The silenced voices of history: Asian workers on the Death Railway

October marks the 70th anniversary of the completion of the notorious 'Death Railway' linking Thailand and Burma which the Japanese army constructed with forced labour during the Second World War. While the privations of the Allied soldiers used for the construction have been highlighted in Western historiography, the unspeakable plight of the numberless Asian workers who were involved has generally been ignored. David Boggett focuses on this neglected dimension.

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THIS year marks the 70th anniversary of the completion of the notorious 'Death Railway', constructed by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. Over 400 kilometres in length, the Death Railway was built to link the existing railway systems of Thailand and Burma, in order to supply the Japanese armies in Burma. Postwar images of the Death Railway were based on the successful - and largely fictional - movie The Bridge on the River Kwai, and on the memoirs and diaries published by Westerners who survived the ordeal of the Railway's construction.

Some 60,000 Allied soldiers, prisoners of war captured after the fall of Singapore, were mobilised as construction workers. Of these, around 13,000 died - due to ill-treatment by the Japanese soldiers and Korean guards; lack of adequate food, clothing and medical supplies; and diseases such as malaria, dysentery, tropical ulcers and - in the monsoon seasons - cholera. The graves of the deceased Allied soldiers are carefully preserved in two war cemeteries in Kanchanaburi in Thailand and one near Thanbyuzayat in Burma.

The understandable preoccupation with the Allied prisoners' accounts has tended to overshadow, and even conceal, a perhaps even greater tragedy - the plight of the enormous numbers of Asian workers mobilised by the Japanese from their new colonies. There are no Asian workers in the movie either, and the story of the Death Railway is usually seen through the accounts of the Western prisoners.

At the end of the war, the returning Allies estimated that around 270,000 Asian workers had been drafted, a figure that is continually repeated in books, articles and museums today. It is unlikely that the Allies in 1945 or early 1946 could have ascertained with any degree of accuracy the number of Asian workers involved. Unlike the Allied prisoners who remained concentrated in camps run by their own military, the Asian workers, disorganised and distressed, were straggled along the entire course of the Railway. Although the British and Dutch did make some efforts to repatriate Asian workers to Malaya, Singapore and Indonesia, many Asian workers later claimed that in the postwar confusion they had never heard of any such repatriation attempts. The scattered testimonies of Asian survivors suggest that a far greater number of workers were involved - possibly more than half a million, of whom probably more than 100,000 perished.

The Japanese had two weeks in which to burn documents related to the Railway's construction before the Allied forces occupied Thailand. General MacArthur expressly forbade any movement of Mountbatten's forces from Ceylon to South-East Asia until he had staged his dramatic surrender ceremony aboard a ship in Tokyo Bay. During the intervening two weeks, Thai witnesses state, smoke from the burning of documents could be seen all along the Railway camps. The Japanese openly admitted to the Allied soldiers that they had destroyed all documents related to the Asian workers. They claimed that, although the Japanese government had signed (though not ratified) the Geneva Conventions regarding treatment of military personnel captured during war, it had never been signatory to any treaties regarding civilian labour. The matter of civilian labour was, therefore, an internal matter of the then Japanese Empire, and Japan was not bound by any international treaties or agreements.

Plight of the Asian workers

For all these Asian workers, the situation was arguably even worse than that of the Allied prisoners. Many Asian workers were barely literate and unable to speak English or Japanese. They could not record their experiences. The Allied prisoners were able to maintain their own military structure in the camps - they were not separated from their friends. This structure provided camp discipline and hygiene and, of course, they had their own military doctors. This military camp structure of the prisoners enabled their leaders to record the circumstances of nearly every single prisoner's death and place of burial. It was based on these records that the bodies of the Allied dead were retrieved after the war. However, there are no graves for the deceased Asian workers; they were just buried where they died and forgotten. 

The Asian workers had no support system on which they could fall back. They had no doctors, no medicines, no sense of how to organise their living quarters in the inhospitable jungles then lying beyond Kanchanaburi; they were separated from their fellow villagers and often mixed together with people whose languages they could not understand; and they had no means of recourse when the Japanese soldiers mistreated them. As they were unfamiliar with the foreign Thai countryside, it was difficult for them to escape. Thai villagers were given financial rewards if they reported any escaped workers to the Japanese. Besides the natural deaths from disease, ill-treatment and overwork, it is believed that the Asian workers faced such appalling conditions that suicides were not uncommon.

