Prison camps of F Force

Hardship and death for Allied prisoners of war

If ever I see home again … I want nothing more … than to forget these awful days—swollen bodies, bloated from beriberi, walking skeletons from dysentery, eyesight becoming universally bad, malaria rampant. Surely this cannot last?

[Stan Arneil, Diary, 1 June 1943, One Man's War, Sydney, Alternative Publishing, 1980, p 99]

The story of F Force is one of the most terrible of the Burma-Thailand Railway. They were one of the last labour forces to leave Changi, Singapore, in mid-April 1943. F Force consisted of 3,662 Australians and some 3,400 British prisoners of war (POWs). Many of these men, particularly the British, were unwell even before they left Singapore. They were Isolated in far up-country Thailand, remote from food and medical supplies and drenched by monsoonal rains. F Force lost 29% (1,060) of the Australians and 60% (2,036) of the British POWs.

F Force's hardships began when they were sent to Thailand by train. Packed into suffocating metal railway trucks with little food and water, even dysentery sufferers had few opportunities to relieve themselves. On reaching Ban Pong in Thailand, F Force was then forced to march over 300 km to camps near the border with Burma.

Arriving up-country in early May, F force was ultimately spread across at least 6 camps progressing towards the Burma border:

• Konkoita (No. 4 camp)
• Shimo (Lower) Ni Thea (Nieke)
• Shimo (Lower) Songkurai (No. 1)
• Songkurai (No. 2)
• Kami (Upper) Songkurai (No. 3)
• Changaraya (No. 5).

From May to October 1943, as the railway progressed, POWs moved between these camps. Australians were mostly located at Shimo Ni Thea, Shimo Songkurai, Kami Songkurai, Konkoita and Tha Khanun.

Learn more about the camps in Thailand.

Shimo Ni Thea

Shimo Ni Thea was the headquarters of F Force from early May to mid-June 1943. Although close to the railway, it was a transit camp rather than a working one, with men going up-country and returning to Kanchanaburi when the railway was completed late in 1943.

At its peak, 1,075 prisoners were based there. Of these, some 450 prisoners were Australians.

Initially, the camp consisted of 2 partially roofed huts and 7 large unroofed huts that had been occupied by Asian forced labourers or rōmusha. A small natural stream, flowing through a depression, provided water. Not that water was in short supply. With almost incessant heavy rain from mid-May to September, the camp became a bog.

Despite widespread dysentery, malaria, beri-beri and diarrhoea, the rates of sickness at Ni Thea were lower than at other camps in the region. However, its hospital progressively gained some 400 seriously ill prisoners from nearby camps.

Changaraya (No. 5)

Changaraya, like Songkurai, was at first a British camp. Some Australians would join the British here in August 1943.

Conditions at Changaraya, 1 km from the border with Burma, were particularly deplorable. Prisoners and rōmusha lived close to each other. The grounds were waterlogged, and sanitation was almost impossible to maintain in the monsoonal conditions. Despite the constant rain, water for drinking and cooking had to be carried a long distance. The Japanese provided almost no buckets or containers.

Cholera broke out at Changaraya on 26 May, with devastating results. Ultimately, 159 men died of the disease. The Japanese forced men recovering from cholera to work. This also went for prisoners desperately ill from dysentery or malaria.

Later in 1943, Changaraya served as a staging camp when the Japanese agreed that some of the most seriously ill of F Force should be transferred to Thanbaya, a hospital camp in Burma.

Konkoita

On their march north around 700 Australians were halted at Konkoita, a short distance before Shimo Ni Thea, on 10 May 1943. Separated from the rest of F Force until December 1943, they were under the command of Australian Lieutenant Colonel S.A.F. (Samuel Austin Frank) Pond, who reported to Lieutenant Maruyama of the Imperial Japanese Army Engineers.

