Combat Trains_2of8_Death Railways
Transcript
00:00100 years of global war can only be understood by uncovering the story of these revolutionary
00:11machines.
00:18They carried terrifying weapons that made the beach out of loving hell and brought millions
00:26of men to the heart of the conflict.
00:30It was the first time in history that anyone had ever used a train in conjunction with
00:35moving troops to a battlefield.
00:39They saved many lives at great risk.
00:43Ambulance trains are vulnerable both in the station and on the rails.
00:46The bottom line is this is a train in a war zone.
00:53But they also inspired terrible cruelty.
00:56The Japanese wanted to build this railway regardless of the cost in human lives.
01:03My father looked out that little window and he announced to everyone that we're heading
01:08for Poland.
01:11The scale and extent of the Holocaust would not have been possible without an efficient
01:17and functioning railway.
01:20These metal monsters transformed the art of war.
01:25The locomotive's speed and power could mean the difference between victory and defeat.
01:55On the 15th of September 1944, three U.S. submarines north of the Philippines spotted
02:01figures in the water covered in oil.
02:04The submariners expected the men to be crew from the Japanese cargo vessel the Rakuyo
02:09Maru they torpedoed three days before.
02:12But as they helped them on board, the Americans were shocked to hear British and Australian
02:16accents.
02:18The Rakuyo Maru had been no ordinary vessel.
02:21It was one of the so-called hell ships transporting POWs for the Japanese war effort.
02:28And they were just treated like cattle, just crammed into these ships and then sent to
02:34Japan under terrible, terrible conditions.
02:37The exhausted men told the Americans about their ordeal and how they'd survived not just
02:43the sinking, but the building of an extraordinary railway between Thailand and Burma, a railway
02:50that had cost thousands of lives.
02:53When we were parading on many, many occasions, we lined up and at one side we put down the
03:00body of whoever had died during the day.
03:02Suddenly you'd be beaten up, but you wouldn't have any idea why.
03:07It was the first time the world found out about the brutal conditions on what soon became
03:12known as the Death Railway.
03:15This is the story of one of the greatest engineering feats of the Second World War, but also one
03:21of the cruelest.
03:24The need for a Thai-Burma railway became more urgent after the events of Sunday 7th December
03:301941.
03:32Two hundred Japanese planes attacked and effectively eliminated the American fleet at Pearl Harbor.
03:39At exactly the same time, Japanese forces attacked British bases in Hong Kong, Singapore
03:45and Malaya.
03:46Hitler, at war with Britain since September 1939, declared, we now have an ally who has
03:52never been vanquished in 3,000 years.
03:57Japan had signalled their intention.
03:59They wanted to be the major power in the Far East.
04:03Japan's at war basically as a grab for empire, grab for land.
04:07It had grabbed Manchuria in China in 1931, it had been at war with China since July 1937,
04:14and to prosecute that war, Japan needed raw materials and supplies.
04:19These were either being denied by America and the other Western allies, or they were
04:23in danger of being denied.
04:27Harold Atchley was a young British officer stationed in Singapore.
04:31We were told by senior officers that the Japanese couldn't see at night and they were bad soldiers
04:39and all the rest of it, absolute nonsense.
04:42The British and Australian forces in Singapore were ill-prepared and under-equipped.
04:47On February 15, 1942, after a brief fight, they surrendered to the Japanese.
04:53Well, the fall of Singapore was probably the bitterest blow that the British Empire ever
04:57had, because the British surrendered to a far smaller force of Japanese troops.
05:03And it was such a humiliation.
05:05After the ceasefire, I returned to Division Headquarters and I seem to remember sleeping
05:15for the best part of, I don't know, 12, 14 hours, and I woke up to the sound of Japanese
05:21voices.
05:22The British walked in, literally walked in, and marched us through the city, where they'd
05:31put heads on the top of poles.
05:36The victorious invaders found themselves with a vast number of prisoners of war, 32,000
05:42Indians, 16,000 British, and 14,000 Australians.
05:47More than half would die in captivity, many of them on the death railway.
05:54Only six months after Pearl Harbour, the Japanese army controlled most of the Far East.
