Time-Line of the Burma-Siam Death Railway

This is a tentative time-line drawn up from the forum of one source. It is naturally not exhaustive but I will continue to add or correct to this database what I dig out of my archives. 

There are gaps in my findings that readers may want to throw some light, for example, we do know that steel girders on the Gemas - Gua Musang railway line was stripped for the Death Railway project but it is uncertain when was this undertaken or to which specific line this iron was used. Or, how was the DR steam engine transported to be restored and displayed in the Yushukan War Museum in Tokyo.

< An image of the Yushukan War Museum, Tokyo.

This initial list was prepared by Train Enthusiasts writing on the forum of www.angkor.com/2bangkok. I am thankful for their effort. 

16 September 1942

·   Start of works on the Burma Line (AKA Death Railway) (Nong Pladuk-Kanchanaburi-Three Pagodas Pass-Thanbyuzayat) by POWs.

February 1943

·   Wooden bridge across the River Kwai completed.

April 1943

·   Steel/concrete bridge across the River Kwai completed.

June 1943

·   Start on works for another Japanese military line from Chumphon to Kraburi and La-Un (Ranong) (standard gauge).

November 1943

·   Chumphon-La-Un Line completed.

25 December 1943

·   Burma Line opened (for Japanese military use only).

09 February 1945

·   Rama VI Bridge destroyed in allied air raid.

13 February 1945

·   Central spans of River Kwai Bridge destroyed in allied air raid.

05 March 1945

·   Thonburi Station destroyed in allied air raid.

19 March 1945

·   Parts of Chumphon-La-Un Line damaged in allied air raid. Other railway infrastructure damaged or destroyed during WWII: Makkasan Railway Plant, Railway Department HQ, Chiang Mai Station, Uttaradit Station, Chulachomklao Bridge across Tapi River at Surat Thani, Paramen Bridge across Nan River at Ban Dara.

1945 (before end of WWII)

·   River Kwai Bridge restored and re-opened.

June 1945

·   Chumphon-La-Un Line partially dismantled (km 28-30) by the Japanese.

14 August 1945

·   Mahachai and Maeklong Railways nationalized.

after August 1945

·   Chumphon-La-Un Line completely dismantled by the British military.

1947-1958

·   Nam Tok-Three Pagodas Pass section of Burma Railway dismantled.

24 June 1949

·   Nong Pladuk-Kanchanaburi section [53 km] of Burma Railway re-opened after track rehabilitation.

01 April 1952

·   Kanchanaburi-Wang Pho section [61 km] of Burma Railway re-opened.

01 July 1958

·   Wang Pho-Nam Tok section of Burma Railway re-opened.

16 June 1963

·   Nong Pladuk-Suphanburi branch line [78 km] opened (from leftovers of the Death Railway; originally intended to reach Lopburi, but never completed).

2003 / e2004

·   Short extension of the Burma Line: section between Nam Tok and Nam Tok Sai Yok Noi [1.4 km] re-opened. (for tourism purposes)

An Interview with a Child Survivor

In 2010, I met a woman in Taiping, Perak who turned out to be a child survivor of the Burma Siam Death Railway. On 6 March 2011, I interviewed her as appended below. The Sunday I went to her house she was attending to her garden patch and offered me tea and I took notes with her permission. She spoke unhesitatingly but towards the end she became withdrawn and terminated the interview abruptly. I had the sad impression that there were things she did not want to reveal.

The presence of children in the Death Railway is remarkable but as this photograph shows the presence of Indian women in the Labour Force it is entirely believable.
(Source: )

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"the Asian story"

What is the "Burma-Siam Death Railway"? It is a half forgotten Japanese Military project to build a railway connecting Siam and Burma so that troops could be mobilised to attack British India at its eastern frontier. The use of Asians as slaves was mandated by the high command of the Imperial Army which naturally had a high toll in human life. The post-War British propaganda machinery sought to downplay this atrocity for which there is evidence to point to Winston Churchill's War Cabinet. It is inexplicable to me how far reaching an effect this had had, that even today this wholesale slaughter of people has no official designation. Hence, I call it the Burma-Siam Death Railway.

