By the spring of 1943, tens of thousands of Allied POWs and conscripted Asian laborers were dying by the thousands as Japan raced to complete the 258-mile Thailand-Burma railway, later immortalized in the film 'The Bridge on the River Kwai.' Malnutrition, tropical disease, and beatings killed an estimated 90,000 to 100,000 laborers and 12,000 POWs during the railway's construction, one of the deadliest forced-labor projects of the Second World War.
The Japanese army needed a land supply route to Burma that bypassed vulnerable sea lanes patrolled by Allied submarines, and it drove POWs and Romusha laborers from Malaya, Java, and Burma to build it in just over a year, a task British engineers had estimated would take five years under normal conditions. Men worked in monsoon mud and tropical heat with primitive hand tools, subsisting on starvation rations of rice, while cholera, dysentery, and beriberi tore through the camps.
The real bridges over the Mae Klong River, later renamed the Kwai Yai to match the famous fiction, were far less dramatic than David Lean's 1957 film suggested, and no British officer ever collaborated so elaborately with his captors as the movie's Colonel Nicholson. Survivors of the actual railway, including author and former POW Eric Lomax, later described the movie's heroism as an insult to the memory of the men who suffered and died building what they grimly called 'the Death Railway.'