- the most famous section of the Thai-Burma Railway, also known as the Death Road.

Death Road in Thailand

Road of Death is a railway between Bangkok (Thailand) and Rangoon (Burma) that was built by Imperial Japan during World War II to supply its troops in the Burma Campaign. This railway was called the Road of Death because hard labor was used in construction, and the working and maintenance conditions were terrible. As a result, a large number of dead: 6,318 British, 2,815 Australians, 2,490 Dutch, 356 Americans and several Canadians.

The road was built in 1943. By the end of the war, the railway was in disrepair. The reconstruction took place in three stages and ended on July 1, 1958. Only part of the road in Thailand has been restored and is still in use, about 130 kilometers out of 415.

The Bridge over the River Kwai is the most famous bridge on the Thai-Burma Railway, bridge number 277 over the Khwayai River.

The river was originally called Maek Long, but after the success of the 1957 film “The Bridge on the River Kwai” based on the novel of the same name by Pierre Boulle, the Thai authorities in 1960 renamed the section of the river above the confluence of the tributary Khuenoi (“small tributary”) to Khway Yai (“big tributary”) ").

The first railway bridge was wooden and was built in February 1943. The reinforced concrete bridge was built in June 1943. Allied aircraft bombed this bridge for 2 years, and only on April 2, 1945, the bridge over the Ma Khlong River was bombed. After the war, the two central spans of the bridge were restored in Japan and transferred to Thailand as reparations.

Tourists from all over the world come to Thailand these days. But not everyone is attracted here by the world-famous resorts. Relatives of thousands of soldiers who died in Thailand during World War II want to see a forgotten jungle prison.

With the hands of prisoners of war, the Japanese built a railway crossing here. The Bridge over the River Kwai was made famous throughout the world by the film of the same name directed by Lin David. About the “road of death” report NTV special correspondent Airat Shavaliev.

Once every half hour, the hot sun seats are occupied by tourists, and the old locomotive begins to move. The driver can drive his train and with his eyes closed, he crosses this river for 30 years. All around is a familiar tropical paradise, with pleasure boats sailing below and elephants grazing. But the tourists of the old train are reserved and sad. They come here not to rejoice, but to mourn.

Somkiart Chamnankul, train driver: “My mother told me that on this bank there was a camp for prisoners of war, who were building a bridge under the guard of the Japanese. So many people died here.”

The original bridge supports have been preserved. The British, Australians, Americans and Dutch, even in captivity, built conscientiously. Prisoners of war began to be transported to the west of Thailand in 1942, when the Japanese needed a railway from Bangkok to Burma.

The whole world learned about the construction after the war thanks to the film “The Bridge on the River Kwai”. The march of prisoners of war from this picture is still required to be performed at parades.

Even the war memorial in Thailand consists of frivolous bungalows. One thatched building is authentic camp guard tower. The museum curator is more suitable for the role of an exhibit; she saw with her own eyes how the railroad of death was built. Shows a photograph of the doctor who saved her life, then a ten-year-old girl.

Exhaustive labor, heat and tropical diseases killed people at the construction site every day. They didn’t even have time to bury them. 16 thousand prisoners of war and 100 thousand local workers died.

The museum does not remain without visitors. A lot of Europeans, Australians and Americans come. There are both Japanese and Germans here.

What would local residents earn if not for the legacy of war? The River Kwai is the only tourist attraction in this part of Thailand. There is a museum on one bank of the river, and a military cemetery on the other.

Dozens of Thais are caring for the graves, trying to stop the riot of local nature. The cemetery is a corner of Europe in the middle of tropical forests. Modest tombstones recede into the distance; prisoners of war were reburied after the war.

The Book of Memory contains dozens of reviews. The British and Australians thank you for your attention to the graves. Actually, grieving over death is not in the Buddhist tradition, but Thais respect the grief of others. Besides, 15 dollars for the crossing is not extra money.

The current version of the page has not yet been verified by experienced participants and may differ significantly from the one verified on December 15, 2017; checks are required.

Thai-Burma Railway, also known as Road of Death- a railway between Bangkok (Thailand) and Rangoon (Burma), built by Imperial Japan during World War II. The length of the road was 415 kilometers (of which almost 13 km (8 miles) were bridges). The road was used to supply Japanese troops in the Burma Campaign.

