But if you wait, Spring comes again,
And boats come up again.
He had been distressed by inaccurate, biased articles and books by Australian and Japanese journalists, and by the brilliantly acted but grossly distorted denigratory account of Japanese railway engineering talent put over in the film version of Pierre Boulle’s novel, Le Pont de la Rivière Kwai, which has been widely shown in Japan under the title Bridge built in the Battlefield. Ex-prisoners-of-war, to whom a preview was given, tried to get excised some of the worst errors, but to no avail. Futamatsu determined the time had come for a definitive history to be published while Japanese and Western survivors were still alive and could verify his statements. His book was published in 1985, a greatly more detailed work than his earlier two pamphlets – an objective, unbiased account, historically accurate, Across the Three Pagodas Pass: the Story of the Burma-Siam Railway, of which my edited translation follows.
Boulle’s 1952 novel contained fewer impossibilities than did the 1967 film, but none-the-less the two principal characters, Colonel Nicholson (played by Alec Guinness) and Colonel Saitō (played by Hayakawa Sessue) are caricatures of type-cast Indian Army officers and of Japanese officers passed over as unfit for front-line service. Boulle was unaware that a railway engineer took precedence over a mere prison-camp official. The bridge in the novel was a wooden bridge and so was the bridge in the film which was built in Sri Lanka. In the novel it was not blown up. The real bridge over the Kwae Yai was a steel bridge with eleven steel spans of 20-metre pony-type Warren curved chord half-through trusses. It was, of course, blown up, but by bombing and not by sabotage.
Personnel employed on the railway included about 11,000 Japanese military, 61,106 prisoners-of-war, and 182,948 Asiatic coolies. Of the prisoners-of-war 12,399 were recorded as having died before leaving Thailand and Burma, and it has been estimated that over 90,000 Asiatic coolies died on this work.
My translation is edited to remove a few redundancies, to simplify a few tautologies and to omit detail such as the initial formation in Japan of gunzoku railway engineering units, of small interest to Western readers. The translation is followed by a fuller bibliography than you normally find in works for the general reader.
To the Western reader the intrinsic quality of the book lies in four directions. First, the author is at pains to present the truth in detail about the construction of the railway. Second, he tries to present a case, unconvincingly, for playing down what lay behind a Western journalist’s slur, ‘the death railway’. Third, he describes the real reason why the Japanese did not ratify the Geneva Convention for the Treatment of Prisoners-of-War, but works the case round to a doubt in his own mind as to how far the Japanese Army violated its clauses. Fourth, justifiable professional pride in the techniques and skills of a civilian railway engineer makes him sceptical of the professional regular soldiers’ attitudes.
Futamatsu printed twenty-eight small photographs in his original Japanese text. They cover the following places and persons: Railtrack over Krian River: Seletar airfield burning: railway stations at Singapore, Nong Pladuk and Banpong: the 0-km post at Nong Pladuk: looking at the Mae Khlaung crossing-point in July 1942: the plank viaduct at Arrow Hill: the Mae Khlaung steel bridge: the same after being bombed: Colonel Imai Itaru: jungle along the Kwae Noi: labouring at earthworks: air photographs of the steel bridge: Kamburi and Kinsaiyok areas: hut construction: work with elephants: The Three Pagodas Pass: C5631 engine decorated for the joining-up ceremony: the cemetery at Kamburi: the memorial monument at Thā Makham (six photographs are ascribed to Sugano Renichi, six to Geoffrey Adams).
His sensitivity is illustrated by his reply to a haiku I wrote on receiving a copy of an autographed photograph of himself taken at Wanyai camp on 12 November 1943. He is immaculately spruced up in formal uniform but I was immediately impressed by his youthful look. The haiku ran:
Wanyai no
Futamatsu kakka
Seinen yo
Which I translate as ‘Senior Officer Futamatsu at Wanyai … but he’s only a youth!’ In his reply he quoted a haiku he himself had written on an occasion, in the Wanyai area, which is translatable as follows:
In my mind’s eye I see again
Peacocks flying over the river at dawn
In the jungle valley.
The remarkable sensitivity of well-educated Japanese in poetical contexts was particularly well illustrated by Sir Laurens van der Post in his article in The Times of 25 January 1989. Describing the Emperor’s reluctance to go along with the Army’s determination to act in a way which led to the air attack on Pearl Harbor, he used ‘the most powerful weapon at his command in speaking of his own distaste for war in the symbolism of a favourite poem of one of the great transitional emperors, Meiji’. Emperor Meiji’s poem runs:
Yomo no umi minna
harakara to omou yō ni
Naze namikaze no
tachisawagaruramu?
A friend of van der Post has translated this difficult poem: ‘If all oceans are really brothers, why then are the wind and the waves raging?’ Laurens van der Post goes on:
In the dead silence that followed among the Chiefs of Staff, Hirohito went on to say that this poem was an expression of peace and that he had always cherished it and sought to guide his life by it. I believe it was with a heavy heart, full of regret and a sense of doom, that he stayed at the head of his people in the war that followed. The great Admiral Yamamoto warned against the attack on Pearl Harbor. ‘You will go only to awaken a sleeping giant.’ Moreover the Emperor’s way was also the way of the noblest Japanese spirits.
Ewart Escritt
Oxford
February 1990
TO THE MEMORY OF THOSE
WHO DID NOT RETURN
ACROSS THE THREE PAGODAS PASS
BY
FUTAMATSU YOSHIHIKO
TRANSLATOR’S
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In accordance with Japanese custom given names are printed after family names.
My thanks are due to Geoffrey Adams, Dr Louis Allen, Jim Bradley, MBE, Burt Briggs, Cecil Colchester, Rose Coombs, MBE, Professor Peter Davies, Dr Christopher Dowling, Carl Fritsche, Dr James McMullen, Charlie Mott, Harold Payne, OBE, Dr Bryan Powell, Roderick Suddaby and John Ullmann for their help at various stages in the writing of this book.
I also wish to thank Lindy Bradley who typed my manuscript.
PREFACE
It is a long time, forty years, since the end of the Second World War, and with the lapse of time what happened in it is like a distant historical fragment of a past which people have now forgotten. With the end of the war we Japanese set up a new constitution which outlawed war, sought peace and declared that Japan would never again go to war.
But how can the present generation who have no war experience understand what war is? By the same token, how can they bear malice, how criticize, how amend the real truth? To them it is the responsibility of those who did experience it to tell them the reality … they can describe it and it is plainly their responsibility to do so. One must admit, however that they are getting few in number.
When our army made their strategic attack on India, they planned a railway for military purposes to transport supplies overland. After the war, the construction of this railway was the background to the film Bridge built in the Battlefield