|
The Bridge On The River Kwai
|
|
|
Thailand and Burma
|
|
Now all the time you have been reading this, you will have been imagining the picture. Almost certainly the images formed in your mind will come from those of the films you have seen. Indeed, the Western public's conception of the Death Railway has been formed, perhaps irrevocably, but quite regardless of what really happened, by the film, The Bridge on the River Kwai, made by Sam Spiegel in 1957, with David Lean as director.
It wasn't like that at all.
There were virtually no successful escapes from our camps, and no escapers getting back to Allied lines. The mythical British colonel who became so keen to maintain his men's morale that he did the enemy's work for them, had no foundation in fact. There are many other discrepancies. The bridge that is now shown to tourists near Kanchanaburi is certainly not that shown in the film. The producers rejected the request of ex-POW associations to say in the credits that the film was pure entertainment and not a re-enactment of reality.
It was based on a book in French, Le Pont de la Riviere Kwai, published in 1952, by Pierre Boulle, author of The Planet of the Apes. There are major differences between this book and the film, which has a different ending. The book is a semi-philosophical treatment of the follies and ironies of war; the film is simply a wartime adventure yarn with an unexpected twist. Boulle had not been a prisoner of war. A planter in Malaya. he had been interned by the Japanese in Saigon. He drew on his experience of French pro-Vichy officers. Boulle had been disciplined by them for his Gaullist sympathies. And his imaginative allegory fell into the hands of an equally imaginative filmmaker!
The film was actually made in Sri Lanka. In his book, To the River Kwai: Two Journeys, 1943, 1979, John Stewart relates his experiences as a technical adviser, largely ignored, in its making. He says that Boulle wanted to show the folly of man, 'the obfuscation of his ideals and the distortion of his goals.' David Lean, who had been a conscientious objector during the war, injected his own idea, 'that in the military mind there necessarily exists an element of criminality. For Lean, the career of a regular army officer was a life of wrongdoing.' Alec Guinness. who played the part of Colonel Nicholson, saw the whole thing differently again. According to Stewart, 'for him, the man was simply mad.' The disputes between Guinness and Lean were publicised in a programme on British Channel Four Television, in a feature on Lean on 4 May 1991, shortly after the latter's death.
Thus, while the film won acclaim as a spectacle of war adventure, people would see things in a different way if the film had never been made. Stewart adds that Lean 'didn't want to turn out an anti Japanese tract, and he soft-pedalled all the horror bits.'
The film portrays a British prisoner of war battalion working for the Japanese on the Thailand-Burma railway in 1943, Their commanding officer is a regular with a very literal interpretation of military law. Their task is to build a bridge across a river. The Japanese commander, Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), orders the British officers to work, as well as the other ranks. Colonel Nicholson refuses, and is beaten and shut up in 'the oven', a hole in the ground covered by corrugated iron sheets. But work does not proceed well, and the Japanese, who face a deadline for finishing it, release him, and agree that the officers should not work. Progress is still terribly slow, and Colonel Nicholson becomes very unhappy about the morale of his men, who spend most of their time fooling around instead of working seriously. He asks two professional engineers among his officers how they would build the bridge if responsibility were in their hands. They say the Japanese have really no idea how to do the job, and have chosen the wrong place for the river crossing anyway. The Colonel decides to take a hand in the operation, in order to do an efficient job.
The allies mount a commando operation to destroy the bridge. This is led by Shears, changed in the film to a US Navy survivor from the USS Houston, sunk in the Sunda Straits, in order to make a major part for William Holden. Shears had been in Nicholson's camp but escaped. As a prisoner he had posed as a naval commander, but in Ceylon is unmasked as from the lower deck. He is persuaded to return with the commando unit led by Warden (Jack Hawkins). The commandos are just in time to lay explosive charges under the bridge. The first train is heard chugging its way round the bends on the approaches to the bridge. Nicholson spots the charges. He is outraged that someone is going to blow up 'his' bridge. Here the book and film again part company. In the latter, in a Spectacular ending, both the bridge and Colonel Nicholson are destroyed. Either way, the story is pure fiction. Nothing much resembling it ever happened in real life.
There would have been no question whatsoever of the POWs taking over the planning of the bridge. The Japanese were far more competent at putting up such structures. Temporary wooden bridges were usual throughout the world in new railway construction in mountainous and remote areas, and Japanese railway engineers must have had plenty of experience in building them in such a mountainous country as Japan.
