The REAL story of the Bridge on River Kwai, Kanchanaburi, Thailand

‘What a load of shite, eh?’ says Dick Lee, in a thick cockney accent. The octogenarian former-HQ dispatch rider is building up quite a head of steam about the seven-Oscar-winning Bridge on the River Kwai. It is 54 years since the movie premiered to worldwide acclaim, but he is not alone among ex-POWs who still voice their disenchantment.

Note well-fed PoW on left

A friend, Paul, remembers attending a screening for veterans in London in 1958 with his father, Captain Hugh Pilkington. ‘He turned to the doorman and said “what a lot of tripe”.’

But perhaps the biggest idea of how wide of the mark the script was comes from Colonel Philip Toosey, the commanding officer played by Alec Guinness. ‘He didn’t even recognise himself as the character portrayed in the movie,’ Julie Summers, Toosey’s grand-daughter and author of The Colonel of Tamarkan, tells me. ‘The film made millions of people think they were seeing something realistic when they were not.’ Unsuccessful entreaties were made to the film’s flamboyant producer, Sam Spiegel, to add a supertitle that branded the movie ‘fiction’.

So where did the movie go wrong?

Bombshell: there never was a River Kwai. Jing jing!

Blame Pierre Boulle. In 1952 the French author published his novel Le Pont de la Riviere Kwai. A POW himself, he’d heard survivors talk of building two bridges on Khwae Mae Klong; and many railway camps were along the adjoining Khwae Noi. The ‘khwae’ part obviously stuck in his head. But khwae is simply the Thai word for river. ‘So he inadvertently named it “River River”,’ laughs Summers.

In 1942, the Japanese desperately needed a railway link between Bangkok and Rangoon Burma to fuel their push into India. Use was made of 60,000 Allied POWs in Singapore and Java, a windfall labour force. A further 200,000 native labourers were also chain-ganged.

With the route fording rugged terrain adjacent the Burma border, 688 bridges spanning nearly 13 kilometres were needed along the 415 kilometre sector that became notorious as ‘The Death Railway’.

The rather ugly asymmetrical bridge

One bridge had to span 378 metres across Khwae Mae Klong at the provincial town of Kanchanaburi (‘city of gold’). Tamarkan, on the south bank near the confluence, was historically where the Burmese crossed the river in their bid to sack the ancient kingdom. The POWs swelled the usual population of 5000 and local vendors enjoyed a boom, trading much-prized duck eggs which supplemented meager rice rations.

Kanchanaburi was also headquarters of the Imperial Japanese Army 9^th Railway Engineering Division. ‘They was no mugs, they knew what they was doing,’ Lee reckons. Some of the best minds behind the Thai Burma Railway – including engineer Yoshihiko Futamatsu – went on to design Japan’s ‘Bullet Train’.

For eight months POWs toiled in blistering sun and driving downpours to complete The Bridge, with little mechanical assistance. Materials from an 11-arched steel bridge in Java were shipped up, and British-laid railway tracks in Malaya were recycled.

Train coming ... #$%&!!!

While never sabotaged with explosives, quality control was deliberately lax, the admixture of the concrete pylons diluted when guards’ backs were turned. The wooden service bridge adjacent was also home to a fine colony of white ants, introduced by the very men who’d built it.

One humorous episode involved two Japanese guards who disappeared during a lunch break, presumably consumed by the setting concrete. They were subsequently found, AWOL with their local girlfriends!

Nine POWs lost their lives during construction, but a further 400 of 2600 Australians, English, Dutch, and Americans based at Tamarkan perished from disease, malnutrition, and wayward Allied bombs. (The attrition was low compared to 24% of all POWs who died in Japanese hands --12,800 Allies and up to 100,000 Asians died building the railway.) Credit to Toosey, a strict disciplinarian and stickler for maintaining hygiene and dignity. And, unlike in the movie, he did encourage – even covered for – one escape attempt.

With little or no fanfare, the bridge was completed at the end of April 1943. After a foot regiment, the first train crossed May 1. Many POWs probably willed The Bridge to come tumbling down. But it stood defiant.

Again, unlike in the movie, The Bridge did its job, enabling 1000 tons of goods and munitions each day to reach Japanese troops in Burma, despite the RAF and USAAF trying to blow it back to Indonesia. Hitting a narrow-gauge rail line from several thousand feet proved tricky, so American military boffins devised the Azon: radio-controlled bombs with adjustable fins. BOOM! On June 24 1945, three curved spans were blasted into the river. A couple of months before war’s end, The Bridge was out of action.

