Pan from tourist on bus to bridge

Superimpose Title:

ONE PAIR OF EYES

LS tourists on bridge Superimpose Title:

JOHN COAST

RETURN TO THE RIVER KWAI

JOHN:

All these people have come here for one reason. They’ve come to see the Bridge on the River Kwai and without the famous film of that name I believe the world would probably have forgotten by now that a real railway was ever built in Thailand and Burma. 25 years ago I was one of tens of thousands of P.O.W.s who did a little work on this railway. At that time this bridge was simply called Tamakam Bridge, and this area where I’m sitting round here, and where all the tourists are, was known as Tamkam Camp. But I must tell you that today fact and fiction have become a little confused on the banks of the Meklong River, here in Thailand.

And I’ve no doubt that these people take away souvenirs of our bridge and equate them with the one in the film.

[MUSIC IN]

2 shots from film:

THE BRIDGE ON THE

RIVER KWAI

Our Japanese had little in common with the Japanese in the film who were made out to be complete idiot as engineers.

[MUSIC OUT: ‘Colonel Bogey March’ Arr. Alford, played by the Massed Military Bands of The Royal Scots Greys and the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.

DECCA LK 4523-30”]

JOHN: (V.O.)

I asked the French novelist, Pierre Boulle, how he came to write his story on which the film was based.

PIERRE BOULLE:

That’s a terrible question, I have been asking myself for years and I’m not sure to have found the answer. All I can say, all I am sure is that at the beginning it was entirely different, it started like an abstract idea. The idea of human absurdity. I had the faint vision of a hero that would follow a very narrow line according to a strict code of honour, principles, and that would probably be the reason to perform acts in direct contradiction to that code of honour. At the beginning it had nothing to do with war, how it came to do that I think that’s an important step because I think it was bound to happen, being connected with human absurdity – it had to be, to bear a sort of relation with war.

JOHN:

But your story, nevertheless, was set against an historical background. It was therefore very important to you presumably that the background should be made as authentic as possible, that the supporting characters should be as genuine as possible.

PIERRE BOULLE:

When I was writing the Bridge on the River Kwai I knew, but I don’t know whether it was good or bad, but I knew it was going to be the book of my life, and I put every man, and I made every man just as I required them, and that was not going to let me stop my . . . whether it was very likely or not very like in the real. I was not going to let myself stop by such trifles?

JOHN:

Such trifles?

PIERRE BOULLE:

Yes.

JOHN: (V.O.)

The building of this railway was, in fact, a very real event. And this line is haunted by ghosts of more than 100,000 POW’s and Asian labourers – I reckon about one life to every four sleepers.

Top shot railway line from air going through jungle

MIX TO:

JOHN (V.O.)

Ironically, because of the feared loss of life amongst Asian Coolies in building such a railway, pre-war plans to connect Bangkok to Rangoon by rail had always come to nothing.

Our destination was Chungkai Camp, built by advance parties that had come up from Singapore some months earlier. These rows of thatched huts were to be the height of luxury we would attain to in the next three years.

Indeed in the bad months up country which were to follow Chungkai became synonymous with “home”.

This huge camp that once held 10,000 men has disappeared. Only the cemetery remains.

They’d march us out straight into the jungle, and here the Japanese had already blazed a trace that disappeared right out into the blue. The trace was about 50 yards wide, marked out by bamboo poles and the height of the bamboo poles should be the height of the embankment where we were working. The men were divided into three groups. First the shovellers, who down below dug out the earth.

Then there were the men who had the stretchers, primitive bamboo pole stretchers with sacking, and these were used to carry the earth up onto the top of the embankment.

JOHN TO CAMERA:

And on the top of the embankment the third lot were waiting to stamp the earth into position and to trim it down.

It may not have been terribly hard work, but it was exceedingly tedious and boring, and we knew already that this railway was pushing through as far as Burma. The job of the Junior Officer was to act as a buffer between his men and the Japanese. That is to say if ever there was a hint of a beating up, if ever there was any misunderstanding, any incident, any unpleasantness, we had to be there.

