Burma Railway


The Burma Railway, also known as the Death Railway, the Siam–Burma Railway, the Thai–Burma Railway and similar names, is a railway between Ban Pong, Thailand, and Thanbyuzayat, Burma, built by the Empire of Japan from 1940–1944 to supply troops and weapons in the Burma campaign of World War II. This railway completed the rail link between Bangkok, Thailand, and Rangoon, Burma. The name used by the Japanese Government is Thai–Men-Rensetsu-Tetsudou, which means Thailand-Burma-Link-Railway.
The Thai portion of the railway continues to exist, with three trains crossing the original bridge twice daily bound from Bangkok to the current terminus at Nam Tok. Most of the Burmese portion of the railroad fell into disrepair decades ago and has not seen service since.
Between 180,000 and 250,000 Allied prisoners of war were subjected to forced labour during its construction. About 102,000 Allied prisoners died.

History

A railway route between Burma and Thailand, crossing Three Pagodas Pass and following the valley of the Khwae Noi river in Thailand, had been surveyed by the British government of Burma as early as 1885, but the proposed course of the line – through hilly jungle terrain divided by many rivers – was considered too difficult to undertake.
In early 1942, Japanese forces invaded Burma and seized control of the colony from the United Kingdom. To supply their forces in Burma, the Japanese depended upon the sea, bringing supplies and troops to Burma around the Malay peninsula and through the Strait of Malacca and the Andaman Sea. This route was vulnerable to attack by Allied submarines, especially after the Japanese defeat at the Battle of Midway in June 1942. To avoid a hazardous sea journey around the Malay peninsula, a railway from Bangkok to Rangoon seemed a feasible alternative. The Japanese began this project in June 1942.
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The project aimed to connect Ban Pong in Thailand with Thanbyuzayat in Burma, linking up with existing railways at both places. Its route was through Three Pagodas Pass on the border of Thailand and Burma. of the railway were in Burma and the remaining were in Thailand. The movement of POWs northward from Changi Prison in Singapore and other prison camps in Southeast Asia began in May 1942. After preliminary work of airfields and infrastructure, construction of the railway began in Burma on 15 September 1942 and in Thailand in November. The projected completion date was December 1943. Most of the construction materials, including tracks and sleepers, were brought from dismantled branches of Malaya's Federated Malay States Railway network and the East Indies' various rail networks.
The railway was completed ahead of schedule. On 17 October 1943, construction gangs originating in Burma working south met up with construction gangs originating in Thailand working north. The two sections of the line met at kilometre 263, about south of the Three Pagodas Pass at Konkuita.
As an American engineer said after viewing the project, "What makes this an engineering feat is the totality of it, the accumulation of factors. The total length of miles, the total number of bridges — over 600, including six to eight long-span bridges — the total number of people who were involved, the very short time in which they managed to accomplish it, and the extreme conditions they accomplished it under. They had very little transportation to get stuff to and from the workers, they had almost no medication, they couldn’t get food let alone materials, they had no tools to work with except for basic things like spades and hammers, and they worked in extremely difficult conditions — in the jungle with its heat and humidity. All of that makes this railway an extraordinary accomplishment."
The Japanese Army transported 500,000 tonnes of freight over the railway before it fell into Allied hands.
The line was closed in 1947, but the section between Nong Pla Duk and Nam Tok was reopened ten years later in 1957.
On 16 January 1946, the British ordered Japanese POWs to remove a four kilometre stretch of rail between Nikki and Sonkrai. The railway link between Thailand and Burma was to be separated again for protecting British interests in Singapore. After that, the Burma section of the railway was sequentially removed, the rails were gathered in Mawlamyine, and the roadbed was returned to the jungle. The British government sold the railway and related materials to the Thai government for 50 million baht.

Post-war

After the war the railway was in poor condition and needed reconstruction for use by the Royal Thai Railway system. On 24 June 1949, the portion from Kanchanaburi to Nong Pla Duk was finished; on the first of April 1952, the next section up to Wang Pho was done. Finally, on 1 July 1958 the rail line was completed to Nam Tok The portion in use today is some long. The line was abandoned beyond Nam Tok Sai Yok Noi; the steel rails were salvaged for reuse in expanding the Bang Sue railway yard, reinforcing the Bangkok–Ban Phachi Junction double track, rehabilitating the track from Thung Song Junction to Trang, and constructing both the Nong Pla Duk–Suphan Buri and Ban Thung Pho–Khiri Rat Nikhom branch lines. Parts of the abandoned route have been converted into a walking trail.
Since the 1990s various proposals have been made to rebuild the complete railway, but as of 2014 these plans had not been realised. Since a large part of the original railway line is now submerged by the Vajiralongkorn Dam, and the surrounding terrain is mountainous, it would take extensive tunneling to reconnect Thailand with Burma by rail.