Post-war, the bridge was repaired. Two rectangular spans lend an awkward asymmetrical look. With the movie achieving ‘classic’ status, the Seventies saw a new army arriving in Kanchanaburi – backpackers. Lee says: ‘There was nothing there at the time except a couple of rooms and a shack.’ They all wanted to see the bridge on the River Kwai. But there was no such thing. So Amazing Thailand responded by changing the name from Mae Khlong to River Kwai. Happy now?

The Bridge remains one of the biggest drawcards in a kingdom with a royal flush of drawcards.

Friendly but persuasive ...

Kanchanaburi -- three hours northwest of Bangkok and gateway to Erawan Falls, the Tiger Temple and Hellfire Pass -- is a buzzing low-rise town where everything screams ‘tourism’ … T-shirt stalls, friendly but persuasive post-card vendors, T-shirts, pirated CDs, T-shirts, hawkers cooking Unidentified Frying Objects, T-shirts, and bars where you can ‘get shit-faced on a shoestring’ (as one sign exhorts) while watching screenings of The Movie. Cue infectious Colonel Bogey March soundtrack. Pencil-sharp V8-engined long-tail craft cannon along the river like Brock at Bathurst. Floating karaoke bars pump out insidious music each evening, surely a war crime in itself.

There is a dramatic beauty. Depending on the season, the backdrop is either the purple peaks of the Burma Ranges, or a hazy grey painterly rendition. But, no, Thailand was deemed not jungley enough -- the film was shot in Sri Lanka (Spiegel sending the movie footage home on five separate flights).

The train line insinuates itself into the burgeoning tapioca-and-sugar cane provincial centre of 175,000 it helped foster. We hop off the third-class rattler at Kwai Bridge Station, where vintage locomotives and Japanese diesel truck-trains litter the station. 

‘Do you think that’s it?’ my travel mate, Kerry, asks.

The Bridge is not as heroic as it looks in the film. It does not have the iconic gravitas of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, nor the Golden Gate. Mainly because its matt-black arches sit at street level. We approach it side-on from water level for a more theatrical impression. ‘But that can’t be it … it’s metal,’ says John from Murwillumbah, derailed by the movie.

We walk the planks. They creak underfoot, as a scrum of tourists pick their way across the metal spans. When the train and tour buses arrive from Bangkok it is standing room only, as we sardine our way from one end of the bridge to the other. Yawning gaps open to a watery grave 20 metres below. ‘No OH & S issues here then,’ quips John.

The shady Theerawat

Khun Theerawat, a Tourist Police officer, confirms that once a year a careless tourist will fall into the river below.

 TOOOOTTT!!! A short, sharp horn blast. Expletives deleted! A yellow-and-red loco chugs into view. Fortunately it stops at the platform. Relieved, nervous giggles. The train inches gingerly forward to the slaps and groans of displaced planks. Further horn blasts shoo stragglers. Beaming faces peer from open sash windows. Motor-drives click and whir in syncopation with the train’s squeaking wheels. Two Muslim girls give a super-friendly wave. The train clatters above umbrella-ed vendor carts, past tapioca fields, then swallowed by the jungle ...

‘I walked into the jungle where a bit of the old railway was still lying,’ Lee says. ‘It was so silent, you think, “Did that all really happen?” Like a bleedin’ dream.’

More like a recurrent nightmare. Which is why, to me, the most resonant line in the movie is when Alec Guinness says: ‘I hope in years to come, when the war is over, people remember who built it and how they built it.’ Amen. Ironically, certainly not by watching that movie.

Now, if I could just get that damn Colonel Bogey March tune out of my head.

Question: been to Kanchanaburi lately? How do YOU find the place now?

Best books about the Death Railway Kanchanaburi Thailand

There are stacks. Literally.

I have personally read around 30 or 40 books, diaries, manuscripts, etc over the years of the POW experience on the notorious Death Railway Kanchanaburi, about 2.5 hours northwest of Bangkok (yes, it's in Amazing Thailand not Burma as some people erroneously think).