JOHN: (V.O.)

Our first real trouble came when the officers refused to go out and coolie with their men – just as in the Alec Guinness scene in the film. With the help of a giant Tamarind tree Lieutenant Inoh and I located the actual spot on which we prisoners had been paraded with machine guns threatening us, though I knew Inoh’s own camp had been a few miles north of Chungkai at the time, in an experiment to try to recapture something of the reality of that day, we took up once again what might be called our “respective positions” as Camp Commander and POW.

JOHN:

Supposing as in the famous film the officers had refused to go out to work and there were the machine guns trained on them. Now supposing we’d been heroes, and supposing we’d said we think we’re going to be shot but we’re not going to work, and we had been shot and quite a lot of us had been killed, would that have redeemed us in your eyes as P.O.W.s? Would that have you respect us as P.O.W.s more?

INOH: (Japanese)

NAGASE: (AS INTERPRETER)

I think at other time in my opinion, there have never been such a terrible scene.

JOHN:

Nothing like that did ever happen I agree, but the threat was there, there was a real threat from machine guns facing us.

[JAPANESE EXCHANGE BETWEEN INOH AND NAGASE]

NAGASE:

Will you explain once more the scene of the machine gun?

JOHN:

We were ordered off on this parade ground here in about three or four ranks, and we had a machine gun on that corner there and we had a machine gun on that corner over there.

NAGASE:

Is that true?

JOHN:

Certainly, it is absolutely true. In the film they came forward in trucks, but here they were in the camp, they were actually brought by hand and they faced us, and we were asked “will you work?” and it took us I think about three gallant minutes before we said “yes, we will work”. We didn’t think you were bluffing.

We were convinced that if we did not work that those machine guns would fire on us.

[JAPANESE EXCHANGE BETWEEN INOH & NAGASE]

NAGASE:

In my opinion that was only a threat.

JOHN:

Only a threat?

NAGASE:

. . . and if we were, ah you won’t work then you may have been beaten up maybe.

JOHN:

Oh been beaten up instead, I see. JOHN: (V.O.)

JOHN: (V.O.)

But I decided I’d also ask Colonel Knights, who commanded a very large POW camp if he thought the Japanese had been bluffing.

COL KNIGHTS:

In my opinion they certainly weren’t bluffing. It was all part of the Japanese very strict form of discipline. Had it been the Japanese that had disobeyed an order undoubtedly they would have been shot, it didn’t apply just to us. In my particular case I had prior warning of this order to be issued, and as a result had a consultation with the Senior Officers about it. As a result of this it was generally concluded that whether, if we decided to work or not, that work on the railway would still go on. Furthermore it was becoming a very grave hardship for the other ranks, they were being pressed unduly hard and we considered it only fair that we should share in their troubles. As a result we decided that we would participate in the work. But then, it is rather a sad thought that by doing so we had been guilty of aiding the enemy, which is not a very good thing to dwell on.

JOHN: (V.O.)

Sitting beside this cutting, named after a notorious Japanese engineer called Teramuto, and hearing that never-to-be forgotten train whistle, it wasn’t hard to recall the suffering of the men who had dug and dynamited it out a generation ago.

Ronald Searle so exactly reproduces the stoic misery on our faces. Of course the Japanese were now paying us!

The men received the equivalent of half-a-crown a week and the officers seven-and-six. Now we’d all become the paid coolies of the Japanese Imperial Army.

JOHN: (TO CAMERA)

Once it was agreed that the Officers should work they put us out first on building bridges, and here we were welcomed by Lieutenant Teramuto, whose opening phrase to us was “I will teach you to love your tools, or I will kill you.” It may not look very much at the moment, this bridge that was built by us with Teramuto, and it was later rebuilt completely, and necessarily, by Thai Railways. But working on this in the scorching sun and with most of us sick I’d say with dysentery, or malaria or beri-beri, is something that I shall never forget all my life.

