Seeing history – bridge over River Kwai

in June 2023 I visited the small town of Kanchanaburi, in Thailand that was the site of the bridge over the river Kwai built during the Second World War by Allied prisoners of War.

The bridge was made famous by the 1957 film, Bridge over the River Kwai (starring Sir Alec Guinness and William Holden). Even though the film referred to the bridge over the River Kwai, it’s actually the river Khwae Sai Yok.

The bridge is 3 hours north east of Bangkok. When I visited the bridge, I knew very little of its construction apart from what I had seen in the 1957 film. The current bridge is built on the pylons of the metal bridge, that was destroyed by Allied bombing in February 1945.

The Japanese wanted to be able to transport troops from Burma (modern day Myanmar) and Thailand. To build the bridge, the Japanese used 60,000 Allied prisoners of war as Australian, Dutch, British and US soldiers. But the Japanese forced more than 200,000 Thai civilians to build the railway bridge.

Not far from the bridge, are the cemeteries of the graves of the Allied prisoners of war that died building the bridge. Suffering from exhaustion, beatings and murder, Allied soldiers were not given medical treatment and many died from diseases as malaria, dysentery and malnutrition.

If you go to Thailand, the tropical heat gives you some idea of what the prisoners of war suffered. It’s estimated 16,000 Allied prisoners of war were killed building the bridges.

But there was another bridge, a wooden bridge, constructed by the Allied prisoners of war. When I was in Kanchanaburi, I visited the war museum and tried to get more information on the original wooden bridge as depicted in the 1957 film.

There is much more I want to write about this visit, but I will leave that to a post about my visit to Hell fire pass, 45 minutes drive from the bridge . I used my own pictures taken on the trip.

But for more detailed information I referred to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website at cwgc.org. I also want to recognise the hundreds of thousands of Thai and Burmese civilians that suffered under the Japanese occupation.

if you want to visit kanchanaburi in Thailand, you can hire a car with driver for the day or get the train from Thornburi station to Kanchanaburi