Walking across the infamous Bridge on the River Kwai-ai in Thailand
A two-hour drive at the crack of dawn from Bangkok took us to Kanchanaburi, a small sleepy town on the border between Burma and Thailand that attained notoriety during World War II as the base for the construction of the Death Railway, the name given to the Burma-Siam Railway. It was in 1939, upon realizing that the sea route to Burma was blockaded by Allied ships in the Straits of Malacca that the Japanese army set upon the project of finding a land route into Burma. This would open up for them the possibilities of invading India and thus taking over the railway system constructed by the British that would give them access to the furthest reaches of modern-day Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. Thus, Japanese engineers masterminded a plan that involved the construction of a railway line that would snake 450 miles from the town of Thanbyuzayat in Burma, crossing, at several junctures, the three small rivers that flow through this tropical jungle area and ending in the creation of a wooden trestle bridge over the Kwai Aie River just outside the town of Kanchanaburi in Thailand (the new name for Siam).
In an insane desire to achieve this goal within a single year, the Japanese recruited Asian laborers from countries like China, Malaysia and India and utilized their Prisoners of War (POWs) from Allied countries such as England, Australia and Holland to construct the railway. I will not go into the horrendous details that characterized the inhuman treatment that was meted out to these individuals in the Samurai ideology that Japan had adopted, i.e. that it is undignified to surrender. David Lean’s 1957 film entitled Bridge on the River Kwai has immortalized the suffering of these prisoners that included physical brutality, near-starvation, the menace of mosquitoes that brought with them the dangers of malaria, frequent outbursts of cholera and typhoid and tropical ulcers that ravaged human flesh. 200,000 Asian slave laborers and 13,000 Allied POWs gave their lives in the building of this notorious railroad as the Japanese considered these human beings completely dispensable and showed no respect whatsoever for their lives (above left).
Today, the bodies of these soldiers, pried from makeshift graves along the railroad track after the war ended, lie buried in the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery which is impeccably maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Japanese reparations after its surrender in 1945 caused a modern iron-clad bridge to be built over the River Kwai upon which, we, contemporary visitors, walked solemnly, recalling the horror of that era. Meanwhile, the JEATH War Museum (an acronym for Japan, England, Australia and America, Thailand and Holland), next-door to the Chung Kai Cemetery (above left), documents coldly the statistics and eye-witness accounts, carries a few heartbreaking sculptures and a number of exhibits that take one through the awful conditions under which wars are fought and thousands of men perish.
Our excursion into Kanchanaburi (which the POWs referred to as “Kanburi”) began with a ride on what our guide called a “James Bond” boat (left) on the River Kwai. A very peculiar vessel, this brightly colored craft had a long, narrow, pointed snout and was maneuvered by a Thai boatman who took us into wild Thai jungles that were ringed by tall, verdant mountains. A while later, the boat deposited us at the modern bridge over the river which we crossed on foot as we posed for photographs. I was humbled and silenced into thinking of the numbers of young and ambitious men who gave their lives that the project might be completed.
After we walked across the bridge (left) , we got back on our bus to ride one hour north towards the Burmese border. Upon reaching our destination, a traditional Thai lunch was served to us, family-style, in a thatched resort restaurant before we boarded the bus again to the railroad station to climb aboard the Death Train that took us for an hour long ride through the varied landscape over which the original railroad passed.
From time to time (left) , we received glimpses of the jade-green Kwai Aie River, the thick plantations of banana, papaya, coconut and pineapple trees, a number of domestic animals like cows and several stray dogs, and the hazy emerald outlines of the surrounding mountains.
While the journey (left) was fascinating, it was not a joy-ride by any means, for the memories of what the prisoners suffered in the process of building the railway upon which our single gauge locomotive train rode, kept us silent, clicking pictures to capture on celluloid our memories of a visit to a venue that has become a modern place of pilgrimage.