Section of a sleeper from the ‘Death Railway’, Burma, c1945
NAM 2005-04-15-1
Railway of death
A recently liberated Allied Prisoner of War, 1945. NAM 1991-01-24-1
Between October 1942 and December 1943, the Japanese Army used forced labour to build a railway that cut 260 miles (420km) through mountainous jungle to link Burma (now Myanmar) and Siam (now Thailand). The project was designed to safeguard the passage of supplies from Singapore and Bangkok to the Japanese armies fighting in Burma. The previously used sea route had become too risky.
Building the railway led to the deaths of around 15,000 Allied prisoners of war and over 80,000 Asian civilians from over-work, disease and starvation. The Japanese used the railway until April 1945, when parts of the line and the famous bridge over the River Kwai (Khwae Yai) were destroyed in Allied air raids. The prisoners were liberated when Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945 following the atomic bomb raids on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This 14-inch (35.5cm) long section of wood is from one of the railway sleepers at Thanbyuzayat at the Burmese end of the line. It is housed in a red and gold wood box and was used as a miniature Buddhist shrine - a fitting act of remembrance for the railway’s thousands of victims.
Around 13,000 British prisoners of war died in Japanese captivity during World War Two (1939-1945), the victims of malnutrition, disease and violence. Many of these men had become prisoners of war when Singapore was taken in February 1942. They were to spend the next three and a half years in captivity.
Asian slave labourer, 1945. NAM 1989-04-116-3102-1
The men were used as forced labourers on Japanese military projects in Japan, in the Malay peninsula and on the construction of the Thai-Burma railway linking Bangkok and Rangoon. The Japanese treated these men inhumanely because they believed that surrender was dishonourable and that it was a soldier's duty to commit suicide if captured.
The construction of the Thai-Burma Railway was one of the many war crimes committed by the Japanese Army between the invasion of China in 1937 and the end of World War Two in 1945. At least 20 million Chinese, Korean, Filippino, Indonesian, Burmese, Indo-Chinese, Pacific Islanders and Allied prisoners were the victims of massacre, forced labour, disease and deliberate starvation. Some historians have called this the ‘Asian Holocaust’.
