Kanchanaburi War Cemetery

The meticulously maintained Kanchanaburi War Cemetery is in the centre of town.

The Burma Thailand Railway

The 415 kilometre Burma-Thailand Railway was constructed rapidly by Allied PoWs and local forced labour between late 1942 and late 1943. It was built to supply Japanese troops in Burma, allowing vulnerable sea routes to be bypassed.

Hellfire Pass

Hellfire Pass is 80 kilometres to the north-west of Kanchanaburi on Saeng Chuto Road – the road to Sangklaburi near the Myanmar border.

The Hellfire Pass Interpretive Centre and Memorial Walking Trail is located just above Hellfire Pass (Konyu Cutting). It was built by and is maintained by the people of Australia. In 2018 it was refurbished and, in the process, many of the diaromas, photographs and information boards were removed or sanitised.

Fortunately, the museums in Kanchanaburi are honest enough to tell the real story.

Naming of Hellfire Pass

To speed up the construction of the railway Japanese engineers demanded two 12 hour shifts This brutal initiative was termed ‘Speedo’. The main source of illumination to allow the work to continue at night was bamboo fires. The prevailing culture of the western PoWs at Konyu was Christian –  wherein the vision of hell was the devil and the fires of hell. The night scene was one of the burning fires of skeletal men working as slaves in front of the devil (the Japanese). Hellfire!

Konyu Cutting was the deepest and longest rock cutting on the entire railway.

Speedo!

As the Japanese became more desperate to finish the railway, they worked the prisoners and the Romusha (conscripted Asian civilian labourers) to the limits of endurance, often to death. Speedo was introduced in mid-1943. It was a time of enormous privation and suffering for those who worked on the railway.

Working Conditions

During this brutal phase from July to October 1943 some prisoners worked for 150 consecutive days, some worked shifts of between eighteen and twenty hours, and at one stage prisoners worked thirty-three hours without rest. In some camps during ‘speedo’ up to half of the prisoners died; in others the figure was lower, but the pressure to complete the line meant extremely ill men were sent out to work though many were too weak to stand.

Treatment

The way the Japanese treated prisoners and Romusha throughout the railway’s construction was generally harsh, ranging from neglect to physical violence. Beatings were common and sometimes fatal. Malnourished prisoners had to march sometimes hundreds of kilometres from one camp to another. The Japanese attitude to prisoners – that surrender was dishonourable and that prisoners of war ‘had no rights or status and were slaves of the Emperor’ – meant that ‘the Japanese did not consider human life of any value when … the railway must be pushed on regardless of the cost … Discipline was enforced by brutality … beatings and other forms of punishment for minor offences were common.’

Men who collapsed under heavy loads were beaten and forced to carry on. Prisoners returned to their camps late at night, often soaked, always exhausted and with little hope that things would improve.

Survival

Exhausting labor, malnutrition, disease, and brutal treatment by guards resulted in devastating loss of life during the Speedo construction phase.

To survive during ‘speedo’ was a daily struggle, always knowing that chance or misfortune could end a life. A small mistake might lead to a fatal beating; a rock fall or a collapsing bridge might kill a man; cholera or another serious illness might strike; a small cut could mean a tropical ulcer that devoured flesh and, if resulting in an amputation, could prove fatal. Equally, a survivor might have missed a draft to a camp rife with disease, or had the luck to escape serious accidents, or have avoided the worst of the beatings. Age and physique played a role – men in their twenties and early thirties of smaller physique tended to fare better, but there were always exceptions. Willpower sustained some, while others gave up and died. In the end it was very difficult, if not impossible, to predict who would survive and who would not.

 

© this format Kim Epton 2026
750 words, 17 photographs.

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