Burma Railway
The Burma Railway, also known as the Siam–Burma Railway, Thai–Burma Railway and similar names, or as the Death Railway, is a railway between Ban Pong, Thailand, and Thanbyuzayat, Burma. It was built from 1940 to 1943 by abducted Southeast Asian civilians and captured Allied soldiers forced to work by the Japanese, to supply troops and weapons in the Burma campaign of World War II. It completed the rail link between Bangkok, Thailand, and Rangoon, Burma. The name used by the Imperial Japanese Government was Tai–Men Rensetsu Tetsudō, which means Thailand-Burma-Link-Railway.
At least 250,000 Southeast Asian civilians were subjected to forced labour to ensure the construction of the Death Railway and more than 90,000 civilians died building it, as did around 12,000 Allied soldiers. The workers on the Thai side of the railway were Tamils, Malays, and fewer Chinese civilians from Malaya.
Most of these civilians were moved to ‘rest camps’ after October 1943. They remained in these camps after the end of the war as they watched the Allied POWs being evacuated. Survivors were still living in the camps in 1947. They were British subjects who, without access to food or medical care, continued to die of malaria, dysentery and malnutrition. They had survived building the railway only to die in the ‘rest camps’.
In general, no compensation or reparations have been provided to the Southeast Asian laborers, and some has been provided to the Allied POWs, although the situation is complex. Japan signed a treaty and offered reparations to the Indonesian and Burmese governments, and the Allies provided some compensation to POWs and relinquished further claims from Japan in the Treaty of San Francisco. The 1951 compensation to Allied POWs was seen as lacking; one former POW was given £76. The United Kingdom gave reparations to the 60,000 Allied prisoners of war, but not to its colonial subjects.
Most of the railway was dismantled shortly after the war. Only the first of the line in Thailand remained, with trains still running as far north as Nam Tok.
History
A railway route between Burma and Thailand, crossing Three Pagodas Pass and following the valley of the Khwae Noi river in Thailand, had been surveyed by the British government of Burma as early as 1885, but the proposed course of the line – through hilly jungle terrain divided by many rivers – was considered too difficult to undertake.Thailand was a neutral country at the onset of World War II. On 8 December 1941, Japan invaded Thailand, which quickly surrendered. Thailand was forced to accept an alliance, and was used as a staging point for the attack on Singapore.
In early 1942, Japanese forces invaded Burma and British forces quickly surrendered. To supply their forces in Burma, the Japanese depended upon the sea, bringing supplies and troops to Burma around the Malay Peninsula and through the Strait of Malacca and the Andaman Sea. This route was vulnerable to attack by Allied submarines, especially after the Japanese defeat at the Battle of Midway in June 1942. To avoid a hazardous sea journey around the Malay Peninsula, a railway from Bangkok to Rangoon seemed a feasible alternative. The Japanese began this project in June 1942.
The project aimed to connect Ban Pong in Thailand with Thanbyuzayat in Burma, linking up with existing railways at both places. Its route was through Three Pagodas Pass on the border of Thailand and Burma. of the railway were in Burma and the remaining were in Thailand. After preliminary work of airfields and infrastructure, construction of the railway began in Burma and Thailand on 16 September 1942. The projected completion date was December 1943. Much of the construction material, including tracks and sleepers, was brought from dismantled branches of Malaya's Federated Malay States Railway network and the East Indies' various rail networks.
The railway was completed ahead of schedule. On 17 October 1943, groups of civilians violently transported from Burma were forced to commence working south, meeting up with groups of civilians taken from Thailand who were working in a northerly direction. The two sections of the line met at kilometre 263, about south of the Three Pagodas Pass at Konkoita. A holiday was declared for 25 October, which was chosen as the ceremonial opening of the line. The Japanese staff would travel by train C56 31 from Nong Pladuk, Thailand to Thanbyuzayat, Burma. A copper spike was driven at the meeting point by commanding General Eiguma Ishida, and a memorial plaque was revealed.
The Japanese Army transported 500,000 tonnes of freight over the railway during the course of the war. Construction camps housing at least 1,000 workers each were established every 5–10 miles of the route. Workers were moved up and down the railway line as needed. The construction camps consisted of open-sided barracks built of bamboo poles with thatched roofs. The barracks were about long with sleeping platforms raised above the ground on each side of an earthen floor. Two hundred people were housed in each barrack, giving each person a two-foot wide space in which to live and sleep. Camps were usually named after the kilometre where they were located. The worst months of the construction period were known as the "Speedo".
