On 16 January 1946, the British ordered Japanese POWs to remove a four kilometre stretch of rail between Nikki (Ni Thea) and Sonkrai. The larger number of British deaths overall reflects the fact that there were simply more British working on the railway than Australians or Dutch POWs. The remaining sailors and marines, including Marvin Sizemore, were captured by the Japanese and found themselves building the Burma - Thailand railway as prisoners of war. The prisoners were sent to various destinations throughout the Pacific and Southeast Asia to provide forced labour for the Japanese army, journeys that carried with them a taste of the nightmare to come. In mid-1942, large numbers of POWs began to be transported to Thailand and Burma for the construction of the Thai-Burma Railway. WAR Graves - Burma - Siam Railway On 6th December 1948 an expedition consisting of an officer, one Siamese interpreter, two police guards, one cook and one general duties coolie, left Kanburi for Takanun by motor boat. Frequently men were sent to work on the line long before their accommodation was completed. [9] Much of the construction materials, including tracks and sleepers, were brought from dismantled branches of Malaya's Federated Malay States Railway network and the East Indies' various rail networks. Max Heiliger-Laundering money for the Nazis. They were some of 42 000 Dutch military and naval personnel and 100 000 Dutch civilians who were captured when the Japanese conquered the Netherlands East Indies in early 1942. [30] Other nationalities and ethnic groups working on the railway were Tamils, Chinese, Karen, Javanese, and Singaporean Chinese. [44], The construction camps consisted of open-sided barracks built of bamboo poles with thatched roofs. The book Through the Valley of the Kwai and the 2001 film To End All Wars are an autobiography of British Army captain Ernest Gordon. Memorial sites along the route of the railway include the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery, where nearly 7,000 Allied dead are interred, and . Since the Netherlands East Indies had been under Dutch control for centuries, the Dutch POWs included not only Europeans but Eurasians, who had acquired full civil rights, and indigenous soldiers, including Sundanese, Javanese, Menadonese, Ambonese and Timorese. Estimates vary but the number who worked on the railway was possibly as high as 18 000. [17] A holiday was declared for 25 October which was chosen as the ceremonial opening of the line. The notorious Burma-Siam railway, built by Commonwealth, Dutch and American prisoners of war, was a Japanese project, driven by the need for improved communication to support the large Japanese army in Burma. With an enormous pool of captive labour at their disposal, the Japanese forced approximately 200,000 Asian conscripts and over 60,000 Allied POWs to construct the Burma Railway. [71], A first wooden railroad bridge over the Khwae Yai was finished in February 1943, which was soon accompanied by a more modern ferro-concrete bridge in June 1943, with both bridges running in a NNESSW direction across the river. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Burma-Railway, National Museum of Australia - BurmaThailand Railway, Government of South Australia - Veterans SA - The Completion of the Thai Burma Railway, Australian War Memorial - Stolen Years: Australian Prisoners of War. The Japanese would not allow the prisoners to construct a symbol (a white triangle on a blue base) indicating the presence of a prisoner of war camp, and these raids added their quota to the deaths on the line. More than a third of these men and women died in captivity. 69 miles (111km) of the railway were in Burma and the remaining 189 miles (304km) were in Thailand. Thanbyuzayat War Cemetery, at Thanbyuzayat, 65 kilometres south of Moulmein, Myanmar (Burma) has the graves of 3,617 POWs who died on the Burmese portion of the line. Much of the excavation was carried out with inadequate hand tools, and, because work on the railway had fallen behind schedule, the pace of work was increased. The Burma Railway, also known as the SiamBurma Railway, ThaiBurma Railway and similar names, or as the Death Railway, is a 415km (258mi) railway between Ban Pong, Thailand and Thanbyuzayat, Burma (now called Myanmar). In Saigon, the Brits accused Aussies of exaggerating conditions on the Railway. ARTICLE 30. [34] Approximately 90,000 Burmese and 75,000 Malayans worked on the railroad. Most of the railway was dismantled shortly after the war. [70], The bridge was made famous by Pierre Boulle's novel The Bridge over the River Kwai and its film adaptation, The Bridge on the River Kwai. In the War Cemetery at Thanbyuzayat in Burma lie those from the northern half of the line. The dawn ceremony was held for the prisoners of war (POWs) who were forced to work and died on the Burma-Siam railway during the Japanese occupation. The Death Railway is only one of the names describing the Japanese project built in 1943 to provide support to its forces during World War II. The rice was of poor quality, frequently maggoty or in other ways contaminated, and fish, meat, oil, salt and sugar were on a minimum scale. His account of the conditions and suffering endured by his fellow prisoners and himself makes for the most extraordinary and disturbing reading. [23] On 1 February 1947, two people including Momluang Kri Dechatiwong[th], the Thai Minister of Transport, were killed on an inspection tour because the bridge near Konkoita had collapsed. 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It is open to general traffic from Ban Pong to Kanchanaburi, about 33 miles.Japanese communications depended upon a long and exposed sea route to Rangoon via Singapore and the Strait of Malacca, and a road (quite unfit for prolonged heavy traffic) from Raheng through Kowkarelk to Moulmein. This gave rise to the name of "River Kwai" in English. Highlights. The largest of these is at Hellfire Pass (north of the current terminus at Nam Tok), a cutting where the greatest number of people died. The railway was to run 420 kilometres through rugged jungle. Two hundred men were housed in each barracks, giving each man a two-foot wide space in which to live and sleep. June 27, 2022, 5:24 PM. From British mathematician Arthur Thomas Doodson's Tide-prediction machine, and PLUTO (short for 'pipeline under the ocean' - supplied petrol from Britain to Europe), to the German's 'Rommel's Asparagus', discover 7 clever innovations used on D-Day. 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