Not only are there no graves but - with a single exception - there are no monuments to the Asian workers in the Kanchanaburi area either. The exception, paradoxically, is the monument erected by the Japanese military itself on completion of the Railway in March 1944. It is located near the bridge made famous by the movie. It is not particularly attractive in design, being made out of rough concrete, but it is an important memorial, as the Japanese did at least admit that deaths had occurred. This is unusual and may be the only Japanese wartime military monument to make such an admission.

The central pillar of the monument is surrounded at the four corners of the outer wall with smaller structures, each bearing an inscription in a different language: English, Thai, Chinese, Bahasa Malaysia/Indonesia, Tamil and Vietnamese. (One plaque destroyed by Allied bombing has never been replaced and was probably in either Burmese or Javanese.) These inscriptions are a clear indication that labourers from the language groups represented worked and died on the construction of the Railway. The Vietnamese inscription is something of a puzzle, as nowhere have any records of Vietnamese workers on the Railway yet been found, but this inscription is evidence that labour from the former French Indochina was also involved.

Even in Thailand, few people realise that Thai workers were involved. Thais were first used by the Japanese to construct the initial stages of the Railway bed around Nong Pladuk and Ban Pong. Today, Ban Pong has a large temple, situated on the site of the Railway workers' camp.  This was an important camp, because all workers, both prisoners and Asian labourers, had to pass through Ban Pong on their way up to the Railway work camps. 

On 18 December 1942, in the very early days of Railway construction, Thai workers attacked the Japanese quarters in Ban Pong, killing four Japanese military officials and severely wounding two others. Besides their severe treatment by the Japanese, the Thais had become enraged when they heard that a Japanese soldier had slapped a Thai Buddhist monk in the face. Some accounts say that it had all started because the Thai monk had given some cigarettes to Allied prisoners. Needless to say, the Japanese authorities were furious at these deaths and wanted the ringleaders rounded up and executed and financial reparations paid. They also called for the execution of the Thai monk (which is not permissible under Thai law - you cannot execute a monk!).

Known as the Ban Pong Incident, this event had serious political repercussions. To avoid having to deal with the Japanese Army's demands, Thai Prime Minister Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram removed himself from Bangkok for several days. The matter went as far as Tokyo where it was decided to appoint a personal friend of Prime Minister Tojo Hideki (and an outstanding diplomat), General Nakamura Aketo, as new head of the Bangkok Garrison Command to deal with the difficult situation. After the Ban Pong Incident, the Japanese military became reluctant to recruit Thais, probably increasing their demand for other Asian workers.

It is unclear how much Thai labour was involved in the Railway. The Thai Chinese Chamber of Commerce recruited 16,000 Chinese for the Japanese Army. These people had been forcibly relocated to Bangkok from the Northern Thai provinces which were thought to have been sensitive military areas. Around 6,000 other Thai workers were registered in Kanchanaburi as working directly under the Japanese Army. Most Thai workers, however, were not directly under the supervision of the Japanese military - rather they were employed by Sino-Thai companies and business concerns which had been sub-contracted to do the Railway work by the Japanese. It is not known how many Thais were involved through these private sector arrangements. Interviews in villages around the Sangkhlaburi area disclosed that Thai villagers had still been employed in Railway construction further up the line and suggest that perhaps a further 5,000-10,000 Thais (perhaps chiefly ethnic Mons) were drafted. Possibly, if civilian contractors are included, as many as 30,000 Thais may have been involved.

'Widespread barbarities'

In 1990, a mass grave of Asian labourers was discovered in a sugarcane field in Kanchanaburi. By the time I visited the site, the skeletons of some 400 workers had already been removed.  This was not the first such excavation of 'Asian workers' bones', nor was it the last. The most recent was in 2008, probably on land near to the 1990 excavations. The exposure of this latter grave was, however, of great importance. Many Thai residents in the area came forward to recount what they had seen. They described how camp workers would come to bury between five and 10 workers every day; how bodies of women and children were also interred; and even how some, probably afflicted with cholera, had been thrown into the grave while still alive. One skeleton was that of a child less than 10 years of age. The child must have been Tamil and still had bangles on its lower legs. Not only Tamils were involved - Thais remember other Malayans, Javanese and even Burmese also being thrown into the graves.

