Prison camps near Hellfire Pass

Camps for Allied prisoners of war and rōmusha

This system of marching battalions into unprepared jungle camps was the [Japanese] policy … in this initial monsoon period thousands lived and died without cover over their heads, or lived in … congested huts … or in leaky tents or crazy bivouacs providing little more than token protection.

[Brigadier CA McEachern, Report on conditions, life and work of prisoners of war in Burma and Siam, AWM 54 554/2/1A.]

In early to mid-1943, many thousands of Allied prisoners of war and Asian rōmusha were brought by the Japanese to work on the construction of the Burma-Thailand Railway in the Konyu-Hintok region. To accommodate them, a network of primitive camps sprang up at various points along the Kwae Noi River and the road heading north to Burma (now Myanmar).

The Japanese refused to allow many men to do camp duty, so it was difficult for the POWs to maintain their camps. Under pressure from the Japanese engineers overseeing railway construction, the local commanders demanded that as many men as possible work on the railway.

Within the Konyu and Hintok area in mid-1943, there were at least 5 major camp sites at which Australians and prisoners of other nationalities were accommodated. The POWs, whose knowledge of local topography was limited, called them by various names. This makes it difficult now to attribute names precisely.

Konyu River (also known as Lower Konyu or Konyu 3) was on the Kwae Noi River below the escarpment on which Hellfire Pass (Konyu Cutting) was excavated. Further upstream was Hintok River camp, positioned on cliffs above a major bend in the river.

On the road just above Hellfire Pass (now Highway 323) was a large camp of POWs and Tamil rōmusha, again called Konyu 3. Nearby, around 100 m up the road, was Malay Hamlet (sometimes called Konyu 2). A few kilometres further on was Hintok Mountain camp, also known as Hintok Road.

In the other direction from Hellfire Pass, towards Tampi and Kanchanaburi, were yet more road camps, probably called Konyu 1 or, again, Konyu 2.

The Konyu and Hintok camps were close enough for communication to occur between them. The prisoners at Konyu 3, Malay Hamlet, and Hintok Mountain, for example, made regular trips down the steep, slippery escarpment to the Konyu River, and later to the Hintok River, where they bought supplies from Thai traders working on the Kwae Noi River. The very ill POWs were also moved to the river for evacuation by barge to hospitals downstream, at Tha Sao, Kanchanaburi and Chungkai, in particular.

Yet in many ways, the individual camps were discrete worlds, with the Japanese treating them as water-tight compartments. Malay Hamlet was administered by a different Japanese command, Malay Command, rather than by the command managing the other camps, Thailand Command. The jealousy between these commands made integrated management of the camps in the Konyu–Hintok region impossible.

Since the camps in this region were temporary, they never developed the infrastructure of more permanent base camps such as Kanchanaburi and Tha Markam further south. Once the construction of the railway in the area was completed, and the workforce moved on to another location, the camps lost their purpose. The Japanese retained some camps along the railway for maintenance and repairs in 1944 and 1945, when the railway was damaged by heavy Allied bombing.

After the war, when the bodies of POWs had been recovered from the camp cemeteries and the Burma-Thailand Railway had been dismantled, the camp sites disappeared into the jungle and the landscape. Some on the river, such as Hintok River and Tha Sao, have become tourist resorts. Good access to the Kwae Noi River, which made them good sites for POW camps, attracts modern adventure tourists.

Map of the Hellfire Pass area

Long description of the map

This map of the Hintok–Konyu camps shows the path of the railway line, the topography and the locations of the camps, cuttings, embankments and bridges.

Highway 323 stretches diagonally from north-west to south-east across the map, generally following the path of the old road built during railway construction. Hintok Mountain camp was located on the road in the north. Located near the road, further south-east, were the Malay Hamlet camp, and the Konyu road camps, Konyu 3 and then Konyu 1. From the site of Konyu 1 the highway stretches a further 80 km to Kanchanaburi.

Some kilometres west of Konyu 3, on the other side of the railway, the Hintok River camp was located on the banks of the Kwae Noi River. Further down the river, which snakes west to south-east across the map, was the Konyu River camp.

Located between the river and road, the railway followed the contours of the escarpment. Just east of the Hintok River camp, Compressor Cutting is situated between 2 embankments. Near the end of the second embankment is the site of the Pack of Cards Bridge. A little further along, as the railway curved around to the north-east, was the site of Hintok Station. Hintok Cutting, Three Tier Bridge and 7-metre Embankment are located at the point where the line curved back toward the south-east. Running parallel to the road (now Highway 323), the railway then wound its way south-east through Hammer and Tap Cutting, Trestle Bridges and Hellfire Pass.