05:59It's been described as an eastern version of Hitler's Blitzkrieg.
06:04But Japanese territorial ambitions weren't finished.
06:08India was in their sights.
06:10By May 1942, the Japanese army had conquered almost the whole of Burma, and it was in a
06:15good position to invade India.
06:18But in June 1942, the Americans defeated the Japanese at the Battle of Midway.
06:25Japan lost control of the Indian Ocean.
06:27Midway really stopped Japan in its tracks.
06:32Now the only safe way to supply Burma was through Thailand, and the best way to do that
06:37was by rail.
06:39Remarkably, the Japanese had allowed for such an eventuality.
06:43They were building infrastructure as early as the mid-1930s.
06:48They came here in 1939 to survey these potential railway routes, just in case we went to war
06:55and just in case we needed this.
06:57A railway linking Burma and Thailand had been, the possibility of one, had been explored
07:02back in the 19th century.
07:04But it was felt it was actually an impractical proposition, partly because of the terrain
07:09and also the terrible conditions that the laborers would have to labor under.
07:14But of course, that didn't worry the Japanese at all.
07:17They are very dedicated.
07:19Their sole reason for being here is to build a railway.
07:23That's their primary objective, and they do that.
07:25Secondly, they are very skillful engineers.
07:29The Japanese had built railways all through mountainous Japan, so this sort of terrain
07:34was nothing new to them.
07:37On the 7th of June, 1942, Japanese Construction Order No. 1 was issued.
07:4350,000 Allied POWs were to be the main labor force on the Thai-Burma railway.
07:49In Singapore, British and Australian prisoners began to hear rumors that they were to be
07:54moved north.
07:56Some said somewhere more luxurious.
07:57It would be like a holiday camp.
07:58Great food.
07:59Three days' work.
08:00Three days' rest.
08:02By the time the prisoners of war were being sent up to Thailand to build a railway, they
08:14already knew what the Japanese were like.
08:18They'd seen their brutality, they'd seen their neglect of the prisoners of war, so they knew
08:24the nature of the Japanese, but they had no idea what this task was going to be.
08:30In the last six months of 1942 and the first months of 1943, thousands of men were taken
08:37from their POW camps and taken north.
08:40The trains are leaving Singapore Station at 4 a.m.
08:45We still have not the slightest inkling as to where we are going.
08:50We played the Bourne-Williams London Symphony yesterday.
08:54I wonder when we shall hear our music again.
09:05The POWs were sent to Thailand in enclosed steel railway wagons.
09:11You can imagine, in Singapore, probably 110 degrees.
09:16There was a lot of sun shining on metal steel trucks.
09:21It's unbelievable.
09:24It was really quite appalling.
09:26We were 30 per truck.
09:28There was not room for everybody to sit down at the same time, and if you wanted to pee
09:34or anything, you had to do it over the side, and those that were too sick to do it themselves,
09:40we had to hold on to them and then try and get them back into the wagon.
09:45We devised a route of moving around the truck through the gap between the door and the side
09:54of the truck, and it took half an hour.
09:58But nobody had a watch, and of course trouble started.
10:03It was an absolute nightmare, and that was for five nights.
10:09The POWs arrived at Ban Pong station in Thailand, exhausted and hungry, many of them seriously ill.
10:17But their journey wasn't over.
10:19The guards told them they now had a long march through the jungle.
10:23Most people already had dysentery, malaria.
10:29We had guides at the head of the column and at the rear.
10:34Sometimes they lost their way because there was not even a road,
10:38it was just a track through mountainous jungle most of the way.
10:42What we never did was to go on the outside of the column,
10:47because the jobs came down the column with a bamboo cane.
10:53And these bamboo canes are sharp as a razor.
10:57The POWs were marched to camps all along the proposed line.
11:01Some camps had to be built from scratch.
11:04Some had already been used.
11:06Harold Atchley was marched 200 miles to Songkirai, close to the Burmese border.
11:12Songkirai had been occupied by the sort of civilian workers where there had been cholera already,
11:20and one part of the area was, there were a lot of decomposing bodies,
11:29where we had no roofs, it was the middle of the monsoon,
11:33and we had to do everything, sleep, work, eat, in the rain.
