The Legacy of the Burmese Death Railway

On the 8th of December, 1941 the Kingdom of Siam formally ended its official neutrality and surrendered to the Empire of Japan with a full armistice and military treaty after a bloodless 5-hour invasion. Siam, under the leadership of Field Marshal Pibun (the pad Thai guy), officially joined the Axis powers until the end of the war, allowing Japan full freedom of movement within the country's territory. Siam, never an enthusiastic Axis power, realized the futility of trying to resist the Japanese, although resistance secretly continued throughout the war.

Nowhere are these vestiges of the war more visible than in Kanchanaburi Province in the far west of Thailand. Home to the infamous Bridge on the River Kwai and Hellfire Pass, Kanchanaburi is steeped in the history of the Second World War, and no visit to the beautiful green jungles of the far west feels complete without taking a moment to remember the important and somber history of this place.

At the heart of Kanchanaburi's WWII past lies the infamous Death Railway, a grim testament to the harrowing human cost of wartime ambition. Constructed during the Japanese occupation of Siam and Burma, the railway aimed to connect Bangkok to Rangoon (now Yangon, Myanmar), providing the Imperial Japanese Army with a vital supply route. However, this colossal engineering feat came at an immense price. Over the course of its construction, an estimated 12,000 Allied prisoners of war and nearly 90,000 conscripted Asian laborers lost their lives due to the brutal conditions, forced labor, and diseases that plagued the construction camps. The railroad ran from the Bridge on the River Kwai in Kanchanaburi town through Three Pagodas Pass and into Burma.

Railroad Museum

On our way into Kanchanaburi, we stopped in at the fantastic The Thailand-Burma Railway Centre (commonly called the "Railroad Museum"), an incredible museum dedicated to the history of the "Burmese Death Railway", filled with memorabilia, exhibits, and artifacts documenting the tragic history of the railroad.

The museum tells the stories of those who lost their lives, as well as those of the survivors. It is one of the most incredible and moving museums I've ever been to. 

Hellfire Pass

Read more: The Blog of Michael Desrosiers: Hellfire Pass

Another phenomenal museum is at Hellfire Pass (very close to where we were camping at the old Hintok Station along the Death Railway).

Hellfire Pass, or the Konyu Cutting, was one of the most brutal and deadly stretches of construction along the Burmese Death Railway. A visit to the center, run and maintained by the Australian Government, begins with a short museum exhibition which displays videos, text memorials, and a physical example of the amount of stone each prisoner was expected to chisel and haul each day on less than a mouthful of rice a day for sustenance.

After watching the videos of survivors recounting their experiences at Hellfire Pass, we left the museum and walked down into the pass itself.

POWs were expected to carve a straight path through the mountains, a feat deemed impossible by both the Siamese government and the foreign powers who had previously tried to accomplish it in Burma. 

To make matters even worse, no equipment was provided save for hand tools. Men died from exhaustion and disease by the thousands.

The prisoners, mainly made up of Dutch, Australian, and British POWs captured during the Fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942, along with a small handful of Americans (around 500 or so), and thousands of conscripted Indian, Malay, and Indonesian laborers, were forced to work both day and night until they collapsed to build the railroad.

Today, the center serves as a very somber reminder to the lives lost in the deadly conditions along the Death Railway.

Each November around Remembrance Day, the vicar of Christ Church in Bangkok leads a memorial service at the site. 

It's sad but heartening to see the reminders and memorabilia left by friends, family, and countrymen at the Hellfire Pass site.

It's an important reminder never to forget what happened here.

Looking across the serene and verdant landscape, it's almost impossible to imagine that any sort of atrocities could ever have been committed here. One has to wonder, were the prisoners able to find any sort of beauty at all in their surroundings?

Wang Po Viaduct Trestle Bridge (Thamkrasae Station)

Later on, we drove onwards through the jungle to Thamkrasae Station, one of the most iconic sites in Kanchanaburi.

Despite its tragic history, this is one of the most beautiful places in Thailand.

This station, which still acts as an active railroad station connecting Kanchanaburi (at the Bridge on the River Kwai) to Sai Yok Station, was one of the original rail stations built along the Death Railway. Built along the side of a cliff upon a seemingly impossible cliffside trellis, the railroad is still an active part of the Thai rail network, despite its dubious past.

Read more: The Blog of Michael Desrosiers: Wang Po

The railroad runs past a small cave which once housed a Japanese army camp and a POW field hospital. 

Today, the cave is a Buddhist shrine.

If there's any spot in Kanchanaburi that is haunted, this must be it.

The cave was hot, damp, and muggy, and it was uncomfortable to stay inside for too long. We paid our respects, then stepped back outside into the relatively cooler air. I can't imagine being a prisoner in such an uncomfortable place.

My brother lit some incense in memory of those who suffered and perished at Wang Po.

You can walk along the trestle bridge, which my mother, brother, nor wife were willing to do. I walked partway, but soon heard a train in the distance (remember, this is still a working railroad!), and hurried back to the mountainside to join my family and wait for the locomotive to pass.

It's quite interesting to see the train running along the old historical rails.

Allied War Cemetery

On our way out of town we stopped by the Kanchanaburi Allied War Cemetery, a beautifully maintained gravesite managed by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. 

 

The Kanchanaburi Allied War Cemetery is one off three Allied War Cemeteries in Southeast Asia dedicated to honoring the memories of those who perished whilst building the Death Railway. 

The other two are Chungkai War Cemetery at Tha Ma Kham, Thailand, and at Thanbyuzayat, Myanmar.

I have always been impressed with how meticulously the cemetery has been maintained. The lawn is always freshly cut, and several of the gravestones always seem to have freshly cut flowers laid upon them to memorialize those who lie buried there. For the Dutch, of course, the flowers were tulips.

My old boss, the late Mr. Geoffrey, even had a cousin buried at the cemetery in Kanchanaburi. One of Geoffrey's first memories was of holding the first day of class in an underground shelter while German bombs fell upon London, and the war was always an inescapable part of his story.

The Bridge on the River Kwai

Perhaps the most famous (perhaps infamous would be a better word) site in all of Kanchanaburi Province is the Bridge on the River Kwai (called more precisely the "Kwae Yai Bridge").

The bridge and its story were first publicized to the West in the 1952 French novel Le Pont de la rivière Kwaï by Pierre Boulle and its English translation by British SOE agent Xan Fielding in 1954. It was made even more famous by the 1957 war epic, "The Bridge on the River Kwai" starring Mr. Obi Wan Kenobi himself, Sir Alec Guinnes (CBE).

We walked along the bridge, taking note of the two notable struts which had been recreated in relatively modern times. Allied bombs destroyed parts of the bridge during the war, and when it was rebuilt, architects chose a different design to distinguish the original and historical parts from those which were reconstructed.