Conditions at Konkoita were appalling. Few huts were roofed and the area, which had been occupied by rōmusha, was filthy. The Australians were employed on bridge and road construction straight away. Within 5 days, cholera broke out in the nearby rōmusha camp. Konkoita would become the focal point of the cholera outbreak that spread throughout the F Force camps, carried by POWs passing through this camp on their way north.

Pond's battalion had a particularly difficult time. It was fragmented and moved across various camps, including Taimonta and Tha Khanun to the south, where it remained for 2 months. The medical officer, Roy Mills, wrote of Lower Taimonta:

… no roofing. Insufficient tents, Burmese camped beside camp … water a problem—all had to be boiled—shortage of dixies—Rice and onion stew only.

[Doctor's Diary and Memoirs: Pond's Party F Force, Thai–Burma Railway, New Lambton, NSW, R.M. Mills, 1994, p 56]

The move to Tha Khanun was particularly gruelling:

A shuttle system had to be employed whereby fit and nearly fit (who by now were very few) marched to the next camp, erected tents, dug latrines, prepared cookhouses etc. and then returned to the last camp to carry stretcher cases and sick men and their gear forward. ... the men repeatedly were ordered back to dig from the mud and then push up the hills the many ox-carts laden with Japanese stores which had become bogged.

[A.J. Sweeting, 'Prisoners of War' in Lionel Wigmore, The Japanese Thrust, vol. IV of Australia in the War of 1939-1945, Canberra, Australian War Memorial, 1957, p 578]

It was at Konkoita, in late October 1943, that the track-laying parties from the Thai and Burmese ends of the railway finally met. In an elaborate ceremony, a Japanese general drove a gold spike into an ebony sleeper. A train, drawn by a locomotive shipped from Japan, then drove across the joining point to mark the completion of the line.

The camps today

The camps of F Force were set up along what is now Highway 323 in the west of Thailand. If you know what you're looking for, you can still identify 3 of the northernmost camps:

• Shimo Songkurai
• Songkurai
• Kami Songkurai

Changaraya is just across the border in Myanmar.

Konkoita and Ni Thea have disappeared under the waters of the Vachiralongkorn dam, built during the 1980s. The position of Ni Thea is visible from a lookout near the Ranti Bridge, on Highway 323 about 20 km before the town of Sangkhla Buri.

Further south, beyond Tha Khanun, the Vachiralongkorn dam wall offers a spectacular view up and down the valley through which the railway travelled.

Map of F Force camps

F Force camps map

The map shows north-western Thailand with the Burma (Myanmar) border down the western side. The Burma-Thailand Railway and Highway 323 run from above Three Pagodas Pass in the Tenasserim Hills in the upper north-western corner of the map down to the south-eastern corner. This includes the valley of the Kwae Noi River, the Khao Laem National Park and the waters of the Vachiralongkorn dam which, built during the 1980s, flooded much of the valley. Kinsaiyok and Kanchanaburi are marked just below the foot of the map.

The camp locations are marked down the railway, from north to south. In the north, the railway is shown to run largely along the same route as Highway 323. Changaraya (located just inside the present border of Myanmar), Kami Songkurai, Songkurai and Shimo Songkurai are located on the railway between Three Pagodas Pass and Sangkhla Buri and the Ranti Bridge. At Shimo Songkurai, at the top of the dam waters, Highway 323 diverges east of the railway to bypass the flooded valley while Sangkhla Buri is marked further west of the railway. The camps of Ni Thea, Shimo Ni Thea, Taimonta, Konkoita and Kriankri are marked next to the railway from the Ranti Bridge to the dam wall. While the railway and highway converge again for a short distance past Shimo Ni Thea, they diverge again above Taimonta with the railway passing for some 60 km through the now-flooded valley south down to the dam wall. In the lower third of the map and below the dam wall, Tha Khanun, Brankasi and Hindat are shown. The railway now closely follows the path of the Kwae Noi River on its eastern side, with the highway converging again just below Tha Khanun.

Shimo Songkurai camp

This month of May 1943 has been the blackest so far since we have been P.O.Ws. It is interminable.