11:39The POWs were not the only workers on the railway.
11:4380% of the workforce were Asian.
11:46The Thais were allies of the Japanese, so the Japanese had to look elsewhere for manpower.
11:52In the north, they used Burmese civilians, and in Thailand, Tamil Indians and Javanese.
11:58There are no official figures, but it's estimated something over 200,000 Asians were employed on the railway.
12:06And of the 200,000 employed here, about 90,000 of them died.
12:12It was a terrible, terrible death toll within the Asian community on the railway.
12:17One camp commandant told his workers,
12:20the Japanese are prepared to work, you must work.
12:24The Japanese are prepared to die, you must be prepared to die.
12:29But it would be the POWs and Asian slave labourers who'd do most of the dying.
12:37The Japanese army needed a railway to supply their planned invasion of India,
12:42and their workforce was mostly prisoners of war and Asian slave labourers.
12:47They were all under the strict supervision of Japanese rail engineers and their guards.
12:52So who were these men, well-educated and well-trained in construction techniques,
12:57but also sometimes violent and ruthless?
13:01Japanese engineers had a great international reputation before the war.
13:06One of the reasons that the Japanese engineering has suffered in terms of reputation since the war
13:12is because of popular media which has portrayed them as incompetent,
13:15such as in the bridge on the River Kwai in which incompetent Japanese engineers
13:20have to rely on the POW engineers who are far superior to the British engineers.
13:23That is a myth.
13:25The Japanese engineers were often able to make surprising use of some of the minimal resources they had in the field.
13:31The success of the construction project was in part due to having two levels of engineering expertise.
13:38You have the army engineers who were supervised by engineers from Japan National Railways.
13:46They knew exactly what they were doing, how they were doing it.
13:49Rod Beattie has a copy of a map that tells us a lot about the Japanese railway engineers,
13:54but also about the bravery of their prisoners.
13:57There's a fascinating story behind this map here.
14:00On the Burma end, a group of Australian POWs saw the Japanese engineers with rolls of plans,
14:07as you sort of expect.
14:09And Japanese engineers finished with it, they roll it up, put them in their shoulder bag
14:14and then hang it on a hook in their bamboo office.
14:18That night, a private Fraser of the 2nd Force Machine Gun Battalion
14:23very quietly went back, reached in through this window and stole a set of plans out of the bag and hid them.
14:32In a construction site, there's probably only going to be one set of these plans.
14:37The repercussions would have been horrendous for the man who did steal them.
14:42So it's just fascinating that Fraser kept them, knowing what the consequences would have been.
14:49He was either very stupid or very brave, and we suspect he was very brave.
14:54The engineer's map reveals the many stages involved in building a complicated section of the Thai-Burma railway.
15:01As the first stage, your engineers go out and they will plot the levels of the natural ground surface
15:09of where your railway is going to go.
15:12Then the engineers have to think of the gradient, the curvature that will suit a railway.
15:17So you then design your finished level of your railway
15:23to try and have a compromise between the amount of excavation you may have to do
15:29and the amount of filling you may have to do in an embankment or bridges, whichever you're going to do.
15:35And then all the technical details are written down here below.
15:39And these figures are the difference in level between the proposed railway and your natural surface,
15:47so whether it's going to be a cut or a fill.
15:50So it's exactly what I would expect to see for a set of plans building a railway.
15:56Wonderful to have, wonderful to have.
15:59Private Fraser risked the severe beating or possible execution if he'd been caught with the map.
16:06This ruthless attitude to prisoners originates from earlier centuries.
16:10The Japanese military code is a result of the incorporation of the ideals in the warrior code of the samurai warriors,
16:17so the Code of Bushido.
16:19The Code of Bushido informed the way that Japanese officers and Japanese soldiers and civilians actually considered their sense of duty.
16:26So rather than betray the order of an officer, rather than not achieve their job, they would rather die first.
16:32When they looked at POWs, they applied the same principles to them.
16:37The POWs who are used are viewed as people who are the reverse image of what a proper Japanese soldier would have done.