Central to this of course is the story of Hellfire Pass, which has taken centre stage in Thailand as shorthand for the atrocities, much as Changi in Singapore has over the years. However, it should be noted that Changi camp was deemed to be the camp to be in under the Japanese because if there was food, medicine, supplies, etc on the island, that's where they would be.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, and to save you wondering which of all of those books to read, here is my shortlist of the 'best' books about the Death Railway:

1. One Fourteenth of an Elephant - Ian Denys Peek.

After wading through so many books, feeling a sameness of tone and material, this was somehow fresher, and gives excellent stories from around the incredible Wang Po viaduct area where elephants were heavily used (they found each pachyderm could lift as much as 14 men.)

2. The Railway Man - Eric Lomax.

Can a book about such a dismal episode really be called delightful? Yes, I think so. Lomax was a trainspotter back home before the war, so offers a unique perception of the Death Railway in terms of the machinery, the engines, rail gauge, etc, all wrapped with a wonderful storyteller's eye.

3. And Dawn Came Up Like Thunder - Leo Rawlings


I may be a little biased with my choice here because I was given a signed copy by Dick Lee, a PoW who appears sitting on a log in one of the hundreds of illustration plates contained in this book. And I guess that's what makes this one different ... it tells the story of the atrocities up the line visually, with deft sketches, water colours, drawings and paintings.

4. The Colonel of Tamarkan - Julie Summers


The REAL story of the Bridge on the River Kwai. Do NOT buy Philip Boulle's Bridge on the River Kwai thinking that's how the famous bridge was built. Boulle was a PoW (well, he's French, they're good at that sort of thing), but not on this part of the railway ... he wrote from hearsay, even getting the name of the river wrong, jing jing. Summers is uniquely placed, being the grand-daughter of Colonel Toosey (the character played by Sir Alec Guinness in that movie) and sets the record straight.

5. Blue Haze - Leslie Hall

I include this not because it necessarily worked for me (I found it a little dry and for-the-record) but on the strength of recommendations by two authorities on the railway: Bill Slape, manager of the Hellfire Pass Memorial Museum, and Rod Beattie, proprietor of the Thai Burma Railway Centre.

Well, that's my five. I'm sure you agree with some, disagree with others, right? Let us know by leaving a comment here ...

ANZAC Day in Kanchanaburi Thailand 2011

"You'll be lucky to git a seat, eh," said Bungy, a Kiwi motorcycling mate of mine from Chiang Mai, when I told him I was going down to the ANZAC Day dawn service at Hellfire Pass.

I was a little taken abeck. I mean aback.  It's been only 3 maybe 4 years since I was there last for the service and it was something of a country derby then. Maybe 400 or 500 people on a good day (of which there were precious few for those poor saps working on the Thai Burma Railway, of course).

And so it was that was great unpleasantness that we knocked our little karaoke session at Pung Waan Resort on the head uncharacteristically early -- although some in the audience would say not early enough! -- and requested a wake-up call for ... gulp! ... 2.30am.

After a quick coffee, we hit the road, Route 323 the former Japanese marching trail, up to Hellfire Pass, arriving around 3:30am. The torches were already lit, flaring red against the bare rock face which gave the notorious cutting its name.

The hush was eerie ... I could almost sense the ghosts of ages past still hanging around this deathly gorge. And near the end of the cutting, I saw the first signs of progress: large screen TVs, with their geometric test patterns glowing incongruously in the pass. Then at the end,  where the cutting evens out and the track moves north into the jungle, temporary stands had been set up.

(Why do they call them stands when they're designed for sitting?)

We aced it. We got a seat on the rock steps adjacent the plinth where the ceremony was held. But the bad news was we now had about two hours to wait for the service. I got talking to the lady next to me. A Kiwi who had just visited the Kanchanaburi war cemetery the day before.

"Tregic, tregic, they were just kuds, gee whuz," she said.


I asked her about the clutch of medals that adorned her right chest (signifying medals won by someone other than the wearer). She told me the incredible story of her grand-father, Major Reginald Stanley Judson, DCM, MM and VC. That's right -- he won a Victoria Cross in the 1918 (and all the other medals in the short space of just 3 weeks).

I sat gob-smacked as she regaled me of his heroic deeds in essentially storming and capturing three enemy machine-gun nests, virtually single-handed (not literally single-handed like Lt Cairns in Burma who won his VC attacking the enemy with a sword even though one of his own arms had already been chopped off).

Before I knew it, it was already 5:30 and a few of the original PoWs from the railway were wheeled in and made their way to their VIP seats supporting each other, raising a spontaneous clamour of admiration from the crowd.

In front of us were a big group called Anzac Day Riders, mostly Aussie and Kiwi expatriates from Bangkok on an annual motorcycle pilgrimage. We gave the Kiwis a bit of a rubbing, I mean ribbing.

