded at the Kranji War
Memorial, set on a peaceful hillside above the busy bustle of Singapore
below. There are 4,000 graves and 24,000 names of those whose bodies were
never recovered and “whom the fortune of war denied the customary rites
accorded to their comrades in death” are inscribed on the walls.
There is an equally poignant experience at the Changi Museum, which has a
replica of the chapels the prisoners created during their captivity. The
cross was made by Harry Stogden from a used artillery shell and donated by
his family.
At the side of the altar is a board where visitors write notes. “Dad, I love
you so much and miss you terribly,” says one. “Thank you for your sacrifice
and pain.” “You may not be here Dad,” says another. “I have come to see what
you went through.” A granddaughter says her grandfather never talked about
his experiences. “Only now, too late, do I realise what he went through.”
Even more poignant was a graveside message at Changi. “To my beloved son,
Mother came to see you for Christmas.”
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NEED TO KNOW
Getting there: Brian MacArthur travelled with Silverbird
(020-8875 9090, www.silverbird.co.uk) which offers an 11-night tour
including Singapore, Bangkok and Burma for £1,495 including excursions,
flights and accommodation.
Other tours: The Royal British Legion (01622 716729,
www.remembrancetravel.com) offers a ten-night trip to Rangoon and
Thanbyuzyat in southeast Burma, where servicemen who died on the
Burma-Thailand railway are buried. The tour begins on March 8 and costs from
£1,395pp. A 13-night tour starting on March 5, visits Rangoon and the site
of the Chindits operations in north Burma, and costs from £1,945pp. Both
prices include flights, most meals and accommodation.
Reading: The River Kwai Railway: The Story of the Burma-Siam Railway by
Clifford Kinvig (Brassey, £9.99) and Railway of Hell: A Japanese POW’s
Account of War, Capture and Forced Labour by Reginald Burton (Pen &
Sword, £19.95).
Further information: Tourism Authority of Thailand (020-7925 2511,
www.thaismile.co.uk); Singapore Tourist Office (020-7437 0033,
www.newasia-singapore.com).
