I really wanted to see what became known as Hellfire Pass and today the kids and I went exploring. We hired the services of Mr Satnam, a taxi driver (orange Izusu pick up with covered bench seats in the back) and off we were driven the 80km plus to the Australian funded museum.
I am not totally sure if there was one particular reason why I so wanted to go but I think it was a mixture of all sorts of reasons: geological fascination about how so much rock was shifted, a opportunity to look at man's attempts to tame jungle, the resilience of the human spirit, tseeing the results of the fall of Singapore, the chance to reflect on a broken political system, and many more reasons too.
The museum itself, founded following the rediscovery in 1984, of the infamous Konyu Cutting by a former Australian soldier, J G 'Tom' Morris, who was forced to work on it is a place that appeared to be very successful in aiming to give factual information and avoid blame. Its collection of photographs, artefacts, tools and video presentation succeeded in telling the story of what happened in the pass and the whole 415km railway by focussing on the resilience of the human spirit and the facts. We all took advantage of the audio guide and listened to recordings of POWs who laboured there as well as descriptions of the engineering feats that they accomplished with little more than hammers, metre long metal stakes, explosive charges and human labour. There is no doubt that completing such a length of railway in just 20 months was an achievement but it came at a massive cost with up to 90000 local labourers and 13000 POWs dying in the process. Sadly little was told of the fates of labourers from as far away as Laos who arrived hoping for good, well-paid work.
The main thought that I have been left with after this visit was that the broken system of the time was to blame. Conscripted guards beat and forced workers who had agreed to work on the line in exchange for wages and conditions that never materialised. These men then exacted the same treatment over the Allied POWs. But these guards, mostly Koreans conscripted into the Japanese army were dealt with in a similar way by their Japanese army bosses, who were in turn kept in line through the seemingly accepted use of institutional violence.
And why was the railway built in the first place? Seemingly to keep an invading army in Burma supplied in a more efficient and less hazardous manner than having to use the Straits of Melacca, which were being fought over and mined.
The line itself was only operational for a very short period of time before the end of the war and, from the evidence we saw today, very soon after the war was soon stripped of its metals and allowed to be recaptured by the jungle from the present end of the line in Nam Tok.
Thanks to funding from the Australian Government there is a 4km stretch of track bed through Hellfire Pass and beyond that has been kept in a walkable condition and today the kids and I, armed with plenty of water and sun cream walked the first 2.5km of it. The museum told us that as well as having to blast through huge amounts of rock the engineers and labourers had to build countless embankments and bridges, the latter mostly being built out of bamboo and wood cut from the jungle. In our 2.5km stroll we did walk across flat sections of track bed and preserved sleepers but we also had to clamber down maintained but steeply stepped slopes where bamboo bridges and embankments were once and had now long since gone. Standing at the lowest point of the walk where 'Three Tier Bridge' was we could only marvel at how a ten metre plus deep gulley had been filled with enough bamboo to take the weight of supply trains while also trying to picture the sheer physical effort and suffering that took place there around 70 years earlier.
The last stop on our tour was at the bridge over the River Kwai. The bridge, one of only eight steel bridges along the whole original line, still stands today and is now a massive tourist attraction. It it used by the State Railway Company of Thailand for three trains per day in each direction between Nam Tok and Bangkok. Visitors are encouraged to walk across and marvel not just at its construction but also the natural beauty of the area. We made sure we did all of this and crossed pretty much all the way across before we heard the distant sound of a diesel locomotive and aged carriages rumbling. A quick look up showed us that the last train of the day was wanting to lumber it's way across to the Kanchanaburi side of the river. The train came to a well rehearsed complete standstill and then gave an almighty honk giving us and the many other visitors time to move to the side areas of the bridge before it made its way very slowly across. As the train passed by I sat Trixie on my shoulders and she dished out high-fives and smiles to people leaning out of the train windows. Immediately after the fourth and final carriage passed us the kids dashed off behind the train following it all the way across to the other side with big grins and excited dashes.
I hope that those men who survived the building of the railway, and maybe even those who did not, might take a little piece of comfort from the squeals of delight of three Lawrences who have learned a great deal in one day and had the fun of chasing after a slow moving train.