The pass filled up. 1500 was the best estimate of the crowd by most sources. Big enough, but certainly not crowded and distant as you might feel if you attended the Shrine in Melbourne or Cenotaph in Sydney.

"Those buggers died in a bloody beautiful place," said Ken afterwards, surveying the stunning valley of teak and bamboo. He could hardly stand upright for the weight of his own medals. He'd served in the Malayan Emergency, Borneo Konfrontasi and Vietnam. But he wasn't raving about the service he'd just attended: "Too much God," he said, fixing me in the eye. "Why can't they just tell a few uplifting stories about how they triumphed over this place ... it means more than a hymn and a prayer."

With the service over, it was then up to the Hellfire Pass Memorial Museum for the traditional gunfire breakfast. This involved a shot of rum. I think there was also coffee and Anzac biscuits served.

I bumped into Cyril Gilbert, who had been with A Force up the northern reaches of the Death Railway, which reminded me of the story he'd told me for The Missing Years of how he 'celebrated' his 23rd birthday. He was one of eight mates who had 9 herrings ... and spent half an hour dividing up the extra piece of fish so everyone got exactly the same amount, no more, no less than anyone else. Jing jing!

Then many boarded their buses, taxis, mini-vans and motorcycles, and headed the 60-odd kilometres south to Kanchanaburi to attend the 10am service there, and wander through the many excellent museums (see www.tbrconline.net), memorials and of course over the Bridge on River Kwai.

By midday the heat was blistering. Can you imagine those poor PoWs slaving shirtless in this summer sun day in and day out?

However, Kanchanaburi today offers a few creature comforts today that were not so readily available during the war. Crisply chilled Heineken in a row of fun bars, for one. "It's turning into rather a naughty town," confided one Aussie expat. (There were actually some creature comforts available in this very street during the war --  a great story told by Eric Lomax* of his Japanese guard handing him his rifle to hold while he ducked inside a little brothel for a short time!)

Soon good-hearted rowdiness oozed from pubs such as the One Mar bar, the Round the Corner Bar, and Ning Bar. Beer was drunk as quick as the girls could pour it. Even quicker sometimes. The stories came out. The yarns. The escapades. The laughter. The tears. The good mates made. The good mates lost.

I spent the afternoon and evening with the Anzac Riders who were brewing up their own brand of mischief, involving burn-offs with their thumping great gleaming chrome steeds out front, roaring down the road standing in the saddle, etc. Someone call the police! Oh, I forgot, the bar is owned by a policeman.

As an emotional release to the solemness of the morning service, this was perfect. Kanchanaburi is certainly a great base for Anzac Day celebrations for that reason alone, let alone that you're in the shadow of the historical railway running through the town.

Lest we forget.





* Read Eric Lomax's brilliant little book called The Railway Man, about his time as a PoW in this area. You can also check out The Missing Years - A PoW's story from Changi to Hellfire Pass by some bloke called Stu Lloyd.

Kanchanaburi - ANZAC Day dawn service at Hellfire Pass

I will be writing up several blogs on the Burma Thai Railway, the Bridge on River Kwai, Hellfiire Pass and Three Pagodas Pass shortly, but in the meantime a few photos from the ANZAC Day ceremony held on April 25 in Hellfire Pass, which is always a privilege to attend ...

Hellfire Pass (or Konyu Cutting) was hacked out of rock with minimal equipment
and has come to symbolise the atrocities of the Death Railway. It was originally planned to be a tunnel through this rugged terrain, but tunnelling equipment could not be shipped from Japan in time.

The crowds have been growing in recent years, estimated this year by
Hellfire Pass Memorial Museum manager Bill Slape to be around 1500.

Many in attendance are veterans themselves, with a lot of Vietnam war veterans in particular joining tour groups.

The TWO minutes silence is stunningly powerful among the soaring teak trees and the dawn chorus of  bird song.

This wreath sums up the sacrifice. 12,800 Allied PoWs died building the railway,
as did around 100,000 unheralded Asian labourers.

The guest of honour in 2011 was the Governor General of Australia, HE Quentin Bryce, seen here chatting to some of the former PoWs, including Bill Haskell, Lex Arthurson, Cyril Gilbert and Neil Macpherson.

An Aussie flag in the wall near the spot where legendary Aussie doctor Weary Dunlop's ashes are scattered.