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 Burmese and the Thai sides of the railway construction. No. 5631 tank engine, decked with the Thai and the Japanese ‘poached egg’ national flags, brooded nearby in a cutting, an AA-gun post was set up, and the GOC presided at a ceremony at which the two regimental commanders drove gun-metal dog-spikes into an ebony sleeper to fix the final rails. One of the many legends tells how an Aussie prisoner prized out these ‘gold’ spikes and sold them for a large sum to a lurking Thai. Each commander was presented with a commemorative replica, which was cast with the date shōwa 18nen 10gatsu 25 nichi along one side, 25 October 1943. One is preserved as an heirloom in Colonel Imai’s family. For engineers a bronze medallion was struck to commemorate the occasion.81 The site of the ceremony is now buried deep under water in the Khao Laem hydro-electric dam, which is 90 metres high, 910 metres water surface-level 155 metres above sea level. The dam covers 42 km from its most southerly to its most northerly points. Power-turbines, capacity 300 megawatts, are in tunnels in the Khao Laem mountain with spillways for rivers. The Kwae Noi had to be diverted for about 500 metres during construction.82
The Three Pagodas Pass has the central pagoda marking the frontier boundary, the other two being in Thai and Burmese territory respectively. Each is about 6 metres high. They are now a shining white trio, having been restored after the war, but I have seen a colour photograph of them as they were when the railway was built, the steps crudely roughened by time, lichen-covered, lacking part of their finials at the top, encroached upon by saplings and trees. Their Thai name is phra chedi sam ong which means ‘the three religious spire-shaped temple towers’. The village near the pass is called Paya Thonzu (thonzu is a religious numerative, paya means ‘pagoda’).
All these places were emblematic of a hideous task, hideous alike to prisoners and coolies and engineers. The Japanese made up many plaintive songs like these:
We are men drenched in soaking rain,
gritting our teeth, gritting our teeth ...
But if you wait, Spring comes again,
and boats come up again.
Left behind at home my darling child no doubt has grown.
How is my wife’s health? Has anything changed?
We shiver in our dreams.
Even when the wind drops, tigers lurk in rubber groves.
Leaves fall and scatter. Why do they scatter?
News, news of our homeland –
Shall we hear soon in August?
Why do stars loom low on a Panga Forest night?
Now in our dreams we think, think, think of home,
and wait for a boat to load, to greet a boat.
In rubber groves in Panga Forest our final lodging to die,
Sparse shade, leaves and branches overhang,
Even today showers impend.
If you visit our comrades’ honoured graves
(mists crowding in, dimly dawn comes calm in the forest)
railbed grows chilly, mists penetrate your body ...
We made a banner of remembrance of our comrades
who refused to die defeated, it was soiled by rain,
it was a collection of autographs, and we set it up
on top of a hill.83
In Chapter 30 Futamatsu remarks that ‘those who have to spend a long time in the jungle realize that their object in life becomes that of staying alive’, and that ‘the curfew orderly made men forget the toils of work and when night fell the fields and hills of home floated under their eyelids, and in their dreams they saw their family friends’. Officer prisoners and senior NCOs were lucky in one respect, that they had, or developed, a strong sense of responsibility for their men, doubly lucky when men of their own unit were in the same camp. Indian Army officers were unlucky because their men were all segregated from white men (and pressurized to join the INA, the Indian Army of Independence). The Dutch, as the RAPWI (Returned Allied Prisoners-of-War and Internees) handbook told them after release in 1945, had a strong sense of survival, had an overpowering urge to look after themselves. We found they tended to jump queues at the cookhouse, a memory which caused an amusing incident when MV Orbita carrying British ex-prisoners home in October 1945 was passed in the Mediterranean by a Dutch liner. Her identity was announced over the tannoy and a spontaneous roar went up from Orbita of ‘Eten halen’, the Dutch phrase for our cookhouse call of ‘Come and get it!’
That too many Australian officers were privately ashamed of themselves for being undemocratic, scilicet being officers, was completely cancelled out by the astounding way an Australian soldier did everything he could to help his cobbers.
But in the jungle along the river-banks lurked unseen a remarkable neolithic archaeological find. In 1943, a Dutch archaeologist
