APPENDIX THREE:

RETURN TO THE RIVER KWAI

Article from Argosy, October 1969, Volume 369, number 4

By John Coast

ALL we knew was that we were off to build a railway; some said into Burma. In Singapore, the Japanese had packed us into cattle trucks, thirty-one men to a truck with all the kit we possessed, and it took us five baking days and shivering nights to travel the length of Malaya and into southern Thailand before we reached the remote junction of Banpong, about fifty miles from Bangkok.

Our first impressions of Thailand in November 1942, were confusing. In the Banpong Transit Camp, the doctor had to wear gum boots to work in the hospital, because the flood water was about one inch below the stinking bed slats on which the unfortunate men suffering from malaria and dysentery lay. The POW-style lavatories, too, were as horrible as they were humiliating, though they were to be our norm for the next three years. In a sea of public mud, men squatted perilously in rows over deep bamboo trenches, buttressed only by bamboo, while the whole area around was alive with fat, white maggots.

We stayed one night in Banpong before climbing into trucks and hurtling off early the next morning to the base area proper, near the small town of Kanburi. Here we made our first acquaintance with the River Mekong and, significantly perhaps, we crossed it by the town jail where, at that time, Thai prisoners were sent out to work, heavily leg-ironed, giving us a foreboding that we had come to some sort of Devil’s Island. Yet, contrasting with these impressions were the Thai People themselves – laughing, grinning, shouting to buy our watches or few remaining valuables, their women-folk trying to sell us bunches of small bananas, tangerines and duck eggs. They gave to the scene an air of bizarre gaiety.

This again contradicted the now vicious tempers of our tired Japanese guards, whose barking voices added to the din and confusion.

We were loaded into cumbersome wooden barges and towed over the stream. On the far bank came the bellow: ‘Kurrah! Kurrah! Oru [all] men march!’ and we were on our way to our first camp, apparently called Chungkai.

As we scrambled up the far bank with our few possessions, we saw that the whole river was lined with houseboats whose cheerful Thai inhabitants hailed us incomprehensibly. The good life these simple people lived, so near and yet so enforcedly far from us, was to be a cause of envy until the end of the war.