The Dutch formed the second largest contingent of Allied prisoners of war on the ThaiBurma railway, after the British. They utilised a labour force composed of prisoners of war taken in the campaigns in South-East Asia and the Pacific, and coolies brought from Malaya and the Dutch East Indies or conscripted in Siam and Burma. Aside from the classic British-American film in 1957, Bridge on the River Kwai, the struggles prisoners of war endured in Burma and the making of the "death railway" became a "forgotten war" - it got lost in the Western Front's heroics and the ugly truth about the horrifying gas chambers found in the Nazis' prison camps. [32], 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. In 1941 these were adjusted to 19 and 40 years. Hekking died in 1994. The Burma Railway, also known as the SiamBurma Railway, ThaiBurma Railway and similar names, or as the Death Railway, is a 415km (258mi) railway between Ban Pong, Thailand and Thanbyuzayat, Burma (now called Myanmar). Those who stayed behind were accommodated in camp "hospitals" which were simply one or more crude jungle huts. The notorious Burma-Siam railway, built by British, Australian, Dutch and American prisoners of war, was a Japanese project inspired by the need for improved communications to maintain the large Japanese Armv in Burma. [47] Coast's work is noted for its detail on the brutality of some Japanese and Korean guards as well as the humanity of others. If you are joining after August, please choose the month you are joining in below. 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. Contact our Media sales & Licensing team about access, whole: Dimensions: 30x21cm., Pagination: [5] leaves 4 plans. [70], The bridge was made famous by Pierre Boulle's novel The Bridge over the River Kwai and its film adaptation, The Bridge on the River Kwai. [21] 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. After the war ended some Australian POWs remembered their captivity as a time in which the typical qualities of the Australian soldier came to the fore. Burma-Siam Railway list of prisoner of war work camps in Thailand during the construction of the death railway, with diagram. Human hair was often used for brushes, plant juices and blood for paint, and toilet paper as the "canvas". On 8 December 1941, Japan invaded Thailand which quickly surrendered. Other parties were employed on cutting and building roads, some through virgin jungle, or in building defence positions. The barracks were about 60m (66yd) long with sleeping platforms raised above the ground on each side of an earthen floor. These pages are dedicated to my father Ken Heyes (Lance Corporal, 1st Aust Corps Troop Supply Column AIF, POW), his good friend, Ernie Badham and all the other brave soldiers who spent so many years in the hell-holes that were the Japanese P.O.W camps during World War II. [19], As an American engineer said after viewing the project, "What makes this an engineering feat is the totality of it, the accumulation of factors. "[38], 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 ( in the Burmese language; in English 'Tin Shelter'), the northern terminus of the railway. Chungkai War Cemetery, near Kanchanaburi, has a further 1,693 war graves. Show more. Another cohort of 450 US personnel suffered 100 deaths. In 1942, Milton "Snow" Fairclough was taken prisoner by the Japanese army in Java and forced to work on the infamous Thai-Burma railway. Articles on the Australian medical personnel working on the railway. Also sketches by POWs. Burma Railway, also called Burma-Siam Railway, railway built during World War II connecting Bangkok and Moulmein (now Mawlamyine), Burma (Myanmar). His subordinates Colonel Shigeo Nakamura, Colonel Tamie Ishii and Lieutenant-Colonel Shoichi Yanagita were sentenced to death. The decision to complete the railway connecting Moulmein with Bangkok, which had been commenced before the war but abandoned by the two countries concerned, was taken in June 1942. Neither drugs or surgical instruments were supplied by the Japanese, and although later on certain medical supplies were made available they were always inadequate. The higher deaths in F Force were probably attributable to the fact that British workers contained a high proportion of men who were already ill when they left Singapore. Donate to COFEPOW instantly - simply click on the button below. Towards the end of the war there were also casualties from Allied bombing raids. 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. [9] Much 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. Taff suffered from dysentery, malaria, beri beri and cholera but, unlike so many, he survived. On 3 April, a second bombing raid, this time by Liberator heavy bombers of the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF), damaged the wooden railroad bridge once again. The Japanese would not allow the prisoners to construct a symbol (a white triangle on a blue base) indicating the presence of a prisoner of war camp, and these raids added their quota to the deaths on the line. [64] Hiroshi Abe, a first lieutenant who supervised construction of the railway at Sonkrai where 600 British prisoners out of 1,600 died of cholera and other diseases,[65] was sentenced to death, later commuted to life in prison, as a B/C class war criminal. Many remember Japanese soldiers as being cruel and indifferent to the fate of Allied prisoners of war and the Asian rmusha. In the years that followed the military units to which the Australians belonged were broken up into work forces to meet the Japanese need for labour. For example, a group of 400 Dutch prisoners, which included three doctors with extensive tropical medicine experience, suffered no deaths at all. On 17 October 1943, construction gangs originating in Burma working south met up with construction gangs originating in Thailand working north. Rivers and canyons had to be