Thailand has found the artefacts left behind not a grim reminder of an atrocity but a sanitised happy tourist destination. Even so, you may go to Kanchanaburi and travel up to the border Chiang Rai and look at the remnants. And if you do, say a prayer for the Asians, especially the Indians of Malaya who perished there.

This wall and relief was set up for tourists ...

Below is a "changkul" or hoe that was found and kept at the Kanchanaburi Museum

The BSDR is not an official name in any official classification. In fact, the BSDR is not classified as an event for academic research at all such as the "Bataan Death March" or the "Rape of Nanking". As a result, BSDR is always presented as an issue in Japanese atrocities against POWs, or an issue in labour mobilization, or as an achievement in Japanese war-time ingenuity. 

We cannot blame them because the Asians who were victims of the BSDR never really took ownership of this tragedy. 

For long I mulled over how to present my material and was overwhelmed at how nuanced it can become. So I am giving a basic outline of the event called "Burma-Siam Death Railway" today and then let my readers speak up on the evidences I am going to place here, somewhat randomly. I am sorry this is not a history book style organized work. 

Between 1942-1943, the Japanese Imperial Army decided and built an estimated 415 kilometres of railway from Ban Pong in Thailand to Thanbyuzayat in Burma. Built over extremely hostile terrain and disease ridden tropical jungle it was a feat of engineering and architecture. But an accomplishment at an amazing cost to human life – 13,000 prisoners of war, and 100,000 conscripted labour from various Asian communities then resident in British Malaya - Malays, Javanese, Chinese, and especially Indians who had migrated to Malaya and Burma. 

The Japanese call this railway “taimen”, meaning the Great Railway. and celebrated their achievement by commemorating a monument and even issued a coinage. The PoWs and Japanese soldiers and their Korean guards have been numbered and named by the various warring nations of World War 2, but the “romusha” as the Japanese called the Asian slaves, have been largely relegated to a few reluctant footnotes in the history books.

So severely marginalized were the Asian slaves, that none of their nations which achieved independence thereafter from their colonial masters even bothered to conduct an official inquiry. Thanks to post-War Japanese diplomacy and the British and their Allied nations’ reluctance to share compensation with Asian survivors; not to mention the clever propaganda campaigns to make Britain look good after the war, nations like Indonesia and Malaysia even adopted a policy not to inquire at all.

Commendably, much has been written of the PoWs who carry the motto “lest we forget” but the souls of the Asian slaves – Indonesian Javanese and Sumatrans; Malayan Tamils, Malays and Chinese; and Burmese tribals will not rest in peace until there is a closure. The lost will not return and their wounds will not heal until the world hears their story.

This site is dedicated to the Asian slaves who died on the Burma Siam Death Railway.

"Burma-Siam Death Railway"

Politicians and their historians have a penchant to downplay terrible deeds by giving it harmless moniker such as "incident" or "skirmish." Take for example, what the Japanese did in Nanking. This is called "Incident" in many historical works but nearly 250,000 people died over a period of a month. That is why the more loaded word "Rape of Nanking" is often preferable. In similar veins, my friend David Boggett says that he estimated that building the railway from Ban-Pong to Thanbyuzat amounted to about the same number of death! I do not want to compare it with the naming of other atrocities committed by the Japanese such as the "Baatan Death March" or similar incidents where it was POWs alone who died.

Burma changed its name to Myanmar in 1989; and Siam changed its to Thailand in 1939 but to the folks who were victims of the Death Railway remember it as Burma and Siam. They would say they went to Burma through Siam. In transliteration: "barmAvuKu pOnOm, siAm valiyA"! "Death Railway" is also the epithet the Tamils in Malaya coined for themselves: "marana rayilvE". In any case, that is the way my old folks referred to this mass murder of innocents and I see it is actually fitting that it should be remembered this way.

Hence we call this Japanese great war accomplishment BURMA-SIAM DEATH RAILWAY.
.