The method of work was quite simple. We had a huge great pile driver, a lot of Officers and a few Japanese Engineers. The pile driver was right in the centre of the bridge, and on the top of the huge frame underneath which hung the weight was a small Japanese Engineer, in those little elastic boots of theirs, which they could clamber around with like anything. There were North, South, East and West officers hauling on ropes out there and out here, and the Japanese engineer in charge shouted out One, Two, Three and we pulled and we sweated and then Wham, down came the weight, and the teak balk was driven in. We felt, I can tell you, rather like the slaves of the pre-dynastic Pharaohs.

JOHN: (V.O.)

Although the slaves on the big bridge at Tamakam were still working in a base area, we’d all now been living on a diet of about 95% white rice for a year and the general state of health of everybody was wretched. I never understood why the Japanese, on purely practical grounds, however much they despised us, didn’t make better use of us as a labour force by keeping us healthier.

Since Sergeant-Major Seito, by chance with the same name as the Japanese Colonel in the film, was actually running Tamakan Camp while this bridge was being built I thought perhaps he could give an answer to this question.

JOHN:

Why was the health of the P.O.W.s allowed to deteriorate so very badly and rapidly?

[SEITO ANSWERS IN JAPANESE]

NAGASE: (AS INTERPRETER)

I think the health of the P.O.W.s in my camp is quite good . . .

JOHN:

Hmm, by the time the party of P.O.W.s came up here in November ’42, to Chungkai and Tamakam area, nearly every P.O.W. was suffering from some form of ‘A’ Vitaminosis, beri-beri, pellagra or something like that. We were in a very very weakened state already, by the time we arrived in Thailand, this was even from Singapore. Now, in a matter of general policy, why did the Japanese, if they wanted a labour force, not keep us healthy?

[ANSWERS IN JAPANESE]

NAGASE:

I think in my camp the Prisoners of War were quite healthy at that time and because in Kanchanaburi there were many food and also the many other facilities so the . . . I think the health of the P.O.W.s are quite good.

JOHN: (V.O.)

Japanese standards of “good” health and “good” food were comparative. For example, good food meant at that time the usual disgusting rice swill, but with a few shreds of old cow floating in it. Good health meant beri-beri and dysentery but not jungle ulcers infected with diphtheria as well.

DE WARDENER:

The Japanese wanted to send the sick off to the railway and it was the Medical Officer’s job, in fact about the only thing he could do, was to stop them being sent on the railway and if they rested they could probably recover. Well now, there they were being beaten up perhaps day after day by the Japanese who were trying to send the sick out onto the railway. You don’t think for one minute they would let any British Officer send the sick out.

JOHN:

Well this is a point that I want very much to come to. I would like to ask you in particular, did you ever come across a British C.O. who went insane in such a way that he could’ve gone into a hospital and persuaded sick men to go out onto the railway?

DE WARDENER:

No, no. In fact there was very little insanity or mental disturbance. I think people were tired and sick. I think its . . . insanity and mental disturbances occurred mostly if you were bored.

JOHN: (V.O.)

I left the base camp area in April ’43. Other P.O.W.s were already leapfrogging up country into new and ever remoter camps. We knew now that solid jungle or forest lay before us and that what we’d had so far had been easy. Some parties of sick men from Singapore, totally unused to our conditions, were doing forced marches of 20 kilometres a day heading straight to the Burma border.

Snakes were food: we ate them if we could catch them.

Another and more innocent looking danger continually surrounded us.

JOHN: (TO CAMERA)

This is a very good example of that evil stuff, prickly bamboo. When we had a lot of this in the sites where we had to clear our camps we really dreaded it. The reason is not difficult to see. If you had to clear out a thicket of bamboo of this type you would take your parang, or knife, and you’d fight your way in there and it would bounce, and when you get into the stems here you would find that they were all knotted at the top together absolutely inextricably. It would probably take five or six men to pull one of these heavy stems out, but the real evil of this stuff lay in its thorns. These awful spikes are needle sharp and when you were working in a clearing like this, or even if you were out in the jungle, this would go into you half an inch without you even feeling it, it is so sharp. And this led in its turn to jungle ulcers. You could have an ulcer in your calf, say, the size of a tennis ball at the end of a month, and we had hundreds and hundreds of legs amputated through jungle ulcers started by prickly bamboo.

