A life lost for every sleeper on Death Railroad

By GEORGE OXFORD MILLER

Forget Alec Guinness in The Bridge on the River Kwai. "The movie was garbage," says Australian Lieutenant Colonel (Retd) Terry Beaton, manager of the Anzac Hellfire Pass Memorial. "It was a fairy tale. It had nothing to do with reality. For every 8km of railroad, 1000 to 2000 workers died."

The lest-we-forget museum, operated by the Australian Department of Veterans' Affairs, commemorates the 92,000 civilians and prisoners of war, including a small number of New Zealanders and nearly 3000 Australians, who died at the hands of the Japanese military.

A sign at the entrance states, "A life for every sleeper".

"At Hellfire Pass, the POWs worked 18-hour shifts to blast a passage through the mountainside," Beaton tells us. "From the top of the ridge, the flickering torches looked like fires in the jaws of hell."

He leads us out to the deck overlooking the river valley. "The men had to carry 110-pound (49kg) bags of rice on their backs for 2.5 miles (4km) from the river to the work camp." He points to a large bucket on display. "It took four men to carry the 600-pound (272kg) buckets of concrete. And there was no escape into the surrounding jungle."

Every year on Anzac Day, the museum holds a memorial ceremony to commemorate all who died working on the Death Railroad.

The event starts with a dawn service at 5.30am followed by breakfast, usually a small bun and coffee with a traditional shot of Bundaberg rum. Wreath-laying at 11am ends the ceremony, hosted alternately by the Australian and New Zealand embassies.

Today, nirvana, not hell, describes the River Kwai. We board a pontoon barge stocked with fried spring rolls and fruit snacks at our overnight cabana-style accommodation and drift downstream.

As the war in the Pacific intensified, the Japanese desperately needed a supply route from the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean. The Allies controlled the sea around the Malaysian Peninsula, making an overland passage vital for the Imperial military to supply their troops in Burma.

The British had surveyed a rail route across the mountains separating Thailand and Burma but deemed it impossible to build.

The Japanese evaluated the project with a standard that didn't consider the cost of human lives. They conscripted 250,000 Malays, Chinese, Tamils, and Burmese and 60,000 Allied POWs to work 12- to 18-hour shifts.

In 16 months, 80,000 civilians and 12,000 POWs died of disease, starvation, and brutality. As we munch peanuts and pineapple slices, it is impossible to conceive the suffering this river has witnessed.

Nearby is the Jeath War Museum, operated by a Buddhist temple in the town of Kanchanaburi. The name, a play on the word "death", stands for countries involved in the atrocity: Japan, England, America and Australia, Thailand, and Holland. New Zealand POWs also were involved.

A low, thatched bamboo building similar to the POWs' living quarters displays photos and drawings from the time and relics from the work camps.

Two Allied cemeteries in Kanchanaburi hold the remains of 7000 victims, a small proportion of the bodies buried in mass graves that stretch along the 402km length of the Death Railroad.

They include at least three New Zealanders who almost certainly died working on the line, plus two pilots, who died when their planes crashed.

After visiting the Hellfire Pass Memorial, we return to Kanchanaburi for lunch in the shade of the Bridge over River Kwai. It's amazing how much Hollywood revised history.

First, the bridge is steel, not wood. The wooden bridge was a temporary structure built downstream for trucks to carry materials to build the bridge we see today. It spans the Kwai Yai River, upstream from the confluence with the Kwai Noi River, which the railroad follows into Burma.

After lunch, we walk across the infamous bridge. Eleven picturesque semicircular arches stretch 365m over the river. POWs took nine months to construct the concrete pylons and assemble the sections of the bridge, which the Japanese purloined from Java, along with much of the track. On the other side, vendors sell crafts and trinkets from Burma.

A 75km section of the Death Railroad still operates. We buy a 7-bhat ticket (10c) at Nam Tok for the 45-minute ride to Tha Kilen.

This isn't a tourist train. Buddhist monks in their saffron robes, villagers going to and coming from town markets, and school children crowd into the cars.

The train chugs slowly along, stopping at every village. We pass through fields of bananas, sugarcane, and tapioca.

The railroad follows the winding river and crosses cliffside trestles built at a staggering cost in lives.

Watching the villagers on the train, I realise the movie captured at least a part of the truth. After six decades, the railroad still runs, only it serves the people of the Thai countryside, not a foreign military.

The workers sacrificed their lives, but left a legacy for generations to come.

Contact

The Hellfire Pass Memorial Museum 00 66 1 754 2098.

Related websites

www.austembassy.or.th/

www.dva.gov.au

www.hellfirepass.com

www.historyinfilm.com/kwai/