Thailand’s Death Railway: Symbol Of A New Anguish

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32320, 11 June 1970, Page 8

Thailand’s Death Railway: Symbol Of A New Anguish

. IBu ARNOLD ABRAMS) KANCHANABURI (Thailand). It is a lonely place and its citizens are dead, lying in neatly aligned graves each marked by a bronze tablet. There are 7000 of them. A memorial plaque speaks of their fortitude and sacrifice: the “valiant company” within. There is another memorial, not far away. Black iron, it straddles a sluggish river and carries rusting railway tracks, and is called the bridge on the River Kwai. It was built when Thailand was a nation looking outward, coveting a tract of Indo-China; today it is a mute precursor of another Thailand—a country now looking worriedly within itself and threatened from the very territories it once coveted so fiercely. When British. Australian, American and Dutch prisoners were set to work on this bridge in 1942, Thailand was a technical ally of imperial Japan, aligned against Britain and the United States. Twenty-eight years later, the bridge on the Kwai symbolises a nation whose policies have changed from expansionism in Indo-China to a "forward defence” movement whose linchpin, once again, is Cambodia. Thousands Killed The bridge is about 70 miles north-west of Bangkok. Bullet holes and shrapnel marks bear a hint of the horror which once lived in this place; the rail tracks shoot from the jungle then curve toward distant mountains and the Burma frontier about 100 miles beyond. The heat is oppressive. Once, the rail line which crosses the bridge was known as “Death Railway.” More than 116,000 men were killed and untold others maimed in building the bridge and the railway during the Second World War. They were victims of the Japanese “speedo” campaign—a frantic effort to put into service an overland supply line between Thailand and neighbouring Burma. The Japanese intended ultimately to use the

line for operations in British India. The line stretched for more than 250 miles, mostly through jungle, and the Japanese military authorities allotted one year to its construction. They gathered some 200,000 coolies, most of them Burmese and Malayan peasants, and 60,000 prisoners of war to work on the project. Work began in October, 1942, and ended 14 months later. Yet the railway never was fully utilised because of frequent breakages, sabotage and air attacks.

The treatment accorded the forced labourers was to horrify much of the world. Poor shelter and insufficient food, sickness, beatings and malnutrition took the lives of 100.000 peasants and 16.000 prisoners. The colleagues of the fallen prisoners recorded the deaths and buried the bodies. The coolies stayed where they dropped unburied and unremembered. Aerial Attacks According to official records, the bridge on the Kwai was put out of commission, although not totally destroyed, in 1945 after a total of 10 aerial attacks. Such was the daily tragedy of the bridge-building task that some prisoners wept at seeing their work demolished. A little way from the bridge site is Kanchanaburi Cemetery, one of three set aside in Thailand and Burma for victims of the Death Railway. It is an unostentatious burial ground: the 7000 simple bronze tablets are testimony enough. About 50 yards from the bridge, almost obscured by the encroaching jungle stands a memorial built by the Japanese captors in 1944, when the tide had turned and the world was grimly taking note of the manner in which imperial Japan treated its prisoners. A 21-foot concrete pillar in a concrete plaza, it is enclosed in barbed wire—evidence of the exquisite sense of irony, or monumental insenitivity, of some nameless official. Whichever, it holds a plaque with the inscription: "In order to console the Deceased who had been laboured along the ThaiBurma railway during World

War 11, this memorial was built by the Japanese Army in 1944.” Perhaps more consoling to the dead, however, are the few visitors who come to this place. All are asked to sign a cemetery gupst book. Many are ilioved to record their despair. Today, new battles are being waged in Cambodia and Laos and South Vietnam, even in parts of Thailand. And at the cemetary near the bridge on the river Kwai, with the 7000 bronze tablets and the guest book of the

dead, visitors vent their anguish. “The absurdity of it all,” inscribed Ralph Harvey, of California. “What can be said?”, wrote Ganis Corke, of Sydney,, Australia. “Everything we do is wrong,” said William Deusch of Massachusetts.—lndonesia Press Agency. The photograph shows a lone peasant cycling over the bridge over the River Kwai.