Most camps were within walking distance of the railway. Hellfire Pass is a short distance west of the site of Konyu 3 and the road. Foot tracks ran down from Hintok Mountain to the railway and the Hintok River camp. Near the Hintok Mountain camp, ladders were needed to cross the escarpment. South of the Hintok Mountain camp, 'The Hill' Road track ran down from the main road to the railway at 7-metre Embankment near Three Tier Bridge.

Konyu Road camps

We had located Major Quick's 'T' Battalion early, on our arrival at Kenyu [sic], and received a shock to see the conditions under which they were living … a camp of exhausted, weak and very sick men. There was nothing we could do to help them.

[RJW Newton et al., The grim glory, p 502.]

Many work camps were established in the Konyu–Hintok region in the first months of 1943 to accommodate the large forces of Allied prisoners and Asian labourers (rōmusha) constructing this section of the Burma-Thailand Railway.

The Australians who worked on Hellfire Pass were based at 2 camps on the road heading north (now Highway 323), directly above the cutting and the ledges approaching it. One camp, Malay Hamlet, accommodated Australian and British prisoners from H Force. The second, located a little to the south, housed T Battalion from D Force under the command of Major E.J. Quick.

This second camp was often known as Konyu 3, although POWs' accounts used many different names and spellings for the camps in the region. The camp at Konyu River, for example, was also sometimes called Konyu 3.

Located on what is now a large open space just inside the entrance to Hellfire Pass Interpretive Centre, Konyu 3 housed British and Australian POWs. A group of Tamil rōmusha were camped nearby, probably near where a wartime truck used to transport POWs from Singapore now stands.

Australian prisoner of war Hugh Clarke later recalled:

On Anzac Day, 25 April 1943, we halted in a small clearing in the jungle-covered plateau and were informed that this was our new camp—when we built it … The job site was at the end of a 500 metre track under a canopy of towering bamboo and was to be a cutting through a great rocky spur. Far below, beyond a sea of bamboo, the river wound north like a silver ribbon.

[Hugh Clarke, A life for every sleeper, p 22.]

Lieutenant Colonel Ernest Edward 'Weary' Dunlop also described the Konyu 3 camp site as …

… a favourable area for tent erection but which 'looks malarious'.

[EE Dunlop, The war diaries of Weary Dunlop, p 221.]

It is hard to trace precisely what happened at Konyu 3. No one at this camp left personal accounts as full of gripping detail as Dunlop's diary of life at Konyu River and Hintok Mountain. The reports of the commander of D Force, Brigadier EA McEachern, also lack detail of Konyu 3 because he was based at Hintok Mountain.

The working conditions for POWs based at Konyu 3 are known to have been some of the harshest on the railway. The excavation of Hellfire Pass was completed manually, using 'hammer-and-tap' methods and physical labour to clear the jungle. The working hours were exceptionally long during the 'Speedo' of mid-1943, and the Japanese treatment of their workforce was relentlessly harsh. The POWs' journey to and from the worksite was also exhausting, as any visitor climbing the steps to the site from the Hellfire Pass Memorial Museum today can attest.

The health of the POWs was shattered by disease, malnutrition and overwork even before the camp was infected with cholera, which broke out close by at Malay Hamlet in June. By 11 June 1943, only 60 of 600 men at Konyu were fit for work, and the Australian death toll was 32. For medical emergencies, the camp had to rely on Dunlop coming down from Hintok Mountain, as he did in May, to operate (without success) on an English patient suffering general peritonitis.

Within the Konyu area, other camps served as work bases, supply points, and staging posts along the road. Again, naming can be confusing, but Konyu 1 was probably located a little further down the road towards Kanchanaburi. Konyu 2 may also have been in this vicinity, although that name was often used to describe Malay Hamlet.

Kwae Noi valley

Konyu River camp

Above and behind us to the north runs a high jungle-treed ridge in the greens, browns and reds of the Australian bush. Its sharp edge shows against the white cumulus which just crowns it … South, across the river in its deep channel, lies another mountain. … The river is called the Kwai Noi.

[Ray Parkin, Into the smother, p 29.]

Konyu River (also known as Konyu/Kanyu or Kannyu 3, Lower Konyu/Kannyu) was the first camp at which Australians were based in the vicinity of Hellfire Pass. For most prisoners, their time at this camp would be short.

About 250 men of Dunlop Force, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Dunlop, arrived at Konyu River on 25 January 1943. After being trucked from Tha Sao to a road junction on the escarpment above, they struggled down a steep path, carrying as much equipment as they could manage. Some 2.5 km later, they reached their campsite on the banks of the Kwae Noi River.

There was already a British camp here, established in late October 1942, where the POWs were in very poor health. But there was no accommodation or any other facilities ready for the Australians. Nor was there any for a party of Dutch prisoners who arrived only days later.

