The Bridge on the River Kwai

The Bridge on the River Kwai is famous in Thailand thanks to the David Lean movie of the same name but the real story of what happened the building of the bridge during World War II is far different from what’s depicted in the film.

In fact, the real story concerns the Thai – Burma Railway aka the Death Railway and whose symbol is the Bridge over the River Kwai.

During the Second World War, an estimated 140,000 Allied military personnel were captured by Japanese Imperial Forces and held in a network of camps stretching from Rangoon (Burma-Myanmar) down through Malaya, Singapore, Sumatra and across Indonesia.

More than 180,000 Asian civilian labourers and over 60,000 Allied POWs were forced to live and work in some of the worst conditions imaginable.

As the majority of the work took place in Jungle conditions, humidity was constantly high and temperatures could reach 40 degrees C (104 F) at midday.

The railway was completed on October 17, 1943. It had been built at a rate of half a mile a day in little over a year. More than 12,000 Allied prisoners, roughly one man for every sleeper along the 415 km of track and a shocking 93,000 Malays, Tamils, Burmese, Javanese and Thai labourers died in its construction.

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