Labourers

Japanese

Japanese soldiers, 12,000 of them, including 800 Koreans, were employed on the railway as engineers, guards, and supervisors of the POW and rōmusha labourers. Although working conditions were far better for the Japanese than the POWs and rōmusha workers, about 1,000 of them died during construction. Many remember Japanese soldiers as being cruel and indifferent to the fate of Allied prisoners of war and the Asian rōmusha. Many men in the railway workforce bore the brunt of pitiless or uncaring guards. Cruelty could take different forms, from extreme violence and torture to minor acts of physical punishment, humiliation, and neglect.

Civilian labourers

The number of Southeast Asian workers recruited or impressed to work on the Burma railway has been estimated to have been more than 180,000 Southeast Asian civilian labourers. Javanese, Malayan Tamils of Indian origin, Burmese, Chinese, Thai, and other Southeast Asians, forcibly drafted by the Imperial Japanese Army to work on the railway, died in its construction. During the initial stages of the construction of the railway, Burmese and Thais were employed in their respective countries, but Thai workers, in particular, were likely to abscond from the project and the number of Burmese workers recruited was insufficient. The Burmese had welcomed the invasion by Japan and cooperated with Japan in recruiting workers.
In early 1943, the Japanese advertised for workers in Malaya, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies, promising good wages, short contracts, and housing for families. When that failed to attract sufficient workers, they resorted to more coercive methods, rounding up workers and impressing them, especially in Malaya. Most of the rōmusha working on the railway were probably coerced, rather than being volunteers. Approximately 90,000 Burmese and 75,000 Malayans worked on the railroad. Other nationalities and ethnic groups working on the railway were Tamils, Chinese, Karen, Javanese, and Singaporean Chinese. Other documents suggest that more than 100,000 Malayan Tamils were brought into the project and around 60,000 perished.
Some workers were attracted by the relatively high wages, but the working conditions for the rōmusha were deadly. British doctor Robert Hardie wrote:

Prisoners of war

The first prisoners of war, 3,000 Australians, to go to Burma left Changi Prison in Singapore on 14 May 1942 and journeyed by sea to near Thanbyuzayat, the northern terminus of the railway. They worked on airfields and other infrastructure initially before beginning construction of the railway in October 1942. The first prisoners of war to work in Thailand, 3,000 British soldiers, left Changi by train in June 1942 to Ban Pong, the southern terminus of the railway. More prisoners of war were imported from Singapore and the Dutch East Indies as construction advanced. Construction camps housing at least 1,000 workers each were established every 5–10 miles of the route. Workers were moved up and down the railway line as needed.
The construction camps consisted of open-sided barracks built of bamboo poles with thatched roofs. The barracks were about long with sleeping platforms raised above the ground on each side of an earthen floor. Two hundred men were housed in each barracks, giving each man a two-foot wide space in which to live and sleep. Camps were usually named after the kilometre where they were located.

Atrocities

Conditions during construction

The prisoners of war "found themselves at the bottom of a social system that was harsh, punitive, fanatical, and often deadly." The living and working conditions on the Burma Railway were often described as "horrific", with maltreatment, sickness, and starvation. The estimated number of civilian labourers and POWs who died during construction varies considerably, but the Australian Government figures suggest that of the 330,000 people who worked on the line about 90,000 of the labourers and about 16,000 Allied prisoners died.
Life in the POW camps was recorded at great risk by artists such as Jack Bridger Chalker, Philip Meninsky, John Mennie, Ashley George Old, and Ronald Searle. Human hair was often used for brushes, plant juices and blood for paint, and toilet paper as the "canvas". Some of their works were used as evidence in the trials of Japanese war criminals. Many are now held by the Australian War Memorial, State Library of Victoria, and the Imperial War Museum in London.
One of the earliest and most respected accounts is ex-POW John Coast's Railroad of Death, first published in 1946 and republished in a new edition in 2014. Coast's work is noted for its detail on the brutality of some Japanese and Korean guards as well as the humanity of others. It also describes the living and working conditions experienced by the POWs, together with the culture of the Thai towns and countryside that became many POWs' homes after leaving Singapore with the working parties sent to the railway. Coast also details the camaraderie, pastimes, and humour of the POWs in the face of adversity.
In his book Last Man Out, H. Robert Charles, an American Marine survivor of the sinking of the USS Houston, writes in depth about a Dutch doctor, Henri Hekking, a fellow POW who probably saved the lives of many who worked on the railway. In the foreword to Charles's book, James D. Hornfischer summarizes: "Dr. Henri Hekking was a tower of psychological and emotional strength, almost shamanic in his power to find and improvise medicines from the wild prison of the jungle". Hekking died in 1994. Charles died in December 2009.
Except for the worst months of the construction period, known as the "Speedo", one of the ways the Allied POWs kept their spirits up was to ask one of the musicians in their midst to play his guitar or accordion, or lead them in a group sing-along, or request their camp comedians to tell some jokes or put on a skit.
After the railway was completed, the POWs still had almost two years to survive before liberation. During this time, most of the POWs were moved to hospital and relocation camps where they could be available for maintenance crews or sent to Japan to alleviate the manpower shortage there. In these camps entertainment flourished as an essential part of their rehabilitation. Theatres of bamboo and attap were built, sets, lighting, costumes and makeup devised, and an array of entertainment produced that included music halls, variety shows, cabarets, plays, and musical comedies—even pantomimes. These activities engaged numerous POWs as actors, singers, musicians, designers, technicians, and female impersonators.
POWs and Asian workers were also used to build the Kra Isthmus Railway from Chumphon to Kra Buri, and the Sumatra or Palembang Railway from Pekanbaru to Muaro.
The construction of the Burma Railway is counted as a war crime committed by Japan in Asia. Hiroshi Abe, a first lieutenant who supervised construction of the railway at Sonkrai where 1,400 British prisoners out of 1,600 died of cholera and other diseases in three months, was sentenced to death, later commuted to 15 years in prison, as a B/C class war criminal.
After the completion of the railroad, most of the POWs were then transported to Japan. Those left to maintain the line still suffered from appalling living conditions as well as increasing Allied air raids.