There is not actually a River Kwai as such to be found on the map, The Meklong is joined, about a hundred kilometres upstream, by a tributary called the Kwa Noi, at Kanchanaburi or Kanburi. The Kwa Noi rises near the Three Pagodas Pass, which separates Thailand from Burma. The railway runs along the north side of the Meklong as far as Kanchanaburi. There it crosses another tributary, the Kwa Yai, to proceed along the north side of the Kwa Noi to the Three Pagodas Pass. It was on the Kwa Noi that POWs worked for the Japanese. Beyond the pass, the railway ran into Burma, to join the previously existing railway to Rangoon, at Thanbyuzayat, 415 kilometres from the start near Nongpladuk.
The bridge that crosses the Meklong at Kanchanaburi is predictably enough shown to tourists as the 'Bridge on the River Kwai'. This is now a solid steel and concrete structure, the bridge the Japanese originally built having been partly destroyed by Allied bombers. There was also a wooden bridge alongside the original one, and POWs did work on this wooden bridge; but neither of these resembled the bridge shown in the film. If the film bridge had really existed it would have had to be very much further up the Kwa Noi, near to the Burmese frontier. There were hundreds of small bridges and culverts on the way to the Three Pagodas pass; but there was no further major river crossing on the Thailand side. The nearest real-life equivalent would be the Wampo viaduct, which snaked around a cliff face overlooking, but not crossing, the river, some forty miles east of Kanchanaburi. Many prisoners died there.
One legend about the Wampo viaduct is even more bizarre than the film. During construction, so the story goes, the British POWs introduced match boxes full of white ants into the trestles near the foundations. In spite of this, the Japanese ran trains over it for much of the rest of the war. But when peace came, and what was left of the railway was handed over to the Thai government, the viaduct collapsed, it is said, at the time of the ceremonial opening. I can find no present-day confirmation of this story!
No British commanding officer resembled the film character Nicholson. There were 'weak' senior officers who gave in to Japanese demands, and there were 'strong' ones who usually got themselves badly beaten up. None acted as the film Colonel Nicholson did, in turning right round and doing the Japanese's job for them. In fact there was very little that senior officers could achieve in the way of concessions, whether by threats, bluff, petitions or any other means. Whatever bargaining there was about numbers of workers, hours of work, numbers of sick, quotas to be filled, rations, medical supplies and punishments, the Japanese almost invariably got their way. and the POWs came off worst.
The maintenance of good morale was another matter. Some senior officers did a magnificent job. In that one respect, there were many who might be considered to be like the film Colonel.
The Sri Lankan scenery used in the film is not unlike that of the Kwa Noi valley, if the waterfalls and rushing torrents are rather overdone. Such little streams as there were might roar in spate in the rainy season, but disappeared in the dry season. The real jungle was not so thick — it was the sheer extent of it, for hundreds of miles, that made it an obstacle.
The Thai people were well portrayed, except the women were over glamourised, to make a female interest for the film. Generally, the Thais were helpful and sympathetic in real life. Not all could be trusted, but many took risks to help the Allied cause, or to perform simple humane acts.
The prison camp and work scenes are quite unrealistic. The officers and men in any one camp rarely came from the same units. By the time POWs got to the railway, they were dispersed into quite different groupings. Thus it would have been quite impossible for a battalion such as the film Colonel Nicholson's to have stayed together.
No film producer could have gathered together enough actors who were sufficiently gaunt and skeletal. An effort seems to have been made to find very thin men for the hospital scenes, but the rank-and-file prisoners looked positively healthy compared with real POWs. And even in very tattered uniforms they were vastly overdressed. Few real life prisoners wore more than a G-string, with some sort of scarecrowish headgear, and perhaps clogs or gym shoes. Many were barefooted and bareheaded. Officers might have possessed reasonable shirts and shorts, but certainly would not have worn the shirt on working parties.
There would have been far more officers in the camp than the eight or so depicted in the film battalion. Most troops captured in Singapore and the former Netherlands East Indies were Asians; and these were separated at the outset by the Japanese from their predominantly European officers. While the latter were put with British troops, there were large parties of officers without any troops of their own. In Japanese eyes, they had to work. There were far too many of them to be engaged only in an administrative or supervisory capacity. The film Colonel Saito does point out that officers were being made to work along most of the river. Efforts by senior officers to prevent officers being used as labourers were not at all successful. A strike against officers working would hardly have been supported by other ranks, who were not very sympathetic about officers sitting round and doing nothing while they themselves had to work extremely hard.
