Getting to the Railway * The Work * Diseases * Insects * Surviving
Getting to the Railway
The POWs began their suffering well before they ever reached
the Burma-Siam Railway. After the surrender of British Singapore to the
Japanese on February 15, 1942, the 80,000 people comprising the British
forces were taken by the Japanese to Changi Prison camp, which was located
on the eastern tip of Singapore island. After the POWs had spent fourteen
months in this prison camp, the Japanese began shipping them to Siam.
Already the prisoners were disease-ridden and malnourished. One POW said
that before he left Changi Prison, stray kittens were already looking
"temptingly delicious" (Searle).
Once the prisoners reached the mainland, they were packed aboard trains
with barely enough room to squat down. The heat in the cars was stifling,
and the men were only let out of the train at certain points to be fed
rice. After five days spent in these conditions, the POWs reached the
end of the line. From there, they had to walk the remaining distance to
their labor camps.
Sketch made by a POW of the hike to
the labor camp (Click to see larger view).
To the Kwai and Back: War Drawings 1939-1945
The distance of this trek varied depending on the location of the labor camps, but some groups had to hike 160 kilometers or more. The length of this march was 1/3 longer than the length of the more famous Bataan Death March, but the treatment that the POWs received was similar in both cases. If prisoners lagged behind the group they were clubbed. If this did not get them to move, they were left behind, and the Japanese guards assured the other prisoners that a truck would come along later to pick up the stragglers. However, these men were never seen again.
The
Work
Getting to the Railway *The
Work * Diseases * Insects
* Surviving
When they first arrived at the site of their labor camps,
all the POWs found was a rough clearing. Their first task was to carve
their own labor camps out of the dense jungle. Once this task was completed,
construction of the railway began.
The Burma-Siam railroad was cut through an inhospitable landscape. Many
parts wound through dense jungle, over mountains, and across rivers. At
least 680 bridges were built along the course of the railway. In many
parts, the track had to be cut into a mountain side or elevated along
a riverbank. The prisoners worked up to sixteen hours a day on very little
food. They supplemented their meager diets of rice with snakes and lizards
that could be caught in the jungle.
The task the POWs faced in building the Burma-Siam Railroad has been compared
to the building of the pyramids in terms of scope and difficulty. This
statement is especially true when judging the size of the task relative
to the tools at hand. The prisoners were given only picks and hammers
to break up large rocks and boulders. As one prisoner noted, "Our
working methods were barely out of the Stone Age" (Searle).
Dynamite was the only modern technology employed to alleviate the burden
of the prisoners, but even it was only used sparingly.
Sketch made by POW of rock-carrying
(click for larger view)
To the Kwai and Back: War Drawings 1939-1945
As rocks and debris began to pile up from the day's labors, the prisoners would form chains to carry buckets of stone away from the track. This was perhaps the worst of all the tasks. One prisoner expressed the feelings of many, calling the experience "soul-destroying" (Searle).
Diseases
Getting to the Railway * The
Work * Diseases * Insects * Surviving
With such a large group of malnourished and overworked people living in the jungle with very little health care or sanitation, diseases ran rampant throughout the prisoner population. Cholera and dysentery killed many prisoners; and malaria, beri-beri, and ulcers added to the misery of many more.
Prisoner's sketch of a man dying of
cholera (click for larger view)
To the Kwai and Back: War Drawings 1939-1945
Cholera was the most feared of all the diseases. It was
almost universally lethal and usually killed the POWs within twenty-four
hours of infection. To prevent more people from contracting the disease,
the corpses of the men who died each day from cholera were burned every
night. A British POW recalled that "our nights were ... illuminated
by the Bosch-like glow of the funeral pyres" (Searle).
At the end of his captivity, this same POW described his
physical condition:
"My leaf bound legs were puffed up with beriberi, large areas of
my body were decorated with a suppurating crust from some exotic skin
disease and one of my ankles was eaten to the bone by a large tropical
ulcer. Apart from this, my three-weekly bouts of malaria had left my skin
a pleasing bright yellow" (Searle).
A Japanese officer and engineer in charge of constructing a section of the railway also remembered the danger cholera presented to the POWs: "In the morning sometimes thirty corpses ... had been rolled out from the prisoners' barracks ... There was nothing you could do but cremate them. The healthy prisoners handled the corpses. One group cut trees for the fires, another burnt the corpses. Yet they didn't always burn. Here and there, the bodies just piled up like cordwood" (Cook).
The situation became so bad that when a passing fly landed on a prisoner's rice ration, he would throw his food in the fire rather than chance sickness. Keep in mind that all of these prisoners were already near starvation!
Insects
Getting to the Railway * The
Work * Diseases * Insects * Surviving
"It was not only the hard labour that nearly drove us out of our minds; it was also the insects, that curse of the jungle, and they ate us alive" - British POW (Searle).
POW's attempt to deal with lice and
other insects (click for a larger view)
To the Kwai and
Back: War Drawings 1939-1945
A wide variety of insects plagued the POWs, from mosquitoes and biting flies to lice, bedbugs, and millipedes. "It was probably the non-killers that made our lives the most miserable. At night after work, tired as we were, we were kept awake by the swarms of bedbugs that wandered over us, sucking our blood and nauseating us with their smell when we crushed them. Day and night the lice burrowing under our skin kept us scratching. Sometimes giant centipedes wriggled into our hair when we finally got to sleep and stuck their million poisonous feet into our scalps as we tried to brush them off, setting our heads ablaze" - British POW (Searle).
A giant, poisonous centipede.
Source
Surviving
Getting to the Railway * The
Work * Diseases * Insects
*Surviving
The POWs building the Death Railway had to survive in two
ways. First, and most basically, they had to survive physically. This
meant covering wounds with strips of large leaves once bandages ran out
and catching small jungle animals such as snakes and lizards in order
to supplement a meager diet.
Secondly, the POWs had to survive mentally. Many POWs wrote in journals,
sketched pictures, or sang to take their minds off of the work. Others
wrote detailed records of the atrocities committed by the Japanese and
buried them. After the war, these records were recovered. They played
a crucial role in some of the war crimes trials that took place after
the war's end. All of these activities were forbidden by the Japanese
guards, and discovery could result in a beating or in death.
Many prisoners also had "out-of-body" experiences during their
time on the Death Railway: "On many occasions there would come a
bizarre moment when the mind liberated itself from the body and went off
independently into the most incredible flights of fantasy. This detachment
of the mental faculties from the miseries of the flesh may have its parallels
in drug-taking or religious trances, but for us it was an involuntary
act of self-preservation that protected some of us from going stark, staring
ravers, leaving us just mildly demented" -British POW (Searle).
This exhibit was researched and designed by Hill Davis.
This exhibit and museum were created during an introductory seminar on the Asia-Pacific War, taught at Wake Forest University during the spring semester 2002.
The material and opinions are those of their respective authors and do not represent the views of the University or the Department of History.