16:44They did not achieve their tasks, they did not achieve victory,
16:47and then when it was clear that they would not achieve victory, they surrendered rather than die.
16:52So in the eyes of the Japanese military engineers, they could be used for almost anything they wished to use them for.
16:59The humiliation of these prisoners, I think, was to show the peoples of Southeast Asia that the white man was no longer the superior being that he had hitherto been,
17:08and somebody to look up to. Now he was a person of inferior status.
17:14It was pitiful because they would pick on a big fellow knowing that he couldn't return.
17:21I never ever saw anybody retaliate.
17:26One lived just for the day or the hour,
17:31and one thing, to my mind, you had to do was to make yourself always as inconspicuous as possible
17:40so that the Japs didn't see anything that you were not supposed to be doing.
17:50Despite the cruel treatment of the POWs, the Thai-Burma railway can be described as an engineering marvel.
17:57The railway was 258 miles long and had over 600 bridges, including the notorious bridge over the river Kwai.
18:07The only surviving wooden trestle bridge is also one of the most impressive.
18:12Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Parker is a serving officer with the British Royal Engineers and an expert in railway construction.
18:20So this is Whampoa Viaduct, about a kilometre long. This is the largest viaduct in this section.
18:27It was built in just 17 weeks by the British prisoners of war.
18:31The viaduct was built because the engineers were trying to maintain the gradients at a reasonable level
18:37so that locomotives could haul their loads up and down the grades.
18:40So rather than bringing the level of the railway down to river level,
18:44they've kept a steady alignment all the way through the section.
18:47Japanese engineers would have preferred a viaduct in this section to cope with rising levels in the river
18:53so that in the very wet seasons the embankments wouldn't be washed away
18:57and the viaduct and the trestle structure would cope with rising water levels.
19:00Even with modern equipment it would be many months of work to produce a structure like that
19:05and to have done it in just 17 weeks is a phenomenal feat.
19:20So this is a sketch by one of the prisoners of war, William Wilder, that he made of Whampoa Viaduct.
19:26This is quite likely the location that he would have used when he made this sketch during the building of the viaduct.
19:32The Japanese were quite happy to allow the prisoners to sketch and paint
19:36as long as it wasn't anything that they considered to be offensive
19:39or which might have been of military significance.
19:42So there are a number of sketches and paintings that exist
19:45made by the prisoners themselves of both the construction of the railway and life in the camps.
19:51By the time they were building the viaduct here at Whampoa,
19:54most of these men had been in captivity for about 12 months
19:58and conditions in the camps were generally not good.
20:02They were malnourished.
20:04Most of their clothing by this stage in the conditions had either been lost or had rotted away.
20:10So many of the men were just wearing a loincloth and nothing on their feet.
20:16Building a structure as long as the Whampoa Viaduct
20:19so close to the River Kwai meant that careful preparation was vital.
20:24Literally it would have been virgin jungle here when they arrived
20:27so they had to have cleared that right back to the rock face
20:30so that the Japanese engineers could get the alignment through for where the viaduct was going to be built.
20:36Every 16 feet, the POWs constructed plinths on which the trestles stood.
20:41On the top of the concrete plinth they'd then put a timber sill, a mud sill at the bottom of the trestle
20:48and the timber piles would then be erected on that.
20:51The strength of a trestle comes from these vertical uprights or piles.
20:56They transfer the load from the train deck above through the mud sill and the concrete plinth
21:01and into the bedrock below.
21:04Further strength comes from these diagonals known as sway bracing.
21:09They're designed to brace both sides of the trestle in both directions so that it's a strong structure.
21:15A lot of the strength of the trestle comes from this triangular shape.
21:18So the vertical upright is transmitting the load
21:21and then the hypotenuse of the triangle is preventing the top of that pile from moving from side to side.
21:30And then on either side you've got these angled piles here
21:35which are at an angle from the mud sill up to the top
21:38and they're designed to stop the lateral movement of the bridge deck
21:42as the train or the loader goes over the top of the bridge.
21:48The POWs who built the viaduct were based at a camp at the edge of the river.
21:53At the start of every day, barges would take them over the quay to begin arduous work.
21:58In some places they used elephants to drag the logs out of the jungle to the sites where they were required.
