The Thai-Burma Railway
There were two items on my ‘Thailand list’ that I was determined to experience during my trip there. The first was to eat Pad Thai from a stand on a street corner. The second was to visit the Thai-Burma railway. Sometimes it’s called the Death Railway.
After the fall of Singapore in 1942, the Imperial Japanese Army sought to consolidate its position in Southeast Asia into a stranglehold. Women and children were sent to hellish internment camps. Men were put into forced labour. A major project of the Southeast Asian campaign was the construction of a 415 kilometre railway, linking Thailand to Burma (as it was then), to bring supplies to the Burma Campaign. Some 61,000 Allied prisoners of war, together with countless Asian labourers, were set to work on it.
While the Japanese anticpated the simultaneous construction — from Thanbyuzyat in Burma and Nong Pladuk in Thailand — would take several years, it was actually completed within 16 months. This came at the cost of tens of thousands of Allied prisoners of war and approximately one hundred thousand Asian workers. They died from malaria, from cholera, from privation, from sheer exhaustion.
The most accessible section of the remaining railway (it was broken up by the British following the end of the war) is at Kanchanaburi, where there’s a bridge over the river Kwae. Yes, that Bridge on the River Kwai, made famous by David Lean. Very little of the original bridge survives, but you can walk across it and through the hordes of tourists taking selfies and longtail boatmen looking for fares, attempt to imagine the hell that the men who built it went through.
When you make it to the other side, and are faced with the encroachment of the jungle through which the prisoners of war would have to have hacked and battled, that’s where their strength of spirit begins to shine.
Slightly less accessible, but bestowing a profound sense of what these men accomplished is Hellfire Pass. It was cut at the height of the ‘Speedo’ period, when men worked 18 hours a day, seven days a week, on subsistence rations. The passage through the rock was hammered-and-tapped night and day; the torchlight giving rise to the name ‘Hellfire Pass’. Now, the Hellfire Pass cutting is so peaceful, looking out across a lush green valley it seems impossible that it was a place of torture.
You reach it by a combination of train — along what remains of the original railway — and taxi. I took a taxi out, which waited for me and then dropped me at Nam Tok for the train back to Kanchanaburi. The train was delayed and it was slow. It passed through sugar cane fields that were being fired in preparation for harvesting. It was third-class only, and air-conditioning meant having the windows open. But it was a fitting way to close the loop on my Death Railway journey.
I make a habit of visiting cemeteries and graveyards when I travel; there’s a lot that they say about the communities that they serve. I make a particular habit of visiting Commonwealth War Graves when I’m far from home. These are the last resting places of men who fought and served and died, separated from family and friends, in fear and privation, to protect my life and my liberty. The least that I can do is to spare them my time and my gratitude.
The War Grave in Kanchanaburi is very different to those in other parts of the world. Instead of the gleaming white proudly upright Portland stone headstones, these are low-pedestal stones with bronze plaques, used because of the risk of earth movement. They feel altogether more sombre, and somehow that’s fitting for the thousands of men who died the victims of war crimes, from brutality and cruelty, in conditions unimaginable. It’s no less awe-inspiring.
I visited late in the day, with the soft golden light of sunset illuminating my photos and reflecting off my tears. I felt exhausted, from the heat, from the excursion, from the emotion, but it couldn’t even bring me close to what these men, all of whom went to hell on earth, must’ve felt.
