World War II Day by Day

Kaeng Khoi Tha, Kanchanaburi Province, Thailand • October 25, 1943

The Burma-Thailand Railway was inau­gu­rated on this date in 1943 near the Konkoita forced labor camp about 11 miles/­18 km south of the Burmese border. The opening of the new rail line was declared a holi­day by Japa­nese autho­ri­ties. The festi­vi­ties cele­brated the meeting of the north­ern and sou­thern lines 9 days earlier near Kon­koita (today Kaeng Khoi Tha). Guest of honor was Lt. Gen. Eiguma Ishida, com­mis­sioner of the Burma-Thailand Rail­way pro­ject. Ishida drove a copper spike where the north and south tracks met and unveiled a memo­rial plaque. The con­struc­tion of the 258 mile/­415 km meter-gauge line between Ban Pong 45 miles/­72 km west of Thai­land’s capi­tal and sea­port Bang­kok and Thanbyuzayat 73 miles/­117 km across the Burmese border (see map below) had taken 16 months and finished 2 months ahead of schedule. Though the rail­way is com­monly referred to as the Burma-Thai­land Rail­way, only 69 miles/­111 km of the track were laid in Burma (present-day Myan­mar); most of the track—189 miles/­304 km—was laid in Thailand.

The British occupied and annexed Burma between 1824 and 1885. The colony was governed as part of next-door British India but became a sepa­rate colony in 1935. On Decem­ber 14, 1941, Burma came under attack by invading Japa­nese forces from Thai­land. To supply their occu­pa­tion forces in Burma, the Japa­nese ini­ti­ally depended on sup­plies and troops shipped around the Malay penin­sula, until early 1942 occu­pied by the British, and through the Strait of Malacca and the Anda­man Sea. The sea route was long and exposed to attack by British and Amer­i­can war­ships, espe­cially after the Battles of the Coral Sea (May 4–8, 1942) and Battle of Mid­way (June 3–6, 1942). To avoid the peril­ous 2,000‑mile/­3,200‑km sea jour­ney, a feasi­ble alter­na­tive emerged: over­land rail from Bang­kok in the direc­tion of the Anda­man Sea, then a swing north to Ran­goon (Yan­gon), at the time Burma’s capi­tal and com­mer­cial center 25 miles/­40 km inland from the coast.

The rail project began on June 23, 1942, when 600 British POWs from prison camps in South­east Asia arrived to build a transit camp for sub­se­quent forced labor staging camps built along the rail­way. Rail­way con­struc­tion began in Burma and Thai­land on Septem­ber 16, 1942. Much of the con­struc­tion cut through moun­tainous coun­try and dense jungle inter­sected by count­less rivers (688 bridges were required, including 6 or so long-span bridges) in a region with one of the worst cli­mates in the world. A quar­ter of a mil­lion peo­ple were involved in the pro­ject. Forced laborers—silent, name­less unpaid con­scripted South­east Asian civil­ians, often known by the Japa­nese word for “laborer,” romusha, (180,000–250,000) and to a smaller extent Allied pri­soners of war (nearly 62,000)—per­formed the dirty, dan­gerous, and back-breaking work.

Often overlooked are the Japanese and their Korean allies who worked on the rail­way. Roughly 12,000 troops of the Impe­rial Japa­nese Army and 800 Koreans were employed on the rail­road project, many acting as guards for the Allied POWs or coercing the romusha. Others were mili­tary engi­neers and those with the techni­cal know­ledge and exper­tise to design and build the rail­way. Some of the men were orga­nized into rail­way regi­ments that worked directly on the rail­way. Still others were admin­is­tra­tors who orga­nized the pri­soner work force, ensuring they did the work and preventing any from escaping.

After construction was complete, work on the rail­way con­sisted of main­te­nance, cutting fuel for loco­mo­tives, han­dling stores along the line, cutting and building roads, and repairing damage caused by Allied bombings to trestle bridges, rails, supply and muni­tion sheds, and petro­leum storage tanks. Bombings became more fre­quent and the inev­i­ta­ble casual­ties rose ever higher when, toward the end of October 1943, trains full of Japa­nese troops and war materiel began to flow through Thai­land to Burma. Flow in the other direc­tion was light. Over the course of its exis­tence, 500,000 tons of freight moved over the rails.

The Notorious “Death Railway,” 1943–1945

Above: The Japanese utilized a labor force com­posed of Allied pri­soners of war, including Allied civil­ians, cap­tured in cam­paigns in South­east Asia and the Pacific Islands and romusha brought from Malaya, Singa­pore, New Britain, and the Dutch East Indies or con­scripted in Thai­land and Burma. From June 1942 onward large groups of pri­soners were trans­ferred periodi­cally to Thai­land and Burma from Java, Suma­tra, and Borneo. Two forced labor teams, one based in Thai­land and one in Burma, worked from oppo­site ends of the line toward the center in a deadly tropi­cal environ­ment that caused horri­fic losses of life due to sick­ness, malnu­tri­tion, exhaus­tion, and their captors’ cruel indifference and brutality.