22:04But the rest of all of this was lifted into this position literally by block and tackle and by manpower
22:10and then erected including the sills across the top.
22:14These were people not in the best of health
22:16and yet they still built these remarkable structures throughout the length of the railway.
22:21Each day you knew that the next day wouldn't be any better.
22:27There was nothing to look forward to.
22:31Each time we went out as a group we carried our tools with us
22:37and at the end of the day we had to report under a guard
22:42and we had to check the same number of tools were there as went out in the morning
22:47and if they weren't all hell would break loose.
22:51And when we were parading on many, many occasions
22:56we lined up and at one side we put down the body of whoever had died during the day.
23:04The POWs, resentful at having to support the Japanese war effort,
23:10sometimes attempted acts of sabotage.
23:13We discovered some white ants' nests somewhere in the jungle
23:18and we decided to pack those around the main timber supports.
23:24I think being fully aware it might have taken 500 years for them to eat through that lot
23:31but it gave us a lot of satisfaction.
23:34The whole early part of the railway line was built by British prisoners of war
23:38so from that point of view you have to salute the work that they've done
23:42under duress, working for the Japanese engineers in dreadful conditions
23:47without the equipment and clothing and tools that we have today.
23:52You have to salute the work that they've produced. It's no small feat.
23:58The suffering of the POWs did not go unnoticed by the local Thai population
24:04and one man in particular would help save many lives.
24:11From June 1942 until October 1943
24:15Allied prisoners of war and Asian labourers were forced to build a railway
24:19between Thailand and Burma as a supply route for the Japanese army
24:24nicknamed the Death Railway.
24:27In a museum not far from the River Kwai are some lost possessions
24:31from the sites of the POW camps.
24:35The men who owned these artefacts were men of spirit and initiative.
24:40This is a radio concealed in a brush.
24:43The radio in Harold Atchley's camp at Songkrai was hidden in the bottom half of a water bottle
24:49and could pick up an American radio station
24:52but the problem was how to power it.
24:55A Japanese truck was parked every night in front of where the sentry sat
25:01with a fire in front of him.
25:03He was usually asleep and a group of us took it in turns
25:08to take a six-gallon food container, so very useful things,
25:13down to the cookhouse for food.
25:16But on our return we would take the battery off the truck, unplug it,
25:23take it up, plug it in to listen to the news
25:27and then take it back again in the six-gallon food container.
25:31And that, I may say, was done in the officer's hut
25:35in which one half of it was occupied by Japanese.
25:40No amount of bravery and ingenuity could shield the men from disease.
25:45The gruelling work on the railway, the climate and the lack of medical facilities
25:49meant that the camps were a place where illness and death were a constant presence.
25:54The biggest killer on the whole railway project was dysentery, malaria.
25:59Malaria affected probably 96% of these men at some time.
26:04Cholera, you were often infected and dead within 12 hours.
26:10Tropical ulcers feared because any little wound would very quickly turn into a septic sore
26:17and just this growing tropical ulcer.
26:20And often the only way to save a man's life or attempt to save a man's life was an amputation.
26:26Amputations were done by borrowing a sore from the Japanese
26:31who demanded that it should be returned to them properly cleaned.
26:36Your priorities are going to be for your own combat troops who are fighting in the South Pacific
26:41or on the Burma front or back in China.
26:44So if you do have medicines, that's where they're going to be distributed
26:48in preference to slave labour building a railway.
26:52For some, the mental strain of life on the railway was all too much.
26:57A lot of people committed suicide before they got to Bud.
27:02That was a strange part.
27:04But those who did go mental, they had to put them in bamboo cages.
27:12That's the worst thing I can remember.
27:18At night, the whales and the shelter.
27:24I thought, why have we to do that to these people?
27:29Harold Atchley sometimes had the grim task of burning the remains of those who died.
27:35You had a pile of bodies lying there to your right, as it were, the fires there.
27:41And sometimes you saw people you had known, practically unrecognisable,
27:45you'd seen two days ago, because they're the ones who died of cholera.
27:50That, I think, was the lowest point.
28:00The main town on the Thai section of the railway is Kanchanaburi.
