When they think of the Pacific Theater in WW II, most Americans picture vast stretches of blue ocean, criss-crossed with aircraft carriers and kamikazes, speckled with the occasional jungle bloodbath on tiny islands like Guadalcanal or Saipan.
But Japanese ambitions went west as well as east. On December 8, 1941, as American sailors were still battling the flames at Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese Army invaded Thailand. Three days later, Burma. While America was still reeling, the Japanese forces were consolidating their grip on southeast Asia and preparing to attack into India.
This left them with the logistical problem of supplying and defending these relatively remote places, particularly as naval setbacks started to render oceanic lines of supply vulnerable.
In June of 1942, the Empire began an ambitious project to connect Bangkok to Rangoon by rail, linking two existing supply networks.
In slightly less than a year, the railway was complete. It was an astounding project in almost every respect–the number of miles, the primitive conditions, lack of tools, and local environmental factors presented unheralded engineering challenges. The terrain was no picnic, either. More than 600 bridges had to be built to cross rivers and chasms along the way.
One of those bridges was to become famous.
Pierre Boulle was a Free French fighter turned author after the war, and he had a story to tell about a maniacal English colonel forced to build a railroad bridge by his Japanese captors.
English and Australian forces had been captured in large numbers in the fall of Singapore. Many of them had later been forced to work on the Burma Railway, and one of those 600 bridges, Boulle thought, would make a plausible setting for his story, “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”
The novel is a work of fiction and Boulle is sometimes held to too high a standard for historical accuracy in telling a tale that was always more about personality than history. But Boulle’s experience as a POW was largely spent in a Hanoi jail cell, which gave him a fine appreciation for the brutality of the Japanese and the dynamics between captor and prisoner, but little engineering practice.
But by consulting a map he could see that the Burma Railroad largely followed the route of Khwae Noi River. Thai spelling being what it is, this ended up being Kwai (although, pronounced as English would seem to dictate, that actually means “water buffalo” instead of “tributary”) and Boulle assumed that the bridge he was modeling the construction of –Bridge 277–crossed it.
But in fact that particular bridge crossed a river called the Mae Klong.
After the success of the book and the film, the Thais realized they had a tourist bonanza on their hands, but the name of the river was inconvenient for promotional purposes. With a certain Asian practicality, then, they simply renamed the Mae Klong “Khwae Yai” which means “Big Tributary” and sounds close enough to “Kwai” for farang purposes.
The construction of Bridge 277 hadn’t been intended for the purpose of attracting tourists, however. In fact, more than 100 of the Japanese military officials involved in the Burma Railroad project probably wished that it would have remained unheard of, since they were prosecuted for war crimes committed during its construction. Thirty-two were sentenced to death for acts far more horrific than any Boulle’s detailed.
The track of the road was littered with corpses when it was finished. More than 110,000, most of them impressed Asian workers, perished during the year-long project.
The lion’s share of the attention, and the major draw for Westerners coming to the town, however, are the POW victims. Twelve thousand Allied prisoners of war perished along the line. Nearly seven thousand of them lay buried in the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery.
The cemetery is right along the main street in Kanchanaburi (another 1,693 rest in a smaller cemetery on the outskirts of town), unmissable.
A walk among the gravestones tells the tale of an army that all but evaporated after early defeats. Headstones reveal 30 year old privates and corporals, long-service men enlisted in the regular army during the calm interwar years when promotions came slowly, if at all. Captured after their first battles (ignominiously lost, in many cases, against Japanese forces only a third of their strength), many of those old men had almost no chance at surviving a long war in Japanese custody.
There is little rhyme or reason to the brutal deaths they suffered at the hands of the jungle and their captors, but one pattern emerges as you wander the grassy graves. There are improbable clusters of headstones all dated from June of 1943, approximately halfway through the project.
June is the rainy season here, and Japanese engineers, under time pressure, refused to slow construction work to allow for the realities of the jungle. The surging water table affected already poor sanitation in the camps, and a cholera epidemic quickly broke out up and down the line. In one camp alone, there were 219 deaths from 315 cholera cases in a one-month period.
Unlike the austere, dramatic rows of graves in American military cemeteries, the graves at Kanchanaburi are low and tucked close together and colorfully decorated with lovingly maintained flowers. A few understated plaques explain the conditions and circumstances of the line. Tourists walk quietly in the warm, humid air. A few leave flowers and notes: still paying respects to fathers, grandfathers, and uncles who died there.
The scene at the bridge itself is far more raucous.
For some reason, perhaps conditioned by the scenery of the movie and the harsh reputation of the railway’s construction, I had expected the bridge site to be outside of town, in heavily forested, mountainous terrain. But instead, you could see it right from our hotel. The Japanese engineers were no dummies–the crossing site is in the flatlands, easily accessed from both sides.
Where there are tourists in Thailand, there will be street vendors, and the town-side of the bridge is more like a street fair than a war memorial. Monica bought some fries to tide her over until dinner.
Although the bridge is still in use, there are no restrictions on wandering across it, and everyone does. In a concession to safety, several platforms are built off either side for frightened tourists to rush onto when a train appears.
Monica and I started across near dusk. In real life, no ad hoc Allied commando squad attacked the span, but American bombers took out two sections from the air in 1945. The rounded girders are the originals, while the straight segments are replacement sections installed after the war.
Before we had got even a third of the way across, a train showed up.
The deficiency in the safety arrangements became quickly apparent as the platforms filled up rapidly and we were left with nowhere to go.
The trains move slow and honk like they are heralding the apocalypse but there is no outrunning them. Attendants wave flags and let you know it’s coming, but you are pretty much left to your own devices to figure out what to do when there is nowhere safe to go.
Since neither Monica nor I are particularly hefty people, we opted to hug the rail and hope for the best.
There’s about a two foot gap between the rail and the side of the train, it turns out, but it feels more like six inches when the engine comes at you. Mindful of random gear sticking off the side, I kept my eyes low and focused on what was coming, but Monica, in my lee, as it were, was free to interact with the passengers who were leaning out the windows right over our heads.
She waved and held up her french fries. A man leaning out to take some pictures reached down and grabbed one for the road.
As the last car came alongside, I noticed something dripping from the bottom.
Leaking hydraulics? I wondered.
But as it came closer, it became clear the the liquid was coming out by design, not accident, and it certainly was not hydraulic fluid. One big tube and one little tube coming out of the bottom of the train were dribbling, in varying quantities, onto the bridge deck, and as they passed I felt it splattering on my legs and shoes.
“What was that?” Monica asked as it got her, too. “Wait… gross!”
Apparently someone had elected to use the facilities on board while everyone else was out gawking at the scenery.
“Yep,” I said. “Exactly. Let’s walk on the other side of the tracks, shall we?”
I felt like I took the whole splattering remarkably in stride–after all, poop splattering is hardly novel to someone who regularly works on marine sanitation systems–but something in my tone must have indicated otherwise to Monica. She stepped across the tracks then stopped, turned, gave me a look that said Stupid farang, what did you expect? and said, “It’s Asia!”
It is, indeed, Asia.