The possibility of building a railway line between Thailand and Burma was considered in the 20th century by the British government of Burma, but the proposed route, through hilly jungles with many rivers, was considered an impossible task. In 1942, Japanese troops invaded Burma from Thailand and retook it from Britain. To supply their troops in Burma, the Japanese used the sea route through the Strait of Malacca and the Andaman Sea. This route was constantly attacked by Allied submarines and required a large number of transport ships. The obvious alternative was the construction of a railway. It began almost simultaneously on both sides in June 1942. On October 17, 1943, both lines connected. But by that time, the situation at the front had begun to change in favor of the Allies, and the need for the road disappeared as the Japanese began to retreat from Southeast Asia.

The most famous part of the road is bridge number 277 over the Khway Yai River. The river was originally called Maek Long, but the success of the 1957 film “The Bridge on the River Kwai” (based on the novel of the same name by Pierre Boulle) prompted the Thai authorities to rename the course of the river above the confluence of the tributary Khuenoi (“small tributary”) to Khway Yai (“big tributary”) in 1960 tributary").

The first wooden bridge across this river was completed in February 1943, a reinforced concrete bridge was built in June. Allied aircraft tried several times to destroy this bridge, but only on April 2, 1945, bridge 277 was bombed. After the end of the war, the two central sections were restored in Japan and transferred to Thailand under reparations.

As a result of military operations, the road was rendered unusable, and there was no traffic on it for a long time. The reconstruction took place in three stages and ended on July 1, 1958. Only part of the road (130 km) located in Thailand has been restored and is still in use. Most of the line has been dismantled, and the rails have been used in the construction of other railway projects. Mostly tourists come here, as well as relatives and descendants of dead prisoners.

The northern sections of the road passing through the territory of Burma (now Myanmar) were deliberately not restored due to fear of an armed attack from Maoist China. Today they are swallowed up by the jungle. In the 1990s, there were plans for a complete reconstruction of the railway, but they have not yet come to fruition.

Hard labor was used to build the road. Working and living conditions were terrible. About 180 thousand Asian convicts and 60 thousand prisoners of war of the anti-Hitler coalition built the Death Road. During construction, approximately 90,000 Asian convicts and 16,000 prisoners of war died from hunger, disease and cruel treatment. Among the deceased prisoners of war there were: 6,318 British, 2,815 Australians, 2,490 Dutch, 356 Americans and several located in the city of Kanchanaburi, where 6,982 prisoners of war are buried.

Several museums tell the story of those who lost their lives during the construction of the railroad. The largest of them is located in Hellfire Pass - a place where many construction workers died. There is also an Australian memorial here.

A memorial plaque has been erected on the bridge over the Khwayai River in memory of the victims of Japanese crimes.

In 1942-1943, at the height of World War II, while the Soviet people were fighting the Germans and their allies, a completely different battle was taking place thousands of kilometers from Stalingrad and the Kursk Bulge. In the mountains of Burma and Thailand, under monsoon rains in the tropical jungle, overcoming cholera, malaria, dysentery, hunger and the monstrous cruelty of the Army of the Great Japanese Empire, a quarter of a million slaves built the railway. In just a year, the impossible task was completed, but the price for this most complex engineering project was paid at a terrible price. In total, more than 100 thousand prisoners of war and forced Asian workers died at this strategically significant construction site for Japan - 250 people for each of the 415 kilometers laid. The history of the Death Railway - in the review Onliner.by.

By 1942, the Empire of Japan was in a difficult situation. On the one hand, most of Southeast Asia was occupied: the Philippines, Indonesia, Manchuria, part of China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Hong Kong and even Singapore, the loss of which Churchill called “the worst disaster and the largest capitulation in British history.” Moreover, by the middle of the year the Japanese occupied Burma, coming close to India, the main pearl of the British crown. However, on June 4, 1942, the Imperial Navy suffered a crushing defeat at Midway Atoll, which became catastrophic for it and marked, as it became clear later, a turning point in the war in the Pacific.

Nevertheless, its outcome by the summer of 1942 had not yet been finally decided. In this regard, one of the important tasks (albeit unnoticeable against the backdrop of large-scale hostilities) facing the Japanese was to ensure unhindered supplies to occupied Burma. This British colony was to become a springboard for the coming attack on India. In addition, it was after its capture that Japan planned to cut off the supply channels of weapons and food for Chiang Kai-shek’s army, which fought against it in China.

