We spent two nights at an attractive little hotel on the banks of a river about 120 km / 75 mi northwest from Bangkok. The ridge of mountains that you see against the sky in the distance is called the Tenasserim Hills. They form the border with nearby Myanmar. Just think of the difficulties and violence raging over that ridge.
When we look the other way along the river, we see an unassuming bridge. But it’s not quite that unassuming. It’s the Bridge on the River Kwai. The same that is the subject of the 1957 movie The Bridge on the River Kwai. The movie is both famous and very good, and is generally based on the historical events of the construction of the Burma-Siam Railway during World War II.
However, Hollywood invented a character-driven story with which to approach the grim reality of what actually happened here. They even made up the name of the river. At the time, the river was called Mae Klong; it was renamed to Kheae Yai in 1960 because already tourists came looking for the river of the movie.
Today, quite a few tourists (us included) come to walk on the bridge and greet the relatively modern-day train that regularly passes through.
The film downplays the brutal conditions endured by POWs and Asian laborers during the railway’s construction. In reality, prisoners faced extreme mistreatment, malnutrition, disease, and death at staggering rates. Over 100,000 laborers, including 12,000 Allied POWs, perished during the project. ※ ※
The bridge is just one part of the bigger story. We visited the nearby Death Railway Museum and Research Centre. Across from the museum is the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery with 6,982 graves from the railway construction period, mostly British, Australian, and Dutch.
This was not a light-hearted day.
The Death Railway Museum explained in detail the history of the railway and the horrific atrocities perpetrated during its construction. If you’d like some of the history, here are some of the main points:
The Burma-Thailand railway (known also as the Thailand-Burma or Burma–Siam railway) was built in 1942–43. Its purpose was to supply the Japanese forces in Burma, bypassing the sea routes which had become vulnerable when Japanese naval strength was reduced in the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway in May and June 1942. Once the railway was completed the Japanese planned to attack the British in India, and in particular the road and airfields used by the Allies to supply China over the Himalayan Mountains.
Aiming to finish the railway as quickly as possible the Japanese decided to use the more than 60,000 Allied prisoners who had fallen into their hands in early 1942. These included troops of the British Empire, Dutch and colonial personnel from the Netherlands East Indies and a small number of US troops sunk on the USS Houston during the Battle of Java Sea. About 13,000 of the prisoners who worked on the railway were Australian.
When this workforce proved incapable of meeting the tight deadlines the Japanese had set for completing the railway, a further 200,000 Asian labourers or rōmusha (the precise number is not known) were enticed or coerced into working for the Japanese.
The 415-kilometre railway ran from Thanbyuzayat in Burma (now Myanmar) to Non Pladuk in Thailand. It was constructed by units working along its entire length rather than just from each end. This meant that the already difficult problems of supply became impossible during the monsoonal season of mid-1943.
Starved of food and medicines, and forced to work impossibly long hours in remote unhealthy locations, over 12,000 POWs, including more than 2700 Australians, died. The number of rōmusha dead is not known but it was probably up to 90 000.
(source)
Every bit of this history of atrocious. This museum is privately funded and run by an Australian. The graves in the cemetery are for British, Australian, Dutch and Americans who died during the construction of the railway. So, it seems that the focus is on the non-Asians. But, the exhibitions in the museum make sure we realize that far more rōmusha were killed in this effort. Even more heart-breaking than what is known about non-Asian victims here is that there is no documentation for the vast majority of the Asian victims. Their stories have been lost.
Our next stop was a particularly infamous stretch of the railway, the Hellfire Pass. This was a cut through the mountain to maintain the gentle grade of the tracks.
This is the site of particularly venal abuse of the prisoners. The labour was done in harsh conditions, with heavy loss of life suffered by the prisoners of war – from malnutrition, disease, Japanese army guards, and accidents. Hellfire Pass is so called because of the fact that the pass was lit up by torchlights in the night, which made the prisoners working in these harsh conditions in the night with the red light shining on them visually resembling Hell. ※
At the far end of the cut, memorials dot the walls.
With our heads and hearts full of the weight of what we learned, we left Hellfire Pass and its museum, stepping back into the incongruously everyday world.
For part of our journey back to our hotel along the river, we took a local, regularly-scheduled train. It was a really pleasant way to wend through the landscape.
At one point, the train came to a halt between stations. After a bit of time, we learned that a tree had fallen across the tracks. We waited for about 20 minutes while staff from the railway removed the tree.
We realized that much of the rail line that we were on dates back to the World War II forced-labor railway project. About 130 km / 80 mi of the Burma-Siam Railway remains in use today.
Back at the hotel after a long, thought-provoking day, a gorgeous sunset over the River Kheae Yai reminded us that there is beauty in the world, too.
January 2025