Over the next 4 weeks, the Australians and Dutch, who were also under Dunlop's command, set about constructing a camp. They cleared the jungle, erected huts, dug latrines to the depth needed for disease control, and implemented anti-malaria measures. All this was done with few tools and no materials other than bamboo and ropes made from jungle fibre. For a while, many POWs, including Dunlop, slept in the open, enduring very cold nights.

Dunlop wrote:

Everything here is à la Swiss Family Robinson—there are practically no resources, not even the odd tin or petrol can or pieces of wire. Fish hooks have to be made from safety pins, bone, etc., containers for food and water out of bamboo. Baskets are being prepared from bamboo and fibre.

[2nd February, in EE Dunlop, The war diaries of Weary Dunlop, p 185.]

By late February, a functioning camp had been created and discipline established by the Australian officers (to the annoyance of some Australian POWs).

By later standards, conditions at Konyu River were relatively good. A number of the British prisoners died and were buried in a cemetery carefully created by the river. A growing number of Australians, now in captivity for over 12 months, also started to display symptoms of avitaminosis thanks to the poor Japanese rations (mainly rice). Dysentery and malaria broke out despite the prisoners' efforts to control mosquitoes.

To offset this, there were many opportunities to trade with Thais, bringing in food supplies via the river. The eggs thus provided were, as Ray Parkin wrote in February:

… literally life-saving. At present the river is easy and the barges can come up but we wonder what will happen in the Wet Season. We can see evidence of the heights the floods reach here.

[Ray Parkin, Into the smother, p 57.]

The Japanese also supplied occasional meat and vegetables after a road was built down from the main road.

Most importantly, the prisoners were not yet forced to work on the railway that was beginning to inch its way along the escarpment high above. Jungle clearance and camp construction were heavy work, but they did not require long treks to the railway, as would later be required at camps such as Hintok Mountain camp. The prisoners at Konyu River also had regular holidays (or yasume) and time for concerts, swimming, fishing and diving for clams in the river.

The Japanese at Konyu River were more reasonable. They experienced less pressure to deliver large work parties to the engineers managing the construction. Dunlop and his fellow officers, Majors Arthur Moon and Ewan Corlette, developed a working relationship with the Japanese troops, impressing them with their medical expertise. After Dunlop operated at night on an Australian suffering from a perforated peptic ulcer, he became known to the Japanese as 'No. 1'.

In early March, the prisoners were told that they would have to shift camps. Apparently, the distance from Konyu River to the railway route was too great for them to be based there. Given the effort put into constructing Konyu River, this was:

… news as bloody as could be received.

[11 March 1943, in EE Dunlop, The war diaries of Weary Dunlop, p 185.]

But they had no choice, and by 17 March 1943, Dunlop and most of the men under his command had moved to Hintok Mountain.

Although the POWs' time at Konyu River was short, the camp remained important to them because of its continuing function as a supply base to the Konyu region. Prisoners at Hintok Mountain and Konyu 3 would make regular trips in mid-1943 to purchase food brought up by river. Konyu River also served as a point from which the growing number of sick were evacuated to hospitals downriver.

Malay Hamlet camp

The site of the camp was on a beautiful sloping hill with a stream running and gurgling some twenty yards away. It was surrounded by dense bamboo thickets while behind it towered sheer and majestic, huge rugged, jungle-clad limestone cliffs. A sight that even when things were at their worst always pleased me … The air when arrived was thick with the nauseating smell of burning bodies, the day's batch of cholera victims were being cremated.

[Stuart Lloyd, The missing years, p 162.]

Malay Hamlet (also known as Konyu 2 or Malayan Hamlet) was one of the POW camps closest to the Hellfire Pass site. Located on the road to northern Thailand, it was only a few hundred metres from Konyu 3, where Australians from D Force were based.

Malay Hamlet was occupied from 21 May 1943 by the Australian and British POWs of H Force, with the Australians under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Roland Frank Oakes. Like many camps along the railway, conditions were primitive. The POWs arrived exhausted after a long march to find no accommodation, latrines or cookhouses. There was at least a small stream, but the water had to be boiled before drinking.

Oakes recalled:

We had a heart breaking job building that camp, but it was done at last and we found ourselves at the end of two days with 24 half rotten, leaking tents, set up in a small clearing amongst giant bamboos in the wilds of Siam … The accommodation worked out at 28 men to a tent, but once the work started that many were never in them at the one time, for there were no holidays and half of them formed each shift.

[RF Oakes, 'Work and be happy', AWM MSS 1037.]

Rations supplied by the Japanese were limited in the first 2 months to rice, a sprinkling of seaweed and something that resembled dried potato chips. Food could be bought from Thai traders who came up by barge to the Konyu River camp, but the camp was some kilometres away, and carrying parties had to be drawn from the same men who were working on the railway.