Death rates and causes

In addition to malnutrition and physical abuse, malaria, cholera, dysentery and tropical ulcers were common contributing factors in the death of workers on the Burma Railway.
Estimates of deaths among Southeast Asian civilians subject to forced labour, often known as rōmusha, vary widely. However, authorities agree that the percentage of deaths among the rōmusha was much higher than among the Allied military personnel. The total number of rōmusha working on the railway may have reached 300,000 and according to some estimates, the death rate among them was as high as 50 percent. The labourers that suffered the highest casualties were Javanese and Tamils from Malaysia and Myanmar, as well as many Burmese.
A lower death rate among Dutch POWs and internees, relative to those from the UK and Australia, has been linked to the fact that many personnel and civilians taken prisoner in the Dutch East Indies had been born there, were long-term residents and/or had Eurasian ancestry; they tended thus to be more resistant to tropical diseases and to be better acclimatized than other Western Allied personnel.
The quality of medical care received by different groups of prisoners varied enormously. One factor was that many European and US doctors had little experience with tropical diseases. For example, a group of 400 Dutch prisoners, which included three doctors with extensive tropical medicine experience, suffered no deaths at all. Another group, numbering 190 US personnel, to whom Luitenant Henri Hekking, a Dutch medical officer with experience in the tropics was assigned, suffered only nine deaths. Another cohort of 450 US personnel suffered 100 deaths.
Weight loss among Allied officers who worked on construction was, on average, 9–14 kg less than that of enlisted personnel.
Workers in more isolated areas suffered a much higher death rate than did others.

War crimes trials

At the end of World War II, 111 Japanese military officials were tried for war crimes for their brutality during the construction of the railway. Thirty-two of them were sentenced to death. No compensation or reparations have been provided to Southeast Asian victims.