[Stan Arneil, One Man's War, Sydney: Alternative Press, 1980, 97]

Shimo (Lower) Songkurai (No. 1) was the largest camp for Australians of F Force. Some 2,000 men arrived at this remote camp between 15 and 20 May 1943, after completing a gruelling train journey from Singapore and an exhausting march of 300 km from Ban Pong.

Conditions were dire from the start.

To call the place a camp was a complete misnomer, as it … merely consisted of two parallel series of huts … None of the huts were yet roofed with attap, although eight tents had been provided to cover the officers [sic] quarters. The ground sloped from a steep hill at the back of the camp and was covered with bamboo and other debris.

[Report of Move of No. 5 'F' Force from Changi to Thailand and on Subsequent Conditions at No 1 Camp Shimo Songkurai, AWM 54, 554/7/4, Australian War Memorial.]

The wretched state of the huts meant that the prisoners were crowded, 10 men to a bay measuring 3 m by 3.5 m and drenched by constant rain or flooding from below. Kitchen facilities were non-existent. Water was restricted to a very small stream, which the Japanese ultimately declared out of bounds for ablution purposes.

Latrines (simple toilets) consisted of 2 wide-open trenches on the side of the hill that rose steeply above the camp site. The already exhausted and sick prisoners sank into states of physical or mental weariness.

Then, on 17 May 1943, cholera broke out. It had been brought with the prisoners from Ni Thea, where the first case had been diagnosed on 16 May.

Since the Japanese were terrified of this deadly, contagious disease, they provided a serum for inoculations. The senior Australian medical officer, Major Bruce Hunt, also brought as much serum as could be obtained from Australian medical stores at Ni Thea headquarters.

Although the men were inoculated and an isolation hospital was created quickly, the death toll soared. In one week in late May, there were 174 new cholera cases and 51 deaths. As Stan Arneil recalled in his diary:

I just saw a cove carried from one of the huts, grey of face and limp of body. The ground is becoming covered in slime where these have bogged or vomited … Two poor chaps were carted out on three poles and wrapped in a blanket or ground sheet were tossed on to a roaring fire five yards from the cemetery. It was a horrible sight and I pray I will not finish that way.

[26 May, 1 June 1943, One Man's War, Sydney: Alternative Press, 1980, 96, p 99]

The rates of illness from dysentery, beri-beri, malaria and malnutrition were also high. Each day, only a few hundred men were fit enough to join the working parties on road works or the railway, which ran in front of the camp. The working day lasted 12 to 13 hours, without rest days.

Within the camp were 80 Australian officers, including 3 medical officers. One officer accompanied every 50 men on working parties outside the camp. However, the rest did not substitute for the men on working parties. Instead, officers were employed on camp duties and, in a scheme introduced by Hunt, as ward masters in the camp hospital. The officers themselves were often ill, but none died at Shimo Songkurai.

With cholera being such an arbitrary killer, 2 groups of 11 men chose to escape from the camp on the nights of 31 May and 3 June 1943. It is thought they were captured and shot or died in the jungle.

The desperate situation at Shimo Songkurai was eased because senior Australian officers provided strong leadership. Lieutenant Colonel Noel McGuffie Johnston and Hunt dared to confront the volatile Japanese camp supervisor, Lieutenant Fukuda. They repeatedly demanded tools, food and time off work to improve the camp facilities.

These sessions were stormy, with Fukuda accusing the Australians of failing to contain the health crisis, and asserting that the sick were feigning illness. But he did agree to suspend outside work for several days, so the Australians could dig stormwater drains and construct covered latrines within the camp. The Japanese also provided tents, attap (palm thatch) and local labourers to help with roofing the huts, but very few tools were supplied.

Rations, however, were at starvation level. When the roads collapsed during the monsoon season, the ration carts had to be dragged by the prisoners for more than 7 km through thick mud. By 19 July 1943, some 1,350 men of a total camp population of 1,850 were sick.