Some of the Allied prisoners were aware that the Asian labourers were suffering even more dreadfully than themselves. We can find many descriptions in the prisoners' diaries, such as the following by British doctor Robert Hardie:

 'A lot of Tamil, Chinese and Malay labourers from Malaya have been brought up forcibly to work on the railway. They were told that they were going to Alor Star in northern Malaya; that conditions would be good - light work, good food and good quarters. Once on the train, however, they were kept under guard and brought right up to Siam and marched in droves up to the camps on the river. There must be many thousands of these unfortunates all along the railway course. There is a big camp a few kilometres below here, and another 2 or 3 kilometres up. We hear of the frightful casualties from cholera and other diseases among these people and of the brutality with which they are treated by the Japanese. People who have been near the camps speak with bated breath of the state of affairs - corpses rotting unburied in the jungle, almost complete lack of sanitation, frightful stench, overcrowding, swarms of flies. There is no medical attention in these camps, and the wretched natives are of course unable to organise any communal sanitation.'

Dr Hardie also adds: 'When one hears of these widespread barbarities, one can only feel that we prisoners of war, in spite of all the deaths and permanent disabilities which result, are being treated with comparative consideration.'

The abbot of Ban Pong Temple, who was a young novice at the time, related that he often saw the workers passing through Ban Pong and he remembered clearly that there were women and children in the ranks of the Indian workers. It seems that many Tamils thought that Railway work would be similar to the plantation work for which the British Imperial authorities had brought them to Malaya in the first place. Many Tamil women were used in the camp kitchens as cooks and cleaners.

Most published works estimate the number of Tamil workers at between 80,000 and 100,000. Historian Michael Stenson estimates that the population of the Indian community in Malaya during the war period actually decreased by around 100,000 or nearly 7%. This indicates the seriousness of the Indian labour mobilisation. After the war the Indian Congress Party sent a delegation to Malaya and Thailand, headed by VS Srinivasa Sastri, to investigate the conditions experienced by the Tamils on the Railway. In a letter to Nehru, Sastri mentions 'a lakh' (100,000) of Tamil workers.

'Lung' (Uncle) Yu Chalawankumphi, one of the Malays sent to the Death Railway, remained in the Tarsao (Nam Tok) area after the war's end. Probably the last surviving Malay worker left in Thailand, he recalls:

'I was brought here from Kota Baru in [the Malayan state of] Kelantan when I was 15 years old. I was picked out at random by the Japanese. It wasn't voluntary; they simply took one out of three males. Perhaps out of every five or six young men, three would be picked out. It was all arbitrary - at random. Many of my friends from Kota Baru were selected too, and we travelled up together.. After we arrived, I was split up from the friends who'd been rounded up together with me. I was never able to meet them; we were all split up. I never knew where they were. The Japanese military never made any lists of the names of us labourers.

'I was put to work immediately. I started at Nong Pladuk and worked right up to the Burmese border. The area was virgin jungle then, very wild.I was working more than two years. We had been promised pay at the rate of 600 a month. I can't recall the currency unit but it was certainly 600 a month! The unit doesn't matter because we never actually received anything at all; no pay at all for all those months' labour...

'We couldn't understand what the Japanese guards were saying. There were no Japanese who spoke Malay. I couldn't understand anything at all! They would beat or prod us to show us how they wanted us to work. Most of the guards were terrible. We had to work every day, regardless of the weather; in the monsoon rains or the fierce sunlight. There was no medicine available in those days. Even when sick, we were forced to work. So many people died, especially of dysentery and cholera. Many also died of malaria. The dead bodies were just thrown into huge holes. That was all! The guards could be very fierce. Even if you just wanted to piss, you had to ask permission first. If you didn't, they would tie your hands behind your back and beat you with sticks teeming with live red ants. You would get bitten all over your body. The bites from these red ants were unbearably painful..

'After the war, I didn't go back. Indeed, many never returned; they remained scattered here and there along the course of the railway. I was very depressed at that time and so sad. I'd wanted to return. The British soldiers who came after the war never helped me; they never asked or tried to find out about us workers at all. They never offered any assistance. I was so miserable!'