28:05In this street lived a storekeeper who chose to risk his life to help the POWs.
28:11His name was Boon Pong.
28:13He realised they needed help when Japanese guards brought some POWs into his store
28:18to carry supplies back to the camps.
28:21When I found out that Boon Pong could speak English,
28:27I told him that he had suffered a lot of suffering.
28:32He was hungry, his body was weak, and most importantly, he had malaria.
28:41If he didn't take his medicine, he would have died.
28:46Boon Pong travelled to the camps up and down the river Kwai.
28:50He devised ingenious ways to smuggle in badly needed medicines.
28:54Some of the medicines had to be picked from thick fruits, such as oranges,
29:01and then wrapped in medicine.
29:04Some of the medicines had to be picked from cabbage leaves.
29:07Some of the medicines couldn't be taken in this way, because they were too big.
29:12For example, they had to be cut by hand, wrapped in cloth,
29:16and then hired people to carry them across the river.
29:19Boon Pong's 12-year-old daughter, Pani,
29:21helped her father smuggle radio batteries and medicines into the camps.
29:25The drugs needed to treat diphtheria had to be kept cool,
29:28so Pani hid them in a vacuum flask.
29:31Pani took them away, because Boon Pong never carried them.
29:37Pani took them away, and when he arrived in Japan,
29:41he said that his father had asked him to bring some drinks for him.
29:48Amazingly, the Japanese never discovered Boon Pong's extraordinary smuggling activities.
29:56Weary Dunlop, one of the doctors who received medicines and even surgical equipment,
30:02remained friends with Boon Pong after the war.
30:05Together they set up a remarkable scheme, still running today.
30:17I was a Thai medical student in Australia for two years.
30:22When I started looking for money to set up a fund,
30:25I realized that Japan was more profitable than me.
30:36The Thai-Burma Railway was not the only railway that the Japanese built
30:40by using prisoners of war.
30:42In March 1942, the Japanese captured Sumatra, an island rich in iron and coal.
30:48But they needed a railway to connect the mines to the existing rail network.
30:53The railway was begun by Asian slave workers,
30:56who were then joined a year later by thousands of British and Dutch POWs.
31:01The Imperial War Museum in the UK has wartime letters and artifacts
31:06from some of the British POWs.
31:09The building wasn't straightforward.
31:11The railway had been investigated as a possibility by the Dutch authorities
31:15in the 19th century and the 20th century,
31:17but it had been dismissed because it was practically impossible.
31:21The route was from Pakambaru in the northeast down to the western port of Padang,
31:26and it went through mountains, it went through volcanic rock.
31:30There was a lot of swampland and jungle,
31:32so the terrain itself was very difficult for the men,
31:36and they had very rudimentary materials to use to build the railway.
31:40So the conditions when they were actually building the railway
31:43under the tropical sun were very harsh.
31:46We were on the edge of a river, and one of our tasks, which was rather dangerous,
31:51was to guide any debris that was coming down the river
31:54through the arches of the wooden railway bridge.
31:57It's one of those trestle bridges.
31:59And if rubbish built up against it, of course it would destroy it,
32:05which it nearly did. It actually bent it.
32:08Few records survive about the railway,
32:10so the papers and artefacts in the Imperial War Museum are especially valuable.
32:15Here we have nails from the railway itself.
32:19The men didn't always have very much in the way of belongings by the end of the war,
32:24but what they could do is take something from the island around them,
32:27and it was an object that they could hold in their hands,
32:29perhaps show to family members and say to them,
32:32this is where I was, this happened, and it sort of verifies their experience.
32:38A letter written by the mother of a British prisoner, John Parsons,
32:42reveals how difficult life was for the workers on the Sumatran railway
32:46and those left behind.
32:48This she typed on March 29, 1943.
32:52I am most laboriously learning to type,
32:55as I understand that typed letters stand a better chance of reaching you.
32:59And she always wrote of the garden to John in her letters.
33:02And she writes that they're having lovely weather,
33:04and the garden is looking very lovely.
33:06The wallflowers are just coming into flower, and so are the arboretums.
