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Back Railroad of Death
Chapters (40)
  1. FOREWORD
  2. RAILROAD OF DEATH
  3. REFERENCE LIST:
  4. Railroad of Death
  5. PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION (1948)
  6. INTRODUCTION
  7. PART ONE: SINGAPORE
  8. CHAPTER 1
  9. CHAPTER 2
  10. CHAPTER 3
  11. CHAPTER 4
  12. CHAPTER 5
  13. PART TWO: RAILROAD OF DEATH
  14. CHAPTER 6
  15. CHAPTER 7
  16. CHAPTER 8
  17. CHAPTER 9
  18. CHAPTER 10
  19. CHAPTER 11
  20. CHAPTER 12
  21. CHAPTER 13
  22. PART THREE: BASE CAMPS AND LIBERATION
  23. CHAPTER 14
  24. CHAPTER 15
  25. CHAPTER 16
  26. CHAPTER 17
  27. CHAPTER 18
  28. CHAPTER 19
  29. CHAPTER 20
  30. APPENDIX ONE:
  31. APPENDIX TWO:
  32. APPENDIX THREE:
  33. APPENDIX FOUR:
  34. APPENDIX FIVE:
  35. APPENDIX SIX:
  36. APPENDIX SEVEN:
  37. APPENDIX EIGHT:
  38. APPENDIX NINE:
  39. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
  40. And The Dawn Came Up Like Thunder

Copies of the documentary are held at the BBC film archives, as well as the holdings of the Imperial War Museum. Alongside Return to the River Kwai John was also working on a couple of other documentary projects about the musical culture of Indonesia with David Attenborough. John’s documentary received very favourable reviews, sometimes in contrast with Lean’s film. He sent the following clipping (provenance unknown, from a second broadcast at Christmas 1974) to his long standing companion Laura Rosenberg:

‘The Bridge on the River Kwai (BBC1) was the season’s Distinguished Film. As nobody should ever have needed telling, this picture is a load of high-toned codswallop. It was depressing to see various people in the preview business recommending its thoughtfulness. Providentially a relevant documentary (Return to the River Kwai, BBC2) turned up to give the viewing audience an idea of what things were really like. John Coast, an ex-POW, had the unstudied eloquence which made the film’s expensive footage look like tat,’ adding that: ‘My enclosed clipping pleased my vanity and even more satisfied me as being evidence of what I wanted my film to achieve . . . God knows how many people saw it this time, but I’ve had quite a fan mail and most people thought I was too British fair to the cunning Nips—as we used to call them.’

In the original plan for the documentary, John proposed that Colonel Philip Toosey (‘Colonel Champaigne’), who had been the commander of Tamarkan camp and had given the command that officers should work alongside their troops to build a bridge across the river there, should feature both in the journey back to Thailand and as part of a round-table discussion, along with Pierre Boulle and Alec Guinness, who played Colonel Nicholson in the film. The documentary opens with a scene of tourists standing in front of a bridge at Kanchanaburi that is signposted as The Bridge over the River Kwai, though of course it is neither the bridge of Boulle’s novel nor an original bridge built by POWs. The film of the novel created many such misnomers, accepted by the public as fact.