In late July and early August, the Japanese ordered the prisoners at Shimo Songkurai to march north to Kami Songkurai and Songkurai camps. Johnston later described the departure of one group as 'one of the most poignant scenes possible in any man's life'.

In this party there were no more than 104 fit men and 94 'walking patients', the balance being made up of 16 stretcher cases. (Three other stretcher cases had been returned to the Camp Hospital, of whom two died within a few hours.)

[Report of Move of No. 5 'F' Force, AWM 54, 554/7/4, Australian War Memorial]

Some 500 of the sick remained in Shimo Songkurai until late September, when 277 were transported to a base hospital in Thanbaya, Burma.

When Shimo Songkurai was finally evacuated, the cemetery was left enclosed with a sapling fence. A 2.5-metre-high cross stood in the centre, and a gateway was inscribed with the words, 'We will remember them'.

Shimo Songkurai today

The site of Shimo Songkurai can be viewed today from Highway 323, as it descends the hill towards the junction of the roads to Sangkhla Buri and Three Pagodas Pass. At the left of the junction (in the direction towards Sangkhla Buri), a dirt road leads to the camp site. It's found beyond a stream and a wooden bridge that was present during the war. To the right, approaching the bridge, is a bamboo clump marked by pilgrims in 2014 by a cross. This site is an assumed mass grave from 1943, since the cemetery is known to have been established about 90 m from the northern end of the camp.

Songkurai camp

[Songkurai] was merely a clearing in the dense jungle, in which there were several long bamboo-framed huts, some with a semblance of an attap roof and others completely roofless … the camp was a sea of mud … the sanitation was indescribable.

[James Bradley, Towards the Setting Sun, London, Phillimore, 1982, p 51-52]

Songkurai (No. 2) camp was initially occupied by prisoners who left Changi, Singapore in April 1943. Some 1,600 British prisoners arrived there on 20 and 21 May 1943 after completing a gruelling train journey from Singapore and an exhausting 300 km march from Ban Pong.

Australian prisoners were transferred to Songkurai from Shimo Songkurai in July and August 1943, when the Japanese consolidated prisoners across the F Force camps, which were by then seriously depleted by illness and death.

Songkurai camp was situated on the banks of a swift-flowing river, the Huai Ro Khi. Initially it consisted of 3 huts, the largest of which was 75 m long. None of the huts had adequate roofing when the prisoners arrived.

The camp soon spread out in a way that made daily living even more difficult than it would otherwise have been. The cookhouse was located 400 m from the main camp, 730 m from the hospital and more than a kilometre from the isolation (cholera) hospital. The British had very few containers by now, and the Japanese provided none. Meals had therefore had to be ferried all day in the pouring rain, along slippery pathways, by officers and convalescing prisoners.

Work outside the camp began almost immediately. After only one day to clear the camp, 600 men were sent to work on the railway. A major task was the building of a 3-span wooden trestle bridge across the river. This involved exhausting pile-driving and the hauling of huge logs. Men would stand in the swift, cold water up to their waists or even to their armpits, hauling on ropes with block and tackle.

Prisoner James Bradley recalled:

When we were felling the teak for the bridge … the Japanese brought in elephants to help drag the timbers out of the jungle … the sight of these great beasts and the complete understanding that existed between them and their mahouts, was the only thing of beauty that I can recall for almost the rest of my captivity.

[Towards the Setting Sun, London, Phillimore, 1982, p 54]

The Japanese at first demanded all medical personnel join the working parties at Songkurai, but this was reversed after an appeal was made to the senior Japanese officer, Colonel Banno.

The cholera epidemic that swept across all camps of F Force hit Songkurai on 21 May 1943. By the end of the month, 67 men were dead. Many more men were ill with:

• dysentery
• malaria
• beri-beri
• and diseases of malnutrition.