33:10And then on the back of here, we find that John has used the letter
33:14as a continuation of his diary.
33:17So in August 1945, two years after receiving his mother's letter,
33:21he writes he's feeling very homesick for the garden crops
33:25and the heavy smells of the garden.
33:27Oh, heavens, surely this can't go on much longer.
33:30If it does, I'm afraid there'll be a great many more casualties.
33:35Well, you cope because you had to get on with living as best you could
33:39under what were very awful circumstances.
33:43Of course, you thought of your family.
33:46I had a girlfriend at the time. I often thought of her.
33:49But...
33:52No, you couldn't...
33:58You couldn't go into it too deeply
34:00because it's such a personal thing, isn't it?
34:04The story of what Rouse, Voisy and the other POWs endured
34:08building the Sumatran railway is not widely known.
34:11That's a big part of my work, is to make sure that this little part
34:15of the story of South-East Asia is told.
34:19There's a place that has become a focus for the commemoration
34:23of Allied soldiers who suffered in the Far East.
34:26It's a cutting on the Thai-Burma railway
34:29that more than earned its grim nickname, Hellfire Pass.
34:37The Thai-Burma railway, built as a vital supply route for the Japanese army
34:42at great cost to its slave labour workforce, had been well planned.
34:46Even before the outbreak of war, their railway engineers had concluded
34:50that there were five possible routes into Burma.
34:53They finally selected the route with the easiest terrain,
34:56but that still had some formidable obstacles.
34:59POWs were expected to build not only bridges and viaducts,
35:03sometimes they had to cut through a mountain of rock.
35:07The most infamous of all was known to the prisoners as Hellfire Pass.
35:12This site was chosen for a particular reason.
35:15Well, if you look at the land profile,
35:17you can see the mountaintop comes down here, dropping down,
35:20and then it rises to this hill on the right.
35:23So what you have is a natural V in the mountainside.
35:28The Japanese engineers pegged their line through that natural V.
35:33The total project in this section here, they actually started here in November 1942,
35:39and the railway ran through here in August 1943.
35:43So almost eight months by the time they finished this section of railway.
35:47The Japanese engineers had an established technique
35:50for creating cuttings such as hellfire.
35:53The first job is to clear all of the vegetation.
35:56Then you remove any topsoil that may be there,
35:59because that's how you dig it out, throw that away.
36:02Then with sledgehammers, you would break away any sort of outcropping rocks,
36:07and then you start drilling.
36:09Drill the metre-deep holes, charge them with dynamite,
36:13light the fuse and run.
36:15Boom.
36:16Shatter the rock, so it would clear the vegetation, clear the soil,
36:20clear the surface rock, drill, tap, blast.
36:23Drill, tap, blast.
36:27Embedded in the rock at Hellfire Pass is the broken end of a drill bit.
36:32For the POW responsible, it would have been a disaster.
36:35It's a precious tool for the Japanese.
36:37Anywhere they got a drill jammed, and they'd gone in and hit a fish or a jam,
36:42there'd be a severe beating, a thrashing, for getting that drill jammed.
36:46The conditions at Hellfire Pass were unbelievable.
36:51The Japanese officers used to sit at the top,
36:54and they would shout down to the guards down below.
36:58And suddenly you'd be beaten up, but you wouldn't have any idea why.
37:05By early 1943, Hellfire Pass posed a serious problem for the Japanese.
37:10The railway lines had been laid either side, but the cutting still wasn't ready.
37:15What happened next would give Hellfire Pass its name.
37:19They wanted this finished, so they went to two 12-hour shifts.
37:23They were working daytime and nighttime.
37:26The only way you can work at nighttime is to illuminate it.
37:29They did have some power lights, but most of the light came from fires.
37:33Most of the men here are of Christian origin,
37:36and as young Christians, we're brought up with our vision of hell
37:39as being the devil and the fires of hell.
37:43Hellfire got the name Hellfire Pass
37:46because of the night scene of the burning fires
37:49and the skeletal men working as slaves in front of the devil.
37:58Every year, there's a dawn service at Hellfire Pass
38:01to remember those who worked and those who died on the Thai-Burma railway.