JOHN:

One of the oddest things was that ever since we’d been captured the Japanese had left us to administer ourselves. We had to run our own camps, and to be responsible for our own discipline. And in the heart of the jungle, they hardly ever guarded us – they knew there was no escape. They’d simply dump our rations down and leave us to get on with it.

COL. KNIGHTS:

I had three or four Officers who were responsible for works, rations and other things. There were other Officers responsible for the discipline in the huts, and it was that standard that we maintained which in my opinion created quite a reasonable environment in Tarso.

Well of course there were bad hats in the camp, just as much as there are bad hats everywhere, and for those we had our ordinary orderly room procedure, where they were put on a charge and marched up against the C.O. – as they would have been in peace time, and in the first place our remedy was to fine the man so many days pay, which was the only form of punishment that we could inflict. Un - fortunately the Japanese became aware of this, and I was hauled up to the Japanese and told that this procedure must stop and that they were responsible for administering punishment, and in future any bad hats were not to be dealt with by me or in the camp itself but were to be brought to the attention of the Japanese. And of course one couldn’t accede to that, it was something that just wasn’t done as far as we were concerned, and after that the general procedure was to read the riot act with the chap concerned, to tear a most terrific strip off him, appeal to his good nature and by and large that had the desired effect.

JOHN:

The Japanese may have been disinterested administrators, but they were far from incompetent engineers and could produce stupendous engineering feats like this 800 yard viaduct at Wang Pho. Built in less than six terrifying months, it clings to the face of a cliff, above a big bend in the river.

NAGASE:

Mr. Coast you are always speaking about this Speedo, but we have some reason for that, because we must send many food and also much ammunitions to Burma, and so the Japanese Imperial Army headquarters ordered us to quicken this railway very much.

JOHN:

Does this mean the order came from Tokyo?

NAGASE:

Yes, and the order was absolute for the Japanese soldiers.

JOHN:

I see, and it wasn’t on a decision from the local command here building the railway?

NAGASE:

No. Oh, I must say something about that matter. You know the Commanders and soldiers in this field here has many time has protested the Japanese, the General Headquarters in Singapore and also the Imperial Japanese Headquarters in Tokyo, but we protested and we asked for postponement of the date to finish this railway, because the Commanders here know the conditions, I mean the miserable conditions of the P.O.W.s.

JOHN:

I see, I see.

NAGASE:

But they were all refused flatly.

JOHN:

What do you think about the film which depicted Japanese engineers as being both, I thought, stupid and very incompetent?

NAGASE:

Yes. I saw it, ah, two times, but that scene in that Bridge above the River Kwai was very funny and I think only a fiction. And you know the . . . I think you can judge the technology of the Japanese people. Ah, I mean since the war we have very big development in everything.

JOHN:

Indeed you have.

NAGASE:

And I think you can easily imagine that we can build this railway in a very short time.

JOHN:

It was what, it was about 400 kilometres in just under one calendar year.

NAGASE:

Yes, yes. We Japanese did it, we complete this railway only about ten months.

JOHN:

Ten months?

NAGASE;

But with the help of P.O.W.s, that I must admit.

JOHN TO CAMERA:

This bit of morass and the bamboo jungle reminds me most unpleasantly of the miseries of the monsoon. We were working in bamboo jungle very like this in 1943, when the rain fell upon us, and it stayed with us for five absolutely solid months. In fact it stayed with us until the end of the railway, until it was completed in October ’43.