Rations were at starvation level. There were almost no medical supplies, and the shortage of containers meant that none could be spared for boiling water for sterilisation of instruments or utensils. This ensured the further spread of disease. Stan Arneil, who passed through the camp on 8 August, as the Australians moved through to Kami Songkurai, formed the perhaps unwarranted impression that the British:

all seem to have thrown in the sponge and just lay down and die.

[One Man's War, Sydney, Alternative Press, 1980, p118]

Unusually for camps on the railway, the local Japanese commander, Lieutenant Wababyashi, showed some humanity and responsibility towards the prisoners in his charge. But the pressure from the Imperial Japanese Army Engineers to deliver the daily quota of working men was relentless. On 20 August 1943, Wababyashi passed on the order that unless the number of men on working parties was doubled, all prisoners, sick and well, would be turned into the jungle to fend for themselves. To his credit, Wababyashi seemed ashamed of this order. After long negotiations with the colonel commanding the Engineers, the plan to evict the prisoners from the camp was dropped.

The situation at Songkurai improved when, in late July, the Japanese decided to transport some of the seriously ill patients of F Force to a hospital camp in Thanbaya, Burma. Towards the end of their time at Songkurai, the Australians were able to organise concerts, lectures by the officers, and church services.

What accounts for the lower death rate for the Australians? Firstly, they were relatively fit, compared to the British who had had to include many sick in their contingent when F Force left Singapore. Possibly the Australians benefited from added camaraderie because they were a more heterogeneous force of volunteers. The British were a mix of regular forces, territorials, militia, conscripts and local volunteers.

Songkurai today

The site of Songkurai can be easily identified today by a modern bridge, the only major river crossed by Highway 323 beyond the Sangkhla Buri junction. A school on the left of the road, heading towards Three Pagodas Pass, marks the camp site. Beneath the bridge can be seen the remains of the concrete footings of the wartime bridge. A little downstream, on the school bank, can be found further wartime remains: 

• a cutting for a ferry across the river
• a large concrete water tank
• the remains of a temporary bridge used while the main railway bridge was being built.

Kami Songkurai camp

We found [Kami Songkurai] to be a pigsty compared with the comparatively well-drained camp at Shimo Songkurei. The ground here was practically flat and received the seepage from the hill at the rear of the camp. It was ankle-deep in mud, and the first thought that struck all of us was how the [earlier] occupants could have lived in such a place without doing something about cleaning it up.

[James Boye, Railroad to Burma, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1990, p 111]

Located only short distance from Three Pagodas Pass and the border with Burma, Kami (Upper) Songkurai (No. 3) was one of the most remote camps that Australians occupied on the Burma-Thailand Railway.

About 400 Australians of F Force arrived here on 25 May 1943, after completing a gruelling train journey from Singapore and an exhausting march of 300 km from Ban Pong. Within a day of their arrival, working parties were sent out by the Japanese.

Like other camps in this region, Kami Songkurai had primitive facilities. The accommodation in the camp consisted of:

two long rows of huts placed close together at the foot of three steep hills which formed a rough semi-circle enclosing the camp in the rear. The area between the huts and the river which flowed parallel to and about 200 yards from the road at the foot of the other range of hills forming the valley was low-lying and swampy. During the wet season this swamp became a filthy quagmire of green mud.

[Reports on the Activities of A.I.F. "F" Force, AWM 54, 554/7/4, p 20]

When the Australians arrived, some rōmusha occupied the camp. They were already suffering from cholera, which broke out in all the camps in this region of the railway in mid-May 1943. By 8 June 1943, over half the Australians were ill and 7 had died, all from cholera.

Rations were grossly inadequate, there were almost no medical supplies and there was very little kitchen equipment and few containers. At least the water supply, cookhouse and sleeping quarters were close to each other, in contrast to Songkurai.

With almost no medical supplies and near-constant monsoonal rains, the health of those who survived the cholera epidemic continued to deteriorate. The stream, the major source of water for bathing, became foul and the hospitals were poorly equipped.