38:06The Japanese wanted to build this railway regardless of the cost in human lives.
38:12We should all have a little think about what we, as a people, a nation,
38:17one nation or another, are trying to achieve,
38:20and what that cost will be to someone else.
38:24And commemoration and the memorialisation of the railway
38:29is that.
38:31It's so we don't forget some of the stupid mistakes we've made in the past
38:36and don't repeat them in the future.
38:40On 25 October 1943, the Thai-Burma railway was finally completed.
38:46The Japanese marked it with a solemn ceremony.
38:49But barely two years after the stunning attack on Pearl Harbour,
38:52the situation in the Far East was very different.
38:56The railway is almost redundant
38:58because the Americans have now gone very much onto the offensive
39:01and the Japanese now are on the defensive.
39:04They did actually launch an invasion of India in the spring of 1944,
39:10but that was repelled by British and Indian troops
39:13at Kohima and Imphal in the spring of 1944.
39:16But Rob Beattie believes that the line proved to be effective
39:20when the Japanese most needed it.
39:22During the main battle for Burma in mid-1944,
39:27in five months they shipped over 100,000 tonnes of supplies.
39:33So when they needed the railway, it did work very successfully for them.
39:38In the long term it had no effect on the outcome of the war,
39:42but for that period it was a very efficient transport route
39:46for the Japanese in Burma.
39:49By 1944, the railway was under almost constant aerial attack
39:53from the British and Americans.
39:55The Japanese devised intriguing ways to protect their line and locomotives.
40:00They developed decoy bridges and also bridges they take apart
40:04and put back together at night.
40:06So they take them apart during the day and they put them back together,
40:08keep them out of hiding, and then a decoy bridge that the Allies can bomb.
40:11With the locomotives, they often, in many cases,
40:16they dig holes in the sides of hills that they pull them back into.
40:19So by doing these things they hope to preserve the engines.
40:22But one of the problems is a steam engine gives off a lot of smoke
40:25and the railway line is a very straight line that's easy for an airplane to follow.
40:29So an engine that's actually caught on the open has very little choice,
40:33has very little it can do to avoid attack,
40:35and that's one of the pitfalls of running a railway if you don't control the air.
40:39Although the line was completed, the POW's ordeal wasn't over.
40:44Many were sent to Japan to work in mines and factories.
40:48And the only way to ship them was to crowd them into ships,
40:52and they were just treated like cattle, just crammed into these ships
40:58and then sent to Japan under terrible, terrible conditions,
41:02known as the Hell Ships because that's exactly what it was.
41:06It was a living hell on the ships.
41:08You couldn't start and they couldn't nail you.
41:12There was nothing.
41:14And you actually had to fight, I mean, actually first fight,
41:20to get a spot that you could get some rest, for instance.
41:28The Japanese did not mark these ships as carrying prisoners of war.
41:33By this stage in the war, the American Navy, and particularly their submarines,
41:38were attacking almost all of the Japanese convoys moving around the Pacific,
41:43and those submarines sank quite a number of the ships carrying Allied prisoners of war.
41:49One, two, two torpedoes.
41:54The noise of a man crying for the loved ones who couldn't swim.
42:03It's the way the love has been for a long time.
42:07It's estimated that 42,000 Malays, 40,000 Burmese,
42:12and 3,000 Javanese slave laborers died on the railway.
42:176,900 British POWs died, 2,800 Australians, 2,700 Dutch, and 680 Americans.
42:28It's said that a man died for every sleeper on the line.
42:46So I laid a wreath in memory of a sapper who died building the railway,
42:52not just for that single soldier, but for all of the members of the Corps of Royal Engineers
42:57who died building the railway in Thailand.
42:59So although the Wargrave Cemetery here is almost in the center of Kanchanaburi,
43:04there's a certain peaceful, pleasant feeling to it.
43:08The headstones are all laid out in their rows as if the men were here on parade.
43:12The cemetery itself is beautifully kept.
43:15Manicured gardens, they're tended every day by local people,
43:18and there's large numbers of tourists and relatives coming to pay their respects.
43:23So it really is quite a peaceful place,
43:25and a fitting memorial for those men who lost their lives building the railway.