The route followed that used in antiquity by Burmese raiders who came over the Three Pagodas Pass and crossed the Mae Khlaung by a liana and bamboo footbridge at Ban Thā Manao near Lat Ya before moving on to assault Ayutthaya, the ancient capital of Thailand.74
Railtrack gauge was set at one metre, a gauge common to southern region railways making it possible for trains to run straight through to Singapore, again from Phnom Penh in Cambodia and Moulmein in Burma, and again as far as Rangoon. Planned transport volume was three thousand tons a day each way. Rails were shipped up from dismantled Sumatran and East coast Malayan Railways. The line had also a theoretical purpose of developing a commercial transport route between Burma and Thailand. Construction materials available in the area with other necessary materials were to be supplied by the Thai and the Japanese governments. It was to cost 700 million yen.
Military construction forces were laid down as one railway HQ, two railway regiments, and one railway materials depot, with auxiliary units as needed, i.e. gunzoku (of Japanese nationality) and heiho (of non-Japanese nationality, in the railway’s case Koreans). Labour needed was specified as local coolies and prisoners-of-war, as appropriate.
For Kuwabara’s projection in 1939 IJA GHQ had had prepared aerial survey maps to scale 1:20,000, which on the Thai side covered the Kwae Noi but the Kwae Yai (the Mae Khlaung) only as far as the immediate Thā Makham area.75 It followed, therefore, that as this emanated from the highest authority Futamatsu had no option but to plan the main river-crossing at Thā Makham instead of the traditional crossing at Ban Thā Manao near Lat Ya. The latter would have elongated the line by about 25 km but would have eliminated the need for a cutting near Chungkai and a plank viaduct beyond it which together cost the lives of many prisoners.
The situation he faced was made the more difficult by the criminal negligence of the Thai Government’s contractors who failed to press ahead with the lorry highway which was necessary in this monsoon climate. The most elementary exercise in work-study had evidently not been done by them. At the time Futamatsu was unaware of the Thai contract. When I told him about it after the war, he commented that the narrow jungly track via Lat Ya to Ban Thā Manao (mis-named Ban Thā Dan by the engineers) was then still the narrow jungly track described by Pavillard in his book, Bamboo Doctor.76
Errors in place-names inevitably arose because of the difficulty of transliterating Thai script into Japanese syllabics. In this instance Ban Thā Dan is much further upstream, is in hilly country and has no river-crossing.
In the Imperial War Museum in London there is a Japanese railway engineer’s trace of the Thai-Burma Link Line. It is in scroll form reading from right to left but has been folded and there are cracks along the folds. It is also rubbed and stained so that some kanji (ideographs) are illegible, others hard to decipher. It was found at Kamburi after the Japanese surrender by an agent of Standard Vacuum Oil, who passed it to his Bangkok manager, Nai Tack Fee, who gave it to his opposite number in Asiatic Petroleum Company (Royal Dutch Shell), C.F. Colchester, who had worked on the railway as a prisoner-of-war, and he presented it to the Imperial War Museum in 1954.77 From internal evidence, it was made for the transport section of 5 Company of 3 Battalion, 9 Railway Regiment.
On this trace only the main Bangkok-Singapore line is marked as a ‘line in operation’ and the Moulmein-Ye line as ‘uncompleted’. The Moulmein-Ye line was in fact completed in 1925. It was described in Railway Gazette International (3 April 1925) as being 89 miles long, made through difficult country with annual rainfall of 367 inches. There were 200 bridges. No roads existed and heavy material had to be conveyed up tidal creeks in country boats.78 The line had been surveyed by 1898. On Waterlow & Sons’ map of Burma railways of that date the track is marked as ‘surveyed’, with stations planned at Moulmein, Paauk, Kawthut, Taungbon and Yemyoma (terminal, i.e. Ye). From Pa-auk runs a ‘suggested’ track through Ataran and Thanbyusayat to the Three Pagodas Pass.79 Probably the first general reference to the Moulmein-Ye line is in The Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1929 in which the map of Burma shows it as an existing railway.80 From internal evidence the trace in the IWM must have been drawn no earlier than August 1944.
At this time Thailand, Muang Thai, the Land of the Free, was a constitutional monarchy, Pratet Thai, controlled by a military dictatorship under Field-Marshal Phibun Songkhraam. When the Japanese Army marched in on 9 December 1941, he had no option (after a token show of resistance) but to capitulate. To the tourist it is the land of Buddhism, of brilliantly-tiled pagodas, of national observances and ceremonial dancing, of historic ruins, of elephants, often gorgeously apparelled, and of lovely women (particularly if below the age of thirty). The Thai are sticklers for prestige.
Yellow-robed priests with shaven heads are a common sight, begging as mendicants under the eaves of houses, haughtily giving no thanks for oblations, treated like buddhas. In modern times, after that brief interlude under Japanese occupation, the Thai have switched from their former anglophile culture to a brash American substitute.
It is essentially an agricultural economy. Educated Thai are generally less proud of their modernity than of their wild forests and mountainous terrain, of their teak and of the long rivers on which it is log-jammed down to the sawmills.
In the history of the railway, for various reasons several towns and villages have their importance. Nong Pladuk, for example, an insignificant cluster of dwellings, was the initial starting-point of the railway. But of the considerable complex of sidings, workshops, foundries, godowns, military barracks and prisoners’ compounds, not a trace remains today. All signs of the railway’s worst bombing raid are wiped away. Two kilometres from Nong Pladuk is Kommā where is Wat Kok Mor, the lovely Buddhist temple near which Nong Pladuk’s dead were buried. The wat remains, but the dead have been exhumed and today lie in the large cemetery at Chungkai.
In the Pacific War, Kamburi (Kanchanaburi) was at first a Japanese airstrip and finally a prison camp in which officers were segregated when the Japanese began to fear a paratroop invasion. It was seldom out of railway records. Here the Japanese erected a monument ‘to ease the souls of the prisoners’ who became victims of their captors’ own neglect and brutality. It was dedicated in March 1944. On a marble plaque on a concrete pillar set on the large plinth of one of the four corner buttresses was engraved in English:
IN MEMORY OF DECEASED PRISONERS OF WAR 1944
The vast Allied cemetery here had been the scene of annual ceremonies held by the Thai, British and Australian governments to commemorate these men, held in the same spirit as the epitaph on the cemetery on the slopes of Garrison Hill at Kohima in Burma:
When you go home
tell them of us and say
for your tomorrow
we gave our today
The real name of Chungkai, known to every ex-prisoner on the railway, is Khao Poon. Here, too, is a very large cemetery, but the place is also infamous for a cutting through a rocky hill. The line of the projected railway route curved round at the waterside at its foot. In the normal way one would plan a tunnel here but the regiment’s men had no tunnelling experience so Futamatsu had to plan a cutting which in the event proved to be 100 metres long, maximum depth 40 metres, and about ten thousand cubic metres of rock had to be excavated, a cutting which cost the lives of many prisoners.
Further along is a high cliff on the North bank, the ‘103 km’ point (calculating from the village of Nong Pladuk where the 0-km post had been set up on 5 July 1942 to mark the point at which the Thai-Burma Railway was to branch off from the main Bangkok-Singapore line on Thai National Railways). The cliff face rose about 50 metres up from the water and continued along for about 200 metres, the wall-face rising perpendicularly and topped by a luxuriant growth of trees and shrubs. There being no straight alignment at riverside level, it was decided to make a direct run halfway up the cliff face and build a plank viaduct. This, too, cost many lives.
Konkuita in the jungle was the site of the joining-up of the