One of the chaplains with F Force recalled:

It was often very trying to conduct a service in a hut with 300 men with the nauseous stench of the awful ulcer cases all around and having often four or six dysentery cases squatting on their bamboo pans around one through the prayers, scripture readings and so on.

[George Polain, 'Report on the Work of Chaplains with "F" Force', AWM 54, 554/7/4, Australian War Memorial.]

For all this, the situation at Kami Songkurai was not quite as desperate as in Shimo Songkurai, where the relationship with the Japanese supervisor, Lieutenant Fukuda, was particularly bad. The guards here seemed easier on the men, for reasons known only to the Japanese. The Japanese officer in charge also had a good working relationship with the Imperial Japanese Army Engineers. Although he could do nothing to get medical supplies, he did not force sick men out to work. The food supply at Kami Songkurai was also better relative to other camps nearby.

By the end of July, the Australians had lost 23 men, 14 from cholera, a relatively low rate of death to this disease.

In late July and early August 1943, the Japanese increased the numbers at Kami Songkurai to 1,685 by bringing in prisoners from Ni Thea, Shimo Songkurai and Changaraya. Stan Arneil, who had been at Shimo Songkurai, was placed in the hospital, 14 men to the 3 m by 3.5 m bay.

Scabies are rife and lice are making sporadic appearances; they burn the bed pans in the fire inside the huts, the smell being particularly vile. The latrines are on a slight rise about thirty yards from the wards and being open have filled so much with water that the seepage has burst from the ground and flows in the general direction of the English ward, next to this one.

[One Man's War, Sydney, Alternative Press, 1980, p 119.]

Many of the new arrivals were already seriously ill and utterly exhausted by being forced to march to Kami Songkurai, through thick mud while carrying their remaining gear. Between 1 August and 28 November 1943, when the camp was finally evacuated, 490 deaths had occurred.

Kami Songkurai today

Little remains of the site of Kami Songkurai today. Its general location can be identified by a local agricultural research facility, located on a bend on the left of Highway 323 only a short distance before Three Pagodas Pass. The railway ran to the left of the road and its route now runs under some local houses. The wartime camp was to the right of the road, a little in the direction of Sangkhla Buri. An overgrown cutting can be found beyond the agricultural station.

Tha Khanun camp

In the mornings mist wreathes and smokes along the hillside above us, green with its feathery bamboos and tall trees. In the soaked stillness of the air, out of the wet woods, come occasional plangent and fluty bird notes. It is wet, wet but rather impressive and beautiful.

[The Burma–Siam Railway: The secret diary of Dr Robert Hardie 1942–45, Sydney, Collins, 1983, p 96.]

During F Force's long march from Ban Pong railway station to the camps near the Burma-Thailand border, a group of 700 Australians were halted on 10 May at Konkoita. Pond's battalion, as it was known, after its Australian commander, Lieutenant Colonel S.A.F. Pond, was separated from the rest of F Force until December 1943.

At first deployed near Konkoita, Pond's battalion arrived at Tha Khanun on 3 July. They remained there for 2 months.

The physical environment was dramatic. There the Kwae Noi River cut its way through steep gorges of limestone cliffs. During the monsoon season, which began mid-May 1943, the river rose over 3 m. 

Swirling down in a yellow rush, submerging the willow-like bushes along the banks, and carrying on its surface great matted tangles of trees and bamboos.

[The Burma–Siam Railway: The secret diary of Dr Robert Hardie 1942–45, Sydney, Collins, 1983, p 96.]

The Australians were already ill with cholera, malaria, ulcers, dysentery, beri-beri and diphtheria.

They appeared to be in a pitiful condition. With bodies like skeletons, they were clothed in dirty, torn and ill-fitting shorts and shirts. 150 men were without boots, few men with socks.

[Report on the Activities of A.I.F. "F" Force, AWM 54, 554/7/4, 31, Australian War Memorial.]