The problem was that the Japanese were forced to supply their Burmese group only by sea, and after the defeat at Midway, this route was under threat. The imperial ships had no choice but to travel more than 3,000 kilometers, skirting the narrow and long Malay Peninsula and becoming easy prey for the Allied submarine fleet along the way in the Strait of Malacca and the Andaman Sea. The solution to the situation seemed to be simple: connect Bangkok and Rangoon, the capitals of Thailand and Burma, with a relatively short railway, making it the main source of supply for the army. However, the simplicity of this solution was deceptive.

The British thought about such a project in the 19th century, but after studying the route of the proposed railway, they shed tears and abandoned the idea. Between the Burmese town of Thanbyuzayat and the Thai town of Ban Pong, already connected to a functioning railway network, there were only about 400 kilometers, but only 200 of them were on conveniently flat terrain. In the depths of Thailand, the Tenasserim mountain range stood in the way of future builders, and the approaches to it were reliably blocked by seemingly impassable jungle and hundreds of streams, which turned into turbulent rivers during the rainy season.

The task of constructing a full-fledged railway line, albeit a single-track one, especially in an ultra-short time, looked impossible against such a background. This, of course, did not stop the Japanese, because they had free labor at their disposal, which could be easily sacrificed.

In total, for the construction of the Thai-Burma highway, the imperial army recruited about 60 thousand prisoners of war: British, Dutch, Australians and Americans. They were transferred from prisons and camps from all over the occupied territory of Southeast Asia: from Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. However, the main labor force (and then the victims) of this inhumane project were the local residents of Burma and the Malay Peninsula.

They were called romusya (“laborers” in Japanese). It is curious that the Japanese initially tried to recruit them on a voluntary basis. The Malays and Burmese were promised mountains of gold: normal working hours, salaries, housing, food and a limited duration of the shift (three months). The first builders sometimes even went there with their families, wives and children. However, the number of volunteers quickly ran out, after those who left disappeared, not returning either after three months or after six months. After this, the Japanese began to practice forced recruitment of “unskilled workers.” For example, the following scheme was used: free film screenings were announced in Malaya, during screenings the cinemas were blocked by soldiers, and all men of suitable age were forcibly sent into the jungle, where they essentially became slaves.

The mortality rate among them was appalling. Although the Romus were much better adapted to the tropical climate than prisoners of war of the Allied powers, they were practically defenseless against epidemics of infectious diseases. The allies had their own doctors who had ideas about the need for quarantine, prevention and hygiene. The unfortunate Asians, who often could not read or write, did not suspect this. They were even kept in separate camps that had no sanitary infrastructure at all. Of the 180 thousand “laborers,” in total, attracted by the Japanese to the construction of the Death Road, more than half died, remaining forever in the jungles of Tenasserim.

The road was built simultaneously along its entire length, and its chances of survival directly depended on the conditions in which the victim was lucky or unlucky to find himself. In flat areas with relatively simple terrain and better food supplies, it was still possible to endure the hardships of construction. In the mountainous areas, in the jungle, the task became difficult to complete, especially for the Russians and especially during the period of the so-called “acceleration”. From April to August 1943, the Japanese, concerned about the speedy commissioning of the highway, repeatedly increased the length of the working day (sometimes up to 18 hours) and production standards. People died in the thousands every day.

The unfortunate builders had three main scourges: malnutrition, unbearable working conditions and especially illness. A significant number of prisoners, having made the trek on foot to their camp at some 280th kilometer of the road, were already exhausted. At the construction site, they were housed in open barracks made of bamboo. Each of these typical buildings housed about 200 people, and one of them accounted for about two square meters of space. However, this was only the beginning of their suffering.

In the lowland camps, food was relatively adequate. There they had the opportunity to set up their own gardens, growing additional vegetables for themselves. It was simply impossible to do this in the mountains. The basis of the diet was regular white rice. It seemed to be accompanied by vegetables and meat, but the former were often an ordinary green mass, and there was simply nowhere to get meat. Food was cooked in huge metal pans, but during the wet season, simply maintaining the fire became a big problem. There was not enough food, especially for people doing the hardest physical labor. One of the surviving British doctors wrote in his post-war memoirs: “Hunger has become a normal part of our lives. Food was like sex, we just tried not to think about it.”