Above: Scenes of two work parties laying rails. The Japa­nese demanded from each labor camp a cer­tain percen­tage of its strength for work parties, irre­spec­tive of the number of sick and dis­abled. The rail pro­ject was inspired by the need for improved commu­ni­ca­tions to main­tain the large Japa­nese army in Burma. At full strength (1942–1943), the Japa­nese Army had ~300,000 men at arms in Burma.

Left: Prisoners in a chow line under the scorching Thai sun and without a shirt or hat for pro­tec­tion, or shade from the nearby jungle canopy. Throughout the building of the rail­way, food sup­plies were irreg­u­lar and totally inade­quate. Brought up by barge on the nearby Kwai Noi River or trucked in over a con­verted jungle track, food delivery could not be con­sis­tently main­tained, so rations were nearly always below the Japa­nese offi­cial stan­dard for the rail­way pro­ject. Vege­tables and other perish­ables long in transit arrived rotten. The rice was of poor qual­ity, fre­quently con­taminated by vermin, and fish, meat, oil, salt, and sugar were rarely provided. Although it was often possi­ble to supple­ment this diet by pur­chases from locals, pri­soners some­times had to live for weeks on little more than a meager bowl of rice flavored with salt. Red Cross parcels helped when they weren’t held up by the autho­ri­ties. Malaria, cholera, dysentery and diarrhea, beriberi, and pel­lagra (two vita­min defi­ciency dis­eases) attacked the pri­soners, and the number of camp sick was always high.

Right: Australian and Dutch POWs, photographed in 1943 at Tarsau forced labor camp, Thai­land, show the results of mal­nu­tri­tion and beri­beri. As long as the wretched laborers could stand, they were pushed to work. Once they turned extremely frail, they were thrown into mass graves adja­cent to the tracks. Thus, the Burma-Thai­land Rail­way earned the noto­rious moni­ker “Death Rail­way.” Wide­spread mal­nu­tri­tion, lack of medi­cines against infec­tions and trop­i­cal dis­eases such as cholera and malar­ia; harsh, muddy ter­rain that required workers to walk for miles; a relent­less and ruth­less army extracting work from even the sickest individ­uals caused the deaths of 80,000 to 100,000 romusha (the Japa­nese kept no death records), chiefly Tamil Indians, Malays, Bur­mese, Indo­ne­sians, Indo-Chi­nese, and Java­nese. An esti­mated 12,621 Allied POWs perished working on the rail­way, a death rate that ranged between 15 per­cent (Dutch sub­jects) and 23 per­cent (British and Common­wealth sub­jects). Around 1,000 Japa­nese died during this period, mostly from disease.

Left: Burma-Thailand bridge construction over the Kwai Noi River at Tamar­kan, n.d. Laborers built the tracks and bridges with hand tools (pick­axes, hammers, tongs) and muscle power. All were urged to work at a tempo the Japa­nese called “speedo” with little rest or food. Work carried on late into the evening by the light of oil lamps and bamboo fires. The Tamar­kan work camp saw a num­ber of inad­vertent com­bat casual­ties. The unfor­tu­nate pri­soners were caught in air raids against the area bridges. The worst took place on Novem­ber 29, 1944, when an Allied air raid struck the bridge seen here and a near­by ant­iair­craft bat­tery. Some of the bombs over­shot the target and exploded in the camp, killing 19 POWs and wounding 68 others. Another raid took place on Febru­ary 5, 1945, in which 15 POWs were wounded; the autho­ri­ties wisely moved the rest of the pri­soners to a less vulnerable camp site.

Right: The iron and concrete bridge that is the true bridge over the “River Kwai” has become a tourist mecca. The bridge was com­pleted in June 1943 and blown up by Royal Air Force Liberator bombers 2 years later. The curved struts are the original Japan­ese made of iron brought in from Japa­nese-occupied Java. The fic­tional River Kwai depicted in Pierre Boulle’s 1952 novel The Bridge over the River Kwai and David Lean’s 1957 film adap­ta­tion of the same name is the Khwae (or Kwai) Yai River, meaning “Big Kwai,” a name it received in the 1960s. A wooden trestle bridge was in fact built over the Kwai Noi (“Little Kwai”) miles up­stream in the jungle (it was bombed and rebuilt 9 times), and that bridge more closely resembled the bridge in Lean’s film. How­ever, Lean’s film is really a fic­tional depic­tion of the events during the bridge’s con­struc­tion with many inac­cur­acies baked into the novel and screen­play, and neither bridge—iron and con­crete bridge or the wooden trestle bridge miles/­kilometers upstream—conform closely to fact.

Building the Burma-Thailand Railway, aka “Death Railway” (Skip first 1:40 minutes)