Their camp site was on a bamboo-covered hillside sloping to a tributary of the main river: 'road one side, dry creek bed the other – railroad the other and creek the other' was how Dr Roy Mills described it. Only half a day was allocated for clearing and preparing the site before the men were sent to work. Only men who were close to death were spared working parties.

To get to their worksite men had to negotiate a high-level bridge, 70 m long and made of slippery logs only 15 cm wide. Or they crossed a low bridge 60 to 90 cm under the water. The hours of work were long, almost inhuman. On 2 days, the men worked from 8 am to around 2 am the following morning. Their work included embankments and a cutting excavated from the near-vertical cliff above the Kwae Noi. At times, officers were ordered to work in special parties on a slightly lighter contract basis.

Like many camps along the railway at this time, Tha Khanun was a cholera camp. The first case was diagnosed on 9 July. By 8 August there had been 59 cases and 21 deaths.

Roy Mills described the situation:

It has been hell—accommodation inadequate and even then muddy, insufficient men to look after them, insufficient containers to boil water for them—pouring rain.

In late July, despite all the efforts to create fly-proof latrines, there was also an outbreak of acute dysentery. Rations were little more than rice and there were only 2 meals a day. All the other illnesses associated with the endemic malnutrition along the railway afflicted Pond's battalion too.

With the rates of illness soaring, the Japanese finally agreed to several evacuations of the most seriously ill prisoners to hospitals downriver.

In late July the camp was split, with some men being moved about 275 m up the road to a site next to a rōmusha camp and a cow yard. A forward camp was also established 2 km north on 10 August.

Finally, in early September, the Australians were marched back to Taimonta.

Tha Khanun today

It is difficult to trace the Australian story at Tha Khanun today, since the Kwae Noi has been dammed a little upriver by the Vachiralongkorn dam. Traces of the railway's route can be found to the right of the main entrance to the impressive Wat Tha Khanun, which is accessed off Highway 323.

Thanbaya camp

Far from Tha Khanun, and 50 km to the south of Thanbyuzayat, was Thanbaya. It was to this camp that the Japanese agreed, during the medical crisis of F Force in mid-1943, that the most seriously ill prisoners could be transported and treated in hospital.

The patients were chosen from Ni Thea, Shimo Songkurai, Songkurai, Kami Songkurai and Changaraya. An advanced party of medical and administrative staff left Changaraya in late July to set up staging posts at Kando and Ronshi to care for the patients in transit. They had to cover some of the distance by marching, since the railway, though completed in Burma, was not working, owing to a bridge having collapsed in the floods.

Thanbaya was an old A Force camp, next to the railway, that had been allowed to fall into a bad state of disrepair. However, in time, despite the lack of tools, it was converted into a hospital of 11 wards. Each ward was dedicated to a specific illness.

Its physical environment was pleasant, with an outcrop of low hills nearby and 3 streams supplying water (2 of these dried up after the monsoon ended). However, the rōmusha who were camped in the vicinity fouled the whole area, adding to the difficulties of hygiene.

Patients began to arrive from Thailand on 8 August and continued to do until 7 September 1943. Their journeys were sheer cruelty. Owing to the railway being damaged, some men had to walk 2 km even though they were suffering from tropical ulcers. Those travelling by train and motor transport were herded into crowded closed or open trucks. Deaths on the journey were frequent.

By early September, the numbers at Thanbaya were 1,776 British and Australians. The morale of the patients rose once they were free from the fear of working. But drugs and food remained inadequate. Malaria, beri-beri and scabies were also prevalent.

From 19 to 24 November 1943, the hospital was emptied as the surviving patients were moved to Kanchanaburi. The prisoners travelled in trucks, some open topped. The journey lasted from 72 to 132 hours, with long halts along the way. This journey was as uncomfortable as previous train journeys experienced by the POWs.

The total number of deaths at Thanbaya, including those who were dead on arrival, was 665. This represented about 45% of the British and 21% of the Australians.

Thanbaya today

Thanbaya is inaccessible today because of restrictions on movement beyond Thanbyuzayat in Myanmar.