Hello!

When I was young, stories of the atrocities suffered by the people of Malaya in the hands of the Japanese circulated in my family. From those heartfelt stories told in the passing among my elders, I figured that my maternal grandfather and his elder brother were "engine drivers" with the Malayan Railway who were forced to work for the Japanese occupying forces. Apparently, they and their two grown-up sons witnessed a samurai style slaying of an European family in the bushes somewhere near Sungai Petani, Kedah that made them change their mind about working for the Japanese. As the story goes, they escaped from Bangkok (and that could be anywhere in Thailand for my folks) and travelled along the railway lines for two weeks and ended up at the Bukit Berapit woods of Taiping. They shaved their heads and eye-brows to escape recognition and lived off the land thereabouts. During this period, they contracted malaria of which my granduncle died in the jungle. Thereafter, his son died in an accident in one of Bukit Berapit's waterfalls. When they emerged from their hiding sometime before the defeat of Japan, it was told that they bore with them a large quantity of British chocolates! My own grandfather died many years later but I never met him but the one uncle whom I loved very much would have this debilitating bouts of malarial fever all his life.

About five years ago, by sheer accident I found a battered book of short stories based on the oral accounts heard by a Mr Shanmugam from Teluk Intan. I never got to meet this gentleman whom I believe is presently residing in Malacca. It was then I began looking for any proper research done by Asians and it dawned upon me that there were none. I wrote to a few people who were maintaining a website for the PoWs and received a somewhat curt replies, something like "go ask your own government." It occured to me that Mr Shanmugam's work was an important oral history that needs to be interpreted; and that my "own government" is not going to be really bothered. The Burma-Siam Railway is really an issue of the Indian immigrant population. Why should a Malaysian Government bother? I can understand the curtness of the PoW survivors because they lived and perhaps still do live in a world where everything political is interpreted along racial lines. I live in Malaysia.

I am grateful for Mr. David Boggett who was working in Kyoto-Seika University for his deep interest in the Asian aspect of the Railway. Mr. Ron Beattie the curator of the Museum in Kanchanaburi was not only sensitive to my request for information and were able to interprete for me the British racial mindset. Of course, there is a quasi-official narrative of the Indians in the Burma-Siam Death Railway which has been repeated over and over again by Indian writers in modern Malaysia. My work took me in different and surprising directions, some of which challenged the prevailing politically correct views.

On a tragic note, it needs to be mentioned that the questions I am trying to answer are simply academic since the people who would be most concerned about this would have died or are too old to care. But I want to tell this story, from the point of view of a man who is witnessing the passing away of a generation of Indians in Malaysia who has some remembrance of that calamitous years. Thousands of these people, mostly Indians and Malays, went out there forced and lured to slave at a military project, and died miserably away from their loved ones.

I call them voiceless because they were too poor to be of any political significance. Even the families of the victims or the survivors who were educated did not know better to sue for any compensation. After the War, the British in India were preoccupied fighting Indian nationalist forces to care about their Indian victims; the British in Malaya were too concerned about getting the Indians back into the plantation labour force to worry about rights and complaints; the Indian Government after their Indpendence in 1948 had an interest to shut up because it would besmirch their nationalist presence in Malaya, the Thais would naturally be not concerned because the victims were not their people; and after Independence in 1957 Malaysian leaders had their interest focused on the post-war Japanese foreign-aid. Everyone had an interest in keeping the matter out of official recognition except the victim.

My personal interest in this project is also motivated by my conviction that all minorities in the world live in various degrees of danger from extreme violence. I think the Indians in Malaya is a suitable subject, and the Burma-Siam Death Railway is a case in point.

As I think about this atrocity, I also feel that this is a rite of passage for those who would be a man in a world of violence and betrayal. We carry the wounds of our people in our hearts. In my family we light a lamp for the souls of our departed ancestors. I hope by telling these stories of my people, and remembering their pain, their souls may now rest in peace. It is not important that a monument should be built for them, monuments are built for heroes and heroism, not for betrayals and lost souls... they need prayers.