bridged and sections of mountains had to be cut away to create a bed that was straight and level enough to accommodate the narrow-gauge track. Burma was a key strategic objective for the Japanese for two reasons. Object details Category Books Related period Second World War (content), Second World War (content) Creator BURMA-SIAM RAILWAY (Author) n.pub. The movement of POWs northward from Changi Prison in Singapore and other prison camps in Southeast Asia began in May 1942. The majority of the army personnel were from the 8th Division. Dutch chemist Van Boxtell. During World War II, the Japanese forced more than 60,000 allied prisoners of war and nearly 300,000 Southeast Asian laborers to build a 415km railway across the mountains and jungles between Thailand and Myanmar (then Burma). Work began at both ends of the rail line in June 1942. At Chungkai War Cemetery and Kanchanaburi War Cemetery in Thailand now rest those recovered from the southern part of the line, from Ban Pong to Nieke - about half its length. Much of the excavation was carried out with inadequate hand tools, and, because work on the railway had fallen behind schedule, the pace of work was increased. 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. [72] Finally, on 1 July 1958, the rail line was completed to Nam Tok (Thai , 'waterfall', referring to the nearby Sai Yok Noi Waterfall) The portion in use today is some 130km (81mi) long. Presidio Pr; ISBN: 0891415777. The Prisoner of War Management Office (Furyo Kanribu) The Prisoner of War Management Office (Furyo Kanribu) was established by the Minister for the Army on 31 March 1942 as an additional office to deal with the treatment of POWs. The rail line was built along the Khwae Noi (Kwai) River valley to support the Japanese armed forces during the Burma Campaign. These became more and more frequent when, towards the end of October 1943, trains full of Japanese troops and supplies began to go through from Thailand to Burma. 493.8 Records of the Peiping headquarters Group 1946-47 493.1 Administrative History Related Records: Records of U.S. Army Service Forces (World War II), RG 160. Troops from the 7th Division embarked on the HMT Orcades arriving at Batavia from the Middle East in early 1942 in a last-minute effort to defend the Netherlands East Indies from Japanese attack. Thanbyuzayat War Cemetery, at Thanbyuzayat, 65 kilometres south of Moulmein, Myanmar (Burma) has the graves of 3,617 POWs who died on the Burmese portion of the line. Dancing Along the Deadline : The Andersonville Memoir of a Prisoner of the Confederacy. The remaining sailors and marines, including Marvin Sizemore, were captured by the Japanese and found themselves building the Burma - Thailand railway as prisoners of war. The Burma Railway was also known as the "Death Railway" as 16,000 allied troops and 100,000 Asian labourers died during its construction. It is open to general traffic from Ban Pong to Kanchanaburi, about 33 miles.Japanese communications depended upon a long and exposed sea route to Rangoon via Singapore and the Strait of Malacca, and a road (quite unfit for prolonged heavy traffic) from Raheng through Kowkarelk to Moulmein. Work on the railway started at Thanbyuzayat on 1st October 1942 and somewhat later at Ban Pong. The horrendous experiences endured by the thousands of POWs has made the Burma Railway a place of pilgrimage and commemoration. [18][19] The Japanese staff would travel by train C56 31 from Nong Pladuk, Thailand to Thanbyuzayat, Burma. From British mathematician Arthur Thomas Doodson's Tide-prediction machine, and PLUTO (short for 'pipeline under the ocean' - supplied petrol from Britain to Europe), to the German's 'Rommel's Asparagus', discover 7 clever innovations used on D-Day. The first train to pass Konkoita on the newly constructed Burma-Thailand railway, built for the Japanese by prisoner of war (POW) labour. In reality, however, the death rates of British and Australians across all sites on the railway were scarcely any different 22 and 21 per cent respectively. A total of 50,000 troops were captured at one time there."He then got moved to Malai POW Camp 1 in Thailand, and transferred to Camp 2 to build the Burma Railway."He was liberated in 1945 . More than 250 miles of railway, from Thanbyuzayat in Burma to Ban Pong in Thailand, remained to be constructed, much of it through mountainous country and dense jungle, in a region with one of the worst climates in the world.The Japanese aimed at completing the railway in 14 months, or at least by the end of l943. More recently, the motion picture The Railway Man (based on the book of the same name) also gives insight into the barbaric conditions and suffering that were inflicted upon the workers who built the railway. The remains of the notorious F-Force camp in Thailand. 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. Estimates vary but the number who worked on the railway was possibly as high as 18 000. They worked on airfields and other infrastructure initially before beginning construction of the railway in October 1942. He served 11 years. They were outnumbered by the British, the Dutch and large cohorts of Asian labourers (rmusha), particularly Burmese and Tamils from Malaya. 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. Although working conditions were far better for the Japanese than the POWs and rmusha workers, about 1,000 (eight percent) of them died during construction. The second largest group of prisoners more than 2700 were captured on Java. The line was abandoned beyond Nam Tok Sai Yok Noi;[27][22] the steel rails were salvaged for reuse in expanding the Bang Sue railway yard, reinforcing the BangkokBan Phachi Junction double track, rehabilitating the track from Thung Song Junction to Trang, and constructing both the Nong Pla DukSuphan Buri and Ban Thung PhoKhiri Rat Nikhom branch lines. 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