Post-war
Within a year of the Second World War ending, Britain retook Burma, Malaya, Singapore and the Straits Settlements, while facing bankruptcy. On 16 January 1946, the British ordered Japanese prisoners of war to remove a four-kilometre stretch of rail between Nikki and Sonkrai. The railway link between Thailand and Burma was to be separated again in order to protect British interests in Singapore. After that, the Burma section of the railway was sequentially removed, the rails were gathered in Mawlamyine, and the roadbed was returned to the jungle.In October 1946, the Thai section of the line was sold to the Government of Thailand for £1,250,000. The money was used to compensate neighbouring countries and colonies for material stolen by Japan during the construction of the railway. On 1 February 1947, two people—including Momluang, the Thai Minister of Transport—were killed on an inspection tour because the bridge near Konkoita had collapsed. After the accident, it was decided to end the line at Nam Tok and reuse the remainder to rehabilitate the line.
After the war, the railway was in poor condition and needed reconstruction for use by the Royal Thai Railway system. On 24 June 1949, the portion from Kanchanaburi to Nong Pla Duk was finished; on the first of April 1952, the next section up to Wang Pho was done. The two curved spans of the bridge which collapsed due to the British air attack were replaced by angular truss spans provided by Japan as part of their postwar reparations, thus forming the iconic bridge now seen today. Finally, on 1 July 1958, the rail line was completed to Nam Tok The portion in use today is some long. The line was abandoned beyond Nam Tok Sai Yok Noi; the steel rails were salvaged for reuse in expanding the Bang Sue railway yard, reinforcing the Bangkok–Ban Phachi Junction double track, rehabilitating the track from Thung Song Junction to Trang, and constructing both the Nong Pla Duk–Suphan Buri and Ban Thung Pho–Khiri Rat Nikhom branch lines. Parts of the abandoned route have been converted into a walking trail.
Since the 1990s various proposals have been made to rebuild the complete railway, but as of 2021 these plans had not been realised. Since the upper part of the Khwae valley is now flooded by the Vajiralongkorn Dam, and the surrounding terrain is mountainous, it would take extensive tunnelling to reconnect Thailand with Burma by rail.
Labourers
Japanese
Japanese soldiers, 12,000 of them, including 800 Koreans, were employed on the railway as engineers, guards, and supervisors of the POW and civilian labourers. Although working conditions were far better for the Japanese than the POWs and civilian workers, about 1,000 of them died during construction. Many remember Japanese soldiers as being cruel and indifferent to the fate of Allied military prisoners and the Southeast Asian civilians. Many men in the railway workforce bore the brunt of pitiless or uncaring guards. Cruelty could take different forms, from extreme violence and torture to minor acts of physical punishment, humiliation, and neglect.Trafficked civilians
Over 180,000 Southeast Asian civilians were forcibly conscripted to work on the Death railway. Limited record keeping on the civilian populations under British occupation has led to incomplete and insufficient recording of the names and families of individuals who were trafficked. Javanese, Malayan Tamils, Burmese, Malayan Chinese, and other Southeast Asians were trafficked by the Imperial Japanese Army to work on the railway, dying in its construction. During the initial stages of the construction of the railway, Burmese and Thais were employed in their respective countries, but the number of workers recruited was insufficient. In Malaya, plantation families were forced by Japanese officers to send their children to the railway and young healthy men were often abducted and trafficked to the railway.In early 1943, the Japanese advertised for workers in Malaya, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies, promising good wages, short contracts, and housing for families. When that failed to attract sufficient workers, they resorted to more violent methods, rounding up civilians, including children and imprisoning them, especially in Malaya. Approximately 90,000 Burmese and 75,000 Malayans worked on the railroad. More than 100,000 Malayan Tamils were brought into the project and around 60,000 perished. Southeast Asian workers were used to build the Kra Isthmus Railway from Chumphon to Kra Buri, and the Sumatra or Palembang Railway from Pekanbaru to Muaro. Those left to maintain the lines after the completion of the Death Railway suffered from appalling living conditions as well as increasing Allied bombing.