Any water had to be boiled first, because the threat of epidemics constantly hung over the work camps. About a third of all deaths of prisoners of war (it is impossible to establish statistics for “laborers”) were caused by dysentery and diarrhea, another 12% by cholera, and 8% by malaria. The most terrible disease was tropical ulcer. An open wound could harbor special microorganisms that literally ate the victim alive. The salvation was the removal of infected tissue. Sometimes this was done with an ordinary spoon, someone lowered the injured limb into the water, where the dead flesh was eaten by fish, someone had to do amputation - all this, of course, without the necessary medications, equipment and anesthesia.

But among the prisoners of war, the Japanese at least allowed doctors to work. Doctors knew that if cholera was suspected, the patient needed to be isolated; they knew that water simply had to be boiled and spoons had to be sterilized. Prisoners of war had relative discipline, hierarchy, and organizational structure, which made it possible to maintain order in their environment and distribute additional food among those who especially needed it. Help and mutual assistance really mattered. The mortality rate among prisoners of war was significantly lower: out of 60 thousand people employed in the construction of the Thai-Burma railway, 16 thousand died.

The Japanese achieved their goal. In just one year - from October 1942 to October 1943 - the Death Road was built and completed two months ahead of schedule. What seemed impossible to British engineers of the 19th century was achieved. The bare hands of slaves, using only the most primitive tools, built not only 415 kilometers of railway track in the most difficult geographical and climatic conditions, they also built 60 stations with all the infrastructure necessary for the passage of trains, their maintenance, refueling with fuel and water.

Thousands of prisoners of war and unnamed Romus "laborers" broke through the Tenasserim mountain range at the cost of their own lives. The pass where many of them died was named Hellfire. "He deserves such a name,- Jack Choker, a former British prisoner of war who left behind dozens of drawings he made in that terrible year, wrote after the war in his memoirs. - After all, he looked, no, he was for us the living embodiment of hell.”

A quarter of a million people who passed through this hell in a year built as many as 688 bridges, the most famous of which was the bridge over the River Kwai, glorified in the famous 1957 epic drama directed by David Lean.

An important survival factor for these builders was the attitude of the soldiers of the imperial army towards them. In total, the labor camps were guarded by 12 thousand Japanese military personnel, among whom were 800 Koreans (Korea during these years was actually a colony of Japan). Indeed, in most cases (though not in all) they treated both prisoners of war and Rorus with exceptional cruelty. Physical punishment, sometimes even leading to the death of prisoners, was part of their daily life. However, this attitude was largely a consequence not of some primitive cruelty, but of the traditional Japanese mentality.

Part of Japanese culture was unquestioning submission to elders - not only in age, but also in rank. Orders from superiors should not have been discussed, they simply could not be discussed. They should only be carried out without thinking about the causes and consequences. The Emperor, revered as a god, needed this railway. This means that it had to be built - at any cost, regardless of any sacrifices.

In addition, the Japanese (especially Japanese soldiers) had a completely unique perception of military duty. According to their code of honor, a real Japanese had to die in battle, and surrender was considered a disgrace. They treated prisoners of war of the Allied powers in the same way. They were not worthy of respect and human treatment, because they surrendered, did not die for their country, their king, their president.

Physical punishment was an integral part of life in the Army of the Great Japanese Empire. A general could punish an officer, an officer could punish a soldier, a Japanese soldier could punish a Korean soldier, and they only had the opportunity to beat to death people who were at the lowest level in their hierarchy - prisoners of war or Romus. The builders of the railway between Thailand and Burma especially hated the Korean guards, because they were the most cruel.

At the same time, Japanese originality was expressed not only in such issues, but also in a completely unexpected way. For example, all prisoners on the construction of the Death Road received money for their work, albeit small. This was absolutely unthinkable for the European theater of war. Soviet soldiers who were captured by the Germans were not considered human beings. In the Thai mountains of Tenasserim, the British also died in the thousands, but at the same time they were all paid for their work - from dawn to dusk, among clouds of malarial mosquitoes, under torrential rains or scorching sun, eating rotten rice, and then dying from cholera. Money with which later the prisoners of war could buy at least a little extra food from local peasants or the Japanese themselves.