In those grey days we woke to misty, jungle dawns and to the melancholy fluting of the Gibbon apes in the tree tops, and the rain never ceased. Sometimes it came down in a fine spray, sometimes it just poured steadily and at other times it completely deluged us, but it never completely stopped. We worked in the rain, and out in the jungle the malarial mosquitoes plagued us in their millions. We ate out in the rain and at night we plodded back in it again to our camps through quagmires. In fact it was even the rain and the over-flooded river that finally brought the cholera down upon us.

JOHN:

As a matter of fact I remember the canteen didn’t look too differently from this little building here, what do you think?

Why did you take these incredible risks, what drove you to help the P.O.W.s? Were you a political man?

BOON PONG:

Ah no, it is because I have been to Priesthood, and Buddhist, and ah Buddhist teach me to be kind to them, poor . . .

JOHN:

You, you actually went through the Priesthood. Did you?

BOON PONG:

Yes.

JOHN:

I see, yes. And so after the war this led to the fact that the British and the Dutch gave you two of their highest decorations for bravery?

BOON PONG:

Yes, I received a K.M.G., King’s Medal of Courage.

JOHN: (V.O.)

God knows what would have happened to Boon Pong if he had been caught by the Kampei Tei, for it seemed that the further we went into the jungle, the more obsessed the Speedo became and the more violent our guards grew. A mere beating-up was now hardly worth protesting over: we had to save our nerves and protest over broken limbs or worse. As though to express their hatred for us, a number of Koreans and Japanese, and the Koreans were the worst – devised various sorts of primitive torture, quite apart from standard beatings with bamboo or rifles.

JOHN:

This is how my friend Ronald Searle saw some of the incidents on the railway. How does that strike you?

[NAGASE SPEAKS TO INOH IN JAPANESE]

NAGASE:

The Japanese soldiers is thrusting the body of the P.O.W.?

JOHN:

Yes, that is a sharp bamboo . . .

NAGASE:

That is a bamboo . . .

I can’t believe this thing might happen.

JOHN:

You can’t believe that these things might happen?

NAGASE:

No.

[EXCHANGE BETWEEN INOH AND NAGASE IN JAPANESE]

NAGASE:

Nowadays, the Japanese are quite changed and peace loving people. So after 25 years I can’t believe even myself.

JOHN:

Yeah.

NAGASE:

Ah, these soldiers, ah, I remember . . .

This is true.

COL. KNIGHTS:

When one comes down to brass tacks there was no difference in the way they treated their men and the way they treated us. There is the factor that as far as the Japs were concerned we were quite the lowest form of humanity as far as we’d been taken prisoner, and they saw no reason why we shouldn’t conform even more strictly than the Japanese did to their own rules, and I think that this different sphere of life between the two nations was responsible for quite a lot of the bad treatment that we experienced.

JOHN: (V.O)

The railway was finally completed by October ’43. With our work completed, the Japanese gradually brought us back from up country: and as we travelled down the line, even we marvelled at this railway we’d carved out of the jungle.

JOHN TO CAMERA:

This Kanburi Camp is very easy to identify and I know exactly where I am as I stroll through, through it now, up towards the direction of the old Japanese Guard Room. In fact these atap huts and these fences give one such an extraordinary, vivid feeling of being back in Kanburi. But when I come round here into this open space, I knew perfectly well that this is indeed the Parade Ground in Kanburi and round the corner there is where I’ve attended Roll Call many many times.

We had two reasons for feeling anxiety while we were in this camp. The first was our Camp Commander Negouchi. He was one of the few really sadistic Japanese I had personal experience of, and he was out to terrorise us and to depress us with every sort of restriction, in fact worse than that, he very nearly killed our interpreter. This wretched man, for defending us on some point or other, was heavily beaten up in the Camp Office by Negouchi himself, and was then put in a hole and buried for practically three weeks, and only the end of the War in fact saved his life. The other thing was that though we did have a secret radio still functioning in this Camp, due to the skill and bravery of three officers from the Malay Volunteers, we didn’t know what plans, if any, existed for P.O.W.s. We didn’t know if we were going to be released, we didn’t know if we were going to be armed, we didn’t know if there was any resistance to help us at all. What we did know was that we’d be stood in the slit-trenches and be eaten by mosquitoes for hours when the flying fortresses went over to Bangkok, and we had more and more attempted bombings in the direction of Tamakam Bridge.