Most camps were very much larger than in the film, usually at least two thousand men, British, Australian and Dutch, with perhaps a few Americans, but never any Asians, who had quite separate camps. The film was thus wrong to show Indians and Malays in the hospital.
Colonel Nicholson and his men would have been lucky to march into a ready-made camp. Usually, prisoners found absolutely nothing waiting for them, except perhaps a small Japanese advance party. Their first task was to build their own camp, cutting bamboo out of the jungle and unloading atap thatching from barges on the river, living in the open until the huts were ready. Had it been a ready-made camp, they might well have found the hospital already full with sick from a previous party. The film does show hospitals realistically.
The film is glaringly wrong where graves and cemeteries are concerned. It shows graves with bamboo crosses beside the railway. In fact even the meanest camp had its own little burial ground tucked away somewhere quiet.
The film's Colonel Saito was played very impressively by Sessue Hayakawa. In the book, incidentally, the colonel is a much less honourable figure. But there are three outstanding errors in the portrayal of the Japanese military. Firstly, it is quite impossible that such a small camp would have had a colonel in command. I believe the commander of the whole of No. 4 Group, to which we belonged, was a colonel, and that covered about a quarter of the whole railway. A camp like the one in the film would have been commanded by a lieutenant, or maybe only a sergeant. The film captain was more true to life, but please note, Japanese officers were not bribable, not by prisoners of war.
Secondly, the commander might have had several Japanese NCOs with him, but the rest of his prison guards would have been Korean Gunzokus civilians in army employment who wore army-style uniforms, but with quite different insignia and working under quite different conditions from the army proper. As already mentioned, some of our worst treatment came from Korean guards.
Thirdly, since the prisoner-of-war administration and the railway-building administration were quite separate, the commanding officer of a camp would not have any direct involvement in construction. The only point of contact was that the POW administration was responsible to army engineers (and under great pressure from them) for providing enough men for the labour force. The POWs suffered greatly at the hands of the rank and file railway engineers, but rarely had any direct contact with their higher officers, who lived apart in separate camps. The whole plot of the film was thus based on a false premise.
The scenes of the work on the railway and the bridge, while good cinematically, are again technically at fault. The POWs did not do all the work on a single stretch of track, in particular they did not do track-laying, which was performed by a special elite party of railway workers, which moved up the line as the track was completed. The POWs prepared the ground, including some immense tasks of earth-moving, blasting and culvert building. There were many other technical misrepresentations of the same order, but, it would be pedantic to dwell on them. After all, the film was meant as entertainment.
The tragedy in real life was that the very considerable achievement of building the railway in an impossibly short time had to be at such great human cost. The ones that suffered were ourselves, and the Asian labourers — and a thousand Japanese soldiers too.
There is a rather ironical subsequent footnote to add. In September 1989 the Sony Corporation bought the Columbia Studios film and TV library for $3.4 billion. The collection includes The Bridge on the River Kwai. I wonder what they will do with it.
The Bridge on the River Kwai was by no means the only film about POWs in the Far East. Tenko and ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence’ are set in other backgrounds. The latter, based on Laurens van der Post's The Seed and the Sower, I come back to later, A film, with the same title, was made of the book Return from the River Kwai, by Joan and Clay Blair. As indeed with all the other films I have mentioned, it fails to convey the atmosphere of the railway POW camps, chiefly because producers could not find enough skeletal, demoralised and near-naked extras for the film. Instead it shows a bunch of fairly fit-looking men, dressed in ragged but relatively intact shirts and shorts, in constant revolt against their captors. Quite apart from questions of bodily appearance, few men other than officers would have worn a shirt on a working party or parade, and most had only G-strings, possibly as their only garments. The idea of revolt against the guards is a nice one to nurture — and there were many cases of stubborn resistance — but the truth is that we were far too ground down and demoralised.
Books
As well as films, there have been many books — let me cite just a few.
‘Death Railway’, by Clifford Kinvig, included some drawings of POW life by G.S. Gimson of Edinburgh. Facing page 67 is a charcoal sketch of a church service at Kanyu on Christmas morning, 1942. I think it was myself who conducted this service, though I cannot remember the makeshift lectern shown in the drawing.