Total figures of the drafting of Malayans for work on railways in Thailand are difficult to ascertain, due to the Japanese Army's destruction of records. A policy of minimising the number of Asian workers they had drafted was probably made known to the higher-ranking Japanese officers on the Railway. However, Major R Campbell, commanding officer of 'K' Force, records in his report to the British military that a Japanese corporal involved in logistics, whom he interviewed at Appuron in Burma immediately after the war in 1945, stated that 250,000 Malayans had been brought to work on the Railway. It is possible that the lowly-ranking corporal had not been informed of official army policy to minimise or remain silent about the extent of Asian labour utilisation. As this figure presumably includes the workers on the Kra Isthmus Railway (see box) and the 100,000 Tamil labourers already mentioned, the Japanese corporal's estimate is highly credible and probably accurate. The remainder of the figure must have comprised workers from Malaya's Chinese and Malay communities.

The Japanese mobilisation on Java was of staggering proportions. So great was the recruitment of labour on Java that the Japanese word for a worker, romusha, has become part of Bahasa Indonesia and can be found in all Indonesian language dictionaries today. Labour was also recruited in large numbers from other Indonesian islands, notably Sumatra. MC Ricklefs, a historian of Indonesia, states that between 200,000 and 500,000 Javanese were drafted for labour work. Japanese historian Sato Shigeru claims that, if 'temporary' workers are included, the total number of people affected at some time by this labour mobilisation may have been as many as 10,000,000. A smaller number of the Javanese labourers were sent to work on the Death Railway, and some survivors have been interviewed by Japanese television in the Jogjakarta area. The Japanese corporal at Appuron told Major Campbell that 100,000 workers had been brought from Java.

Burma was another source of large labour recruitment. Lin Yone Thit Lwin was a volunteer labour organiser for the Japanese. Even though his situation would have been a little better than that of the compulsorily drafted workers, he and his friend, Then Tha Sin, escaped from the horrors of the Railway, eventually returning to their homes. After the war, Lin Yone Thit Lwin became a well-known writer recording his escape from the Railway and the terrible conditions faced by the other Burmese workers in a diary entitled The Thai-Myanmar Railway: A Personal Memoir, published in Rangoon in 1968. In his book, Lin Yone Thit Lwin states that 170,000 Burmese workers were originally recruited. But as many Burmese, being familiar with their own countryside, frequently escaped (despite the serious penalties if caught), the Japanese were continually finding fresh recruits to fill the place of missing workers. The wartime Prime Minister of Burma, Ba Maw - who was generally sympathetic to the aims of the Japanese military - in his book, Breakthrough in Burma, calls the drafting of Burmese labourers 'an appalling mass crime'.               

David Boggett is an Emeritus Professor of Kyoto Seika University in Japan, where he worked for 37 years. He has led several groups of Japanese students on field study  trips to the Kanchanaburi area. He is presently retired, living in Chiangrai, North Thailand.

The Kra Isthmus Railway THE Death Railway was not the only railway built in Thailand by the Japanese military. The first such railway to try to link Thailand with Burma was the Kra Isthmus Railway.  Construction began in June 1943 and it was completed by November of the same year. It was a short line of roughly 90 kilometres, starting from Chumphon, an important station on the Southern Thailand Railway, to the small village of Ban Khao Fa Chi near the Burmese border. From Ban Khao Fa Chi goods were transferred to boats and shipped down the River La-Un and the Kra River to Victoria Point in Burma. It was abandoned in 1944 due to Allied bombing as the railway course ran through a very exposed area. The importance of this Railway is that it was built only by Malayan labour - from all the communities in Malaya, Malay, Indian and Chinese. When I visited Ban Khao Fa Chi around 2004, the son of the wartime village headman, Sabiang Chuchat, told me that one Tamil worker had stayed behind after the war. He recounted in an interview: 'Among the Malayan workers, there were many Indians. Many were very dark-skinned. I used to know one Indian who stayed behind after the war. He had been affected mentally by his experiences and had nowhere to go. He was called Ladam.' Sir Andrew Gilchrist had been a member of the staff of the pre-war British Embassy in Bangkok. He was returned to the UK early in the war by the Japanese as part of an exchange of diplomatic personnel and was secretly parachuted into Thailand, near Chumphon, before the war's end. He must have been the first British official to visit the camps in the area. He vividly describes the terrible conditions in the camps in his book Bangkok, Top Secret. One of his photographs bears the caption, 'When I removed the blanket to take the photograph the man was alive; when I bent down to put it back he was dead.' Published accounts suggest that between 60,000 and 120,000 Malayans were involved in the construction of the Kra Isthmus Railway. After the work was completed, many Malayans remained to operate the Railway, as engine drivers, maintenance workers, station staff and clerks.

*Third World Resurgence No. 278, October 2013, pp 44-47