JOHN:

Are you ever conscious of the enormous number of lives that were lost in the building of this railway, I think there were about 16,000 Allied lives lost and probably 100,000 or more Asian coolies sent up front from Malaya.

YUP:

Oh you Westerners, you always put too much value in human lives. 16,000, we can lose them in few hours and then 100,000 in China is . . . is the casualty of a days battle.

JOHN:

So you think the railway was what, cheap at the price.

YUP:

Yes, human history is always advancing with bleeding feet, so I think this sacrifice is worth while and nobody should be scared about it.

NAGASE:

You know Mr. John Coast, for us Japanese soldiers this is the most wonderful railway in the world and this a few constructing operations during the war time, and this railway still bringing civilisation from Bangkok to the jungle. So we Japanese feel very proud of this railway.

JOHN:

I felt it was constructive, similarly, but also I am always haunted by the number of dead people on this railway, and I think you said yourself that some of the Japanese staff officers at the time, they just felt we were expendable material and they didn’t care how many of us died.

NAGASE:

I admit it.

JOHN:

You, admit it, yeah.

NAGASE:

But you know the, here the Mr Inoh, you know. He was tried severely in the War Crimes Court in Singapore.

JOHN:

Mr Inoh was?

NAGASE:

He was confined a year and a half in Changi Prison.

JOHN:

Well now I would like to hear more about this because I was in Mr Inoh’s camp twice and I have only regard for Mr Inoh. How was he treated?

[NAGASE ASKS INOH IN JAPANESE]

NAGASE:

Ah, bad.

JOHN:

In what way bad?

NAGASE:

About food, he could only survive with the food.

JOHN:

Just survival food? Yeah, and was he treated cruelly, any physical violence?

[NAGASE ASKS INOH IN JAPANESE] NAGASE:

Such things there weren’t, but I think that I was told he was confined in a small room.

JOHN:

Solitary confinement? For how long?

[NAGASE ASKS INOH IN JAPANESE]

NAGASE:

For ten months.

JOHN:

. . . I find that appalling, because I know Mr Inoh well, also I was interested in two other officers in whose camp I was, Colonel Yanagita was the boss, I think, of Mr Inoh, and he was sentenced to twenty years and in fact I had a letter of protest in the newspapers in London about that, and I also was interested in Captain Nagouchi, from Kanburi Officers Camp, because he was an exceedingly unpleasant man, Captain Nagouchi, and he very nearly killed our camp interpreter, but he did not kill any man, and yet I found from the records, which are extremely hard to get hold of, that he was hanged.

NAGASE:

Mmm, yes, I know that about ten, I mean one hundred Japanese soldiers hanged at the Singapore Court.

JOHN:

In Singapore Court?

NAGASE:

So the Japanese people, ex-soldiers, are still having a very ill-feeling towards the British. That ah, we all very sorry for you and for us.

(JOHN V.O.)

As I walked beside the now barely discernible embankment, just a few hundred yards beyond the point where the line now ends, it seemed incredible that men had sweated and suffered and died in this wilderness; for what? If we feel bitter about the way we were treated, perhaps our captors have a right to their bitterness too for the revenge we took on them at the War Crimes Trials. I hope our railway will not be forgotten. Because I’d like to think that some lesson could be learnt from the futile war that caused it to be built. But I have my doubts.

CLOSING MUSIC: CBS : BPG

62011

The New Andre Costellanos Wonderland of Sound Star Spangled Marches Side 1, Band 2. Colonel Bogey. (43”)

Railway, Superimposed Titles:

The BBC wishes to thank the

following for the use of

Original Drawings,

Photograph and Film:

Ronald Searle,

John Goodall

Imperial War Museum

Australian War Memorial

Far East Prisoner of War Club

Horizon Pictures (G.B.) Limited

Columbia Pictures