The bridge over the river Kwai

Kanchanaburi is a town in western Thailand whose main economic income comes from interest in an historical tragedy. It is the site of a former WW2 prisoner of war camp, controlled by the Japanese, and the location of the famous bridge over the river Kwai. Through the town runs a stretch of the Burma-Thailand railway, or as it is more infamously known, Death Railway, built by Allied POWs and Asian slave labour. The full railway line is 415km long, took nearly 250,000 men to build and cost more than 100,000 of these men their lives. The construction took just 14 months, which means approximately 238 men died each day.

After the end of the war, 111 Japanese and Koreans were tried for war crimes because of their brutal treatment of the prisoners and labourers during the railway's construction; 32 were sentenced to death. However, as we have seen from the tragedy that just ensued in Paris, 'an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind' - killing someone for causing the death of another will not bring those men back but simply cause more people pain and hurt and anger.

The people of Kanchanaburi seem to have come to this realisation too: the three or four museums in the town remember the men who worked on the railway and the bridge, and honour those who died at the hands of the task, rather than focussing on the atrocities enforced by the Japanese and vilifying them.

The story of the railway, depicted in films such as The Bridge over the River Kwai and The Railway Man, is one of brutality and horror however. The Japanese had been planning a railway between Burma and Thailand since before the outbreak of the war but after their successful invasion of Burma in 1942, they urgently required a way to supply their troops there overland, as the route by sea made their ships too vulnerable to attack. Japanese engineers surveyed the land, made up mostly of hilly, jungle terrain, and concluded that it would take five years to build. The Japanese army generals ordered that it must be done faster and thus began to transport tens of thousands of Allied POWs up from prison camps in Singapore and Indonesia, to use them as labourers. When they realised that the 62,000 POWs would not be enough, they recruited approximately 180,000 Asians (mostly Malays, Indians and Indonesians) on fake construction contracts, falsely promising good conditions and fair employment. 50% of these Asian men would be dead in just over a year's time. None of their deaths were recorded by the Japanese, so the overwhelming majority are in unmarked graves and remain unidentified.

Conditions for the men were poor to start and only got worse, especially when rainy season hit and disease spread through the camps like wildfire. Meals consisted of salted rice twice a day, so a lot of deaths were caused by mild illnesses that could have been prevented, had they been properly fed and had some vitamins in their diet. Labour shifts lasted 18 hours, so imagine the fatigue and exhaustion that would have occurred with the terrible diet and lack of calories; legend has it that there was a death for every wooden sleeper laid for the track.

The bridge soon became a target for Allied bombers to break Japan's supply lines to Burma, which the Japanese tried to counter by getting the prisoners to line up along the top of it, in an attempt to prevent the planes from attacking their own side. Unfortunately for the prisoners, orders were to destroy the bridge at any cost and there were a number of deaths by 'friendly fire' in the effort to bomb the bridge. It was hit a number of times but only successfully put out of action in June 1945.

After the war, teams of grave finders were sent out to find and recover bodies of the 12,000 Allied soldiers who died during the railway's construction. Large war cemeteries were built to honour and memorialise the late British, Dutch, Australian and American soldiers, one of which is in Kanchanaburi. There is also a large memorial for the 90,000 Asian labourers, whose graves were not identified or marked.

Today the bridge and parts of the original railway are used as part of Thailand's rail network. In between the fairly infrequent trains, you can walk across the bridge and look down the river.

Over all, it was a very interesting and incredibly moving day. I would highly recommend taking the time to come here should you happen to be in Thailand.