Today's History Lesson

I have never been much of a history buff and I usually tire of reading in a museum pretty quickly, but for some reason, I found the Thailand-Burma Railway Center’s museum fascinating, perhaps because it makes the history so personal. In addition to well laid-out informational placards, there are many more tangible exhibits, including a replica of a medical tent with realistic mannequins, video interviews with guards and laborers (both POW and Asian), a scale model of the terrain and railroad, with lights for each POW camp, a model showing how the railbeds were built, displays of POW personal items, either brought with them or made using local materials, diaries, and records kept by the POW organizations. I read every word the museum had to offer.

When I was in high school, my ninth grade US History teacher got sick, delaying the weekly lesson plans, such that by the end of the year we had only had three days of actually instruction on WWII. But from what I could gather at the museum, here is my best account of the events leading up to the building of the railway and the events that transpired in its creation. History buffs can feel free to correct me; I make no claims about my knowledge of history.

Japan went to war with China, seizing Beijing and Shanghai (think Empire of the Sun). Everyone tried to impose sanctions on the Japanese, who responded by pulling out of the League of Nations. (I guess sometimes sanctions aren’t enough.) The US, England, Australia, and the Netherlands were supporting China to protect their interests in Asia, including India and ports throughout the Pacific. Meanwhile, several of these nations were also fighting with Germany, after Germany invaded Poland. Germany allied with Italy, took Paris, and attacked Russia, who signed a non-aggression pact with Japan. Germany and Japan formed an alliance, I suppose based on common enemies and the ability to dominate a large part of the world without stepping on one another’s toes. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, at which point the US got serious about involvement in these conflicts. Japan bombed Allied ships and ports in the Pacific until they pretty much controlled the better part of the western Pacific and were headed for India. The Allies started bombing back, and Japan realized that the water routes through the Malacca straits were too dangerous. They needed transport overland and a railway linking Bangkok, Thailand and Rangoon, Burma would provide links through the major cities in southeast Asia. Using some existing railways where possible, the Japanese plan involved building rail lines through the border mountains where there were only walking trails at the time and where the British had previously determined that building a railway was not sensible.

The Japanese had many British-trained railway construction engineers who had experience in mountainous railway building due to the terrain in Japan. The ambitious plan would take an immense labor force. They began with contract labor from Burma, Malaysia, and Thailand and quickly added European and Australian POWs from Singapore. The POWs were told that the conditions in Thailand would be better in terms of food, medical supplies, shelter, and easier labor. In reality, the conditions were quite the opposite. Most medical supplies were what the soldiers had themselves carried in or were improvised (a blood plasma centrifuge made from a stolen bicycle, saline drips from empty sake bottles, needles from thorny bamboo, etc.) The prescribed rations were sufficient for a small Asian laborer, but not enough to sustain the larger Europeans and they often received much less food than the prescribed amount. The rice was often rotten or tainted. When meat did arrive, it was often so bad that the Japanese would bury it, but the POWs would dig it back up and cook it, skimming away the maggots from the top of the stew. Pictures of some of the men with malaria, cholera, dysentery, and general malnutrition literally looked like skeletons – no muscles, all bone. How they even walked is beyond me. Often, the shelters were unfinished or collapsing, but the men were not given time to repair them when they arrived. The huts, which held as many as 28 men instead of the reasonable 8, were made of cut bamboo, which provided a thriving home for lice and other insects.

The labor was backbreaking. The laborers were manually leveling the ground, carrying rocks to build up railbeds and bridge abutments, carving passageways through solid rock with hammer and spike, cutting trees for timbers, building bridges, and laying ties and rails. The original plan called for five years to construct the railway, but the schedules were accelerated such that the railway was completed in 16 months. The Japanese soon sent more POWs from Japan to speed up the schedule and also to spread out the POWs to keep their network from becoming too strong in Japan. They also started taking slave labor from Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, and Java. One heartbreaking video showed an interview with an Asian student who was approached at the market one Friday. The Japanese asked him what he was doing there and told him he should give up school to work for them. When he turned them down, he was taken by force right then and there.

While Japan kept some POW records, they were slow to forward the paperwork. The Japanese allowed some POW organizations to keep records; the rest had to be kept in secret. Men carved their personal records into their mess kits. While the Japanese cruelly tortured prisoners, they seemed to have a reverence for the dead, allowing the POWs to hide records in the graves of dead comrades. The Japanese also didn’t identify POW camps and ships transporting prisoners, so some POWs died from being accidentally bombed. In addition to the cruel treatment of POWs, the Japanese also violated the Geneva Convention by issuing orders that POWs be killed if Allied troops landed nearby. This was actually carried out in one known instance in the Pacific where POWs were marched 250km, left with no food, and eventually massacred. Only six POWs in this group survived thanks to help from natives upon their escape.

The Japanese cruelty occurred in part because of a system that allowed anyone to apply corporal punishment to anyone of a lower rank. As pressure mounted to finish the railway, the beatings became more severe down through the ranks and were subsequently passed on to the POWs, often through Korean guards who had been taken into the lower ranks of the Japanese Army. The guards were often cruel in their treatment of the POWs. As one of the museum placards commented, “No army uses their best soldiers to guard prisoners.”

After Japan’s defeat at the Battle of Midway and successful campaigns by the Australian, British, and Russian militaries, the US retook Guam and the Philippines, and then dropped the bombs on Japan, finally forcing their unconditional surrender. By this time, Germany had also surrendered.

The railway records were preserved because a British Lieutenant Colonel, who happened to be a railroad buff, walked into the railroad’s office in Kanchanaburi the day after the surrender and began to run the railroad. Keeping the railroad running was critical to transporting POWs to freedom and for recovering graves to deposit in a central cemetery.

In the end, about 90,000 Asian laborers and 12,000 POWs perished in the building of the railroad. Most of the western nations lost about 20% of their POWs in this region.

I think a lot of people think that we will never again see a nation (or two) trying to take over the world. But remember that this only happened 60 years ago. This is not ancient history.

After the museum, I visited the Allied War Cemetery, which has graves of a portion of the POWs from Britain, Australia, and the Netherlands. (The United States only had about 600 POWs in this area and they sent their approximately 125 dead soldiers home.) The cemetery is perhaps the best-cared for burial ground I have seen, with broad walkways, a plant next to every headstone, and plenty of green grass.