Notable structures

The bridge on the River Kwai

One of the most notable portions of the entire railway line is Bridge 277, the so-called "Bridge on the River Kwai", which was built over a stretch of the river that was then known as part of the Mae Klong River. The greater part of the Thai section of the river's route followed the valley of the Khwae Noi River. This gave rise to the name of "River Kwai" in English. In 1960, because of discrepancies between facts and fiction, the portion of the Mae Klong which passes under the bridge was renamed the Khwae Yai.
This bridge was made famous by Pierre Boulle in his book and the film which was based on it, The Bridge on the River Kwai. However, there are many who point out that both Boulle's story and the film which was adapted from it were unrealistic and do not show how bad and poor the conditions and general treatment of the Japanese-held prisoners-of-war were. Some Japanese viewers resented the movie's depiction of their engineers' capabilities as inferior and less advanced than they were in reality. In reality, Japanese engineers had been surveying and planning the route of the railway since 1937 and they had demonstrated considerable skill during their construction efforts across South-East Asia. Some Japanese viewers also disliked the film for portraying the Allied prisoners of war as more capable of constructing the bridge than the Japanese engineers themselves were, accusing the filmmakers of unfairly biased and unfamiliar of realities of the bridge construction, a sentiment echoed by surviving prisoners of war who saw the film in cinemas.
A first wooden railroad bridge over the Khwae Yai was finished in February 1943, which was soon accompanied by a more modern ferro-concrete bridge in June 1943, with both bridges running in a NNE–SSW direction across the river. The newer steel and concrete bridge was made up of eleven curved-truss bridge spans which the Japanese builders brought over from Java in the Dutch East Indies in 1942. This is the bridge that still remains today. It was this Bridge 277 that was to be attacked with the help of one of the world's first examples of a precision-guided munition, the US VB-1 AZON MCLOS-guided 1,000 lb aerial ordnance, on 23 January 1945. Bad weather forced the cancellation of the mission and the AZON was never deployed against the bridge.
According to Thai-based Hellfire Tours, the "two bridges were successfully bombed and damaged on 13 February of 1945 by bomber aircraft from the Royal Air Force. Repairs were carried out by forced labour of POWs shortly after and by April the wooden railroad trestle bridge was back in operation. On 3 April a second bombing raid, this time by Liberator heavy bombers of the U.S. Army Air Forces, damaged the wooden railroad bridge once again. Repair work soon commenced afterwards and continued again and both bridges were operational again by the end of May. A second air-raid by the RAF on 24 June finally severely damaged and destroyed the railroad bridges and put the entire railway line out of commission for the rest of the war. After Japan's capitulation, the British Army removed about 3.9 kilometres of the original Japanese railroad track on the Thai–Burma border. A survey of the track had shown that its poor construction would not support commercial railroad traffic. The recovered tracks were subsequently sold to Thai Railways and the 130 km Ban Pong–Nam Tok section of railway was relaid and is still in use up to today." Also, after the war, the two curved spans of the bridge which collapsed from the British air attack were replaced by angular truss spans provided by Japan as part of their postwar reparations, thus forming the iconic bridge now seen today.
The new railway line did not fully connect with the Burmese railroad network as no railroad bridges were built which crossed the river between Moulmein and Martaban. Thus, ferries were needed as an alternative connecting system. A bridge was not built until the Thanlwin Bridge was constructed between 2000 and 2005.

Hellfire Pass

Hellfire Pass in the Tenasserim Hills was a particularly difficult section of the line to build: it was the largest rock cutting on the railway, it was in a remote area and the workers lacked proper construction tools during building. The Australian, British, Dutch and other Allied prisoners of war, along with Chinese, Malay, and Tamil labourers, were required by the Japanese to complete the cutting. Sixty-nine men were beaten to death by Japanese guards in the twelve weeks it took to build the cutting, and many more died from cholera, dysentery, starvation, and exhaustion.

Significant bridges

After the war, the remains of most of the war dead were moved from former POW camps, burial grounds and lone graves along the rail line to official war cemeteries.
Three cemeteries maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission contain the vast majority of Allied military personnel who died on the Burma Railway.
Kanchanaburi War Cemetery, in the city of Kanchanaburi, contains the graves of 6,982 personnel comprising:
A memorial at the Kanchanaburi cemetery lists 11 other members of the Indian Army, who are buried in nearby Muslim cemeteries.
Thanbyuzayat War Cemetery, at Thanbyuzayat, 65 kilometres south of Moulmein, Myanmar has the graves of 3,617 POWs who died on the Burmese portion of the line.
Chungkai War Cemetery, near Kanchanaburi, has a further 1,693 war graves.
The remains of United States personnel were repatriated. Of the 668 US personnel forced to work on the railway, 133 died. This included personnel from USS Houston and the 131st Field Artillery Regiment of the Texas Army National Guard. The Americans were called the Lost Battalion as their fate was unknown to the United States for more than two years after their capture.
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Several museums are dedicated to those who perished building the railway. The largest of these is at Hellfire Pass, a cutting where the greatest number of lives were lost. An Australian memorial is at Hellfire Pass. One museum is in Myanmar side Thanbyuzayat, and two other museums are in Kanchanaburi: the Thailand–Burma Railway Centre, opened in March 2003, and the JEATH War Museum. There is a memorial plaque at the Kwai bridge itself and an historic wartime steam locomotive is on display.
A preserved section of line has been rebuilt at the National Memorial Arboretum in England.

Notable labourers

The construction of the railway has been the subject of a novel and an award-winning film, The Bridge on the River Kwai ; a novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan, and a large number of personal accounts of POW experiences. More recently, the motion picture The Railway Man also gives insight into the barbaric conditions and suffering that were inflicted upon the workers who built the railway. Flanagan's 2013 book The Narrow Road to the Deep North centres on a group of Australian POWs and their experiences building the railway as slave labour, and was awarded the 2014 Man Booker Prize. The book Through the Valley of the Kwai and the 2001 movie To End All Wars are an autobiography of Scottish captain Ernest Gordon.

Book references

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