‘The Other Hundred Years War’ Russell Bradden's: Japan's Bid for Supremacy, 1941-2041, takes as its theme the Emperor's surrender speech in August 1945, when he laid down a blueprint for Japan's recovery and success in the next hundred years. Japanese soldiers frequently assured me that they were engaged in a hundred years' war.
Ronald Searle's drawings, many of which are collected in ‘To the Kwai and Back’: War Drawings 1939-1945, capture the spirit of our imprisonment perhaps more than any photographs. Like Goya's vision of the Peninsular War, they are difficult to forget.
Hugh V. Clarke's ‘A Life for Every Sleeper’: A Pictorial Record of the Burma-Thailand Railway uses photographs which have to come to light fairly recently, taken by a Japanese army surveyor. Clarke had been with the Australian forces, and had returned to the railway in 1978.
It had always been believed that of those who escaped, none managed to get back to Allied lines. Denis Gavin, who had been a corporal in the East Surreys, in our original 6 Brigade, tells us in his ‘Quiet Jungle: Angry Sea’ how he escaped three times, and finally managed to get back to the advancing British troops before the Japanese surrender.
One of the best-known books on the general topic of Japan's behaviour during the war is Lord Russell's ‘The Knights of Bushido’: ‘A Short History of Japanese War Crimes’. This must have been written about the same time that David Lean's film was being made. It is a companion volume to his book on Nazi war crimes, ‘The Scourge of the Swastika’. The subtitle explains better than the title what the book is — a scholarly, legally oriented catalogue of war crimes based entirely on the assumptions of Western ethics. It certainly does not make any attempt to study the spirit of Bushido. But Russell considers that the uncivilised treatment of prisoners of war was the natural outcome of the code of Bushido, which may have been worthy before it was appropriated and perverted by the military from 1931 on.
According to this code, the Japanese warrior 'looked upon it as shame to themselves not to die when their Lord was hard pressed. The youth of Japan was brought up to consider that the greatest honour was to die for their Emperor, and that it was ignominious to surrender to the enemy. The only honourable conduct for the Japanese soldier was to fight to the death. He should never surrender. This concept of manly duty undoubtedly led to the Japanese soldier having an utter contempt for those who surrendered to the Japanese forces.'
One of the chapters is about the Railway. Russell argues that since the railway was purely strategic, POWs should not have been used on its construction. Now the route the Japanese used was surveyed a few years before the war, but the idea was abandoned as uneconomic. (Only that part of the railway in Thailand remains in use.) It was revived for military reasons, because the sea route to Burma via Singapore was hazardous for Japanese ships. Moreover, the speed of the construction was certainly dictated by military necessity; and this speed was the cause of a great number of deaths.
Russell's account is incomplete. He cites ‘A’ Force being sent from Singapore to start work from the Burma end, and ‘F’ and ‘H’ Forces from the Thailand end. But he says nothing at all of the other groups that preceded ‘F’ and ‘H’, which were relatively late arrivals on the scene. There is a lot more which could have been said.
Japan, having quit the League of Nations in 1932, got away with the 'China incident' in the eyes of the rest of the world. Hence, when they entered the Second World War, they perhaps became victims of their own established practices. Moreover, the army was quite unprepared to deal with the tens of thousands of western prisoners who fell into their hands. It seems doubtful if the ordinary Japanese soldier had received any other briefing than to kill them, or to treat them in any other way than they had treated the Chinese for a decade. A high proportion of the war crimes to which Russell refers were committed very soon after the Japanese entered World War 11, or by isolated and distant units over which Tokyo did not have much direct control. It is doubtful whether the authorities either knew or cared very much at first about what happened in the field.
Lord Russell cannot be ignored, but many of the cases of suffering were attributable to bad planning and organisation, and to levels of cruelty not out of keeping with the Imperial Japanese Army's own standards of internal discipline. Only a relatively small number were due to murder, torture and exceptionally sadistic behaviour. This does not excuse any ill treatment, but at least it should help to put the whole picture into perspective.
|
|
|
|
|
|
![wh_l_arr[1]](../assets/images/wh_l_arr_1_.gif "wh_l_arr[1]")
|
Previous Page
|
Next Page
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