Malay Hamlet also suffered from being under the control of the remote Imperial Japanese Army Malay Command rather than the Thai administration, which managed other camps in the Konyu–Hintok region.

H Force arrived just as the wet season began, making all access and communications exceptionally difficult:

Almost immediately the monsoon rains began, pouring down day after day, until the country became like a wet sponge. In our confined area, and on the track outside which carried the traffic, mud was often knee deep—filthy, oozing mud which stuck to everything like glue. We made a few poor bamboo tracks in the camp area, but it was difficult to provide labour to maintain them. I doubt if any of us or our belongings were dry during the first month in that camp.

[RF Oakes, 'Work and be happy', AWM MSS 1037.]

Inevitably, the number of sick prisoners at Malay Hamlet soared, and within 3 weeks, cholera had broken out. At the height of this crisis, the camp was burying 12 men a day. The death toll within 10 weeks rose to 216.

To bury the dead, a cemetery was created some 200 m up the road. It was guarded by a large wooden cross unveiled by the British commander, 'To Our Australian and English Comrades. Here Laid to Rest – Amatos Eorum Deus Aspicat [May God protect the loved ones of these men].

By mid-July, conditions at Malay Hamlet had begun to improve. The cholera outbreak was contained thanks to the Japanese providing vaccinations and the efforts of medical personnel, including Australian surgeon Major Kevin Fagan. The Japanese also began supplying pigs and buffalo in quantities that were too much for the POWs to eat. The prisoners themselves stole from the Thais herding cattle to camps further up the line. As Stuart Lloyd put it:

I have never known the Australians fail to abduct at least one beast, when at the night the camp would be lit by millions of little fires over which men squatted frying steaks.

[Stuart Lloyd, The missing years, 2009, p 174.]

With work on Hellfire Pass completed in mid-1943, Malay Hamlet became redundant. Around 100 men of H Force moved north to other worksites, and in September, some of the sick were evacuated to hospitals in Kanchanaburi.

Hintok Mountain camp

Accommodation in Hintock [sic] camp was extremely bad consisting largely of most defective R.D. tents often with only a single fly. Hospital accommodation was tents of this type with rough bamboo staging to keep the men out of the mud. During the entire monsoon season no roof could be erected over the kitchen. In general the overcrowding whether of fit or sick was extreme and many men were rain soaked throughout the 24 hours.

[EE Dunlop, 'Interim Report upon Experiences of P.O.W. Working Camps and Hospitals in Thailand', 14 September 1945, AWM54, 554/1/5.]

Hintok Mountain camp (also known as Hintok Road camp, Upper Hintok and Hintok Jungle no. 5) was the northernmost POW camp in the vicinity of Hellfire Pass, housing Australians, British and Dutch POWs. Located on the main road, the camp also served as a staging post for other groups, such as F Force, passing through on their way to sites further north in Thailand.

The Australians at Hintok Mountain camp were in Dunlop Force, S Battalion and the headquarters of D Force.

Lieutenant Colonel Dunlop reached the camp in March 1943 after some weeks at Konyu River. He commanded the Australians (and some Dutch units) until early May when, as the burden of caring for the sick became immense, he persuaded Brigadier CA McEachern of D Force to take over administrative command at Hintok Mountain.

Although one of the better camps in the region, thanks to Dunlop's management, it had 2 severe disadvantages. Firstly, it was some distance from the worksite, forcing the men to negotiate steep paths up and down rugged hills at the start and end of each working day. When the wet season started, the paths became treacherously slippery and a nightmare to negotiate safely.

Without boots, many men cut their feet on sharp bamboo and rocks. Desperate to avoid injuries that could start tropical ulcers, the POWs would swing from one bamboo to another or use bamboo sticks to stop themselves from sliding. With raw, bleeding and ulcerated feet, many crawled back to camp, arriving at night well after mealtime and the roll call (tenko). Some slept or even died in the jungle.

In an effort to make the journey a little easier, the POWs built bamboo and rope ladders over the escarpment to the south of the campsite.

A second disadvantage of Hintok Mountain was its distance from the supply route of the Kwae Noi River. Although the mainly rice diet was sometimes supplemented by pigs and bullocks provided by the Japanese or purchased and stolen from local Thais, the road route became a quagmire in the wet season. Supplies coming up the river were more reliable, particularly since the Thai trader and member of the resistance V movement, Boongpong Sirivejabhandu, was shipping in food and medicine via this route.

But Konyu River camp and Hintok River camp were kilometres away, and the routes to them were again steep. The Japanese refused to provide trucks or release men from railway work, so supplies had to be hauled up the slopes by carriers, who included officers such as Dunlop.

The worst time at Hintok Mountain camp was the 'Speedo' in mid-1943, when some men worked without rest for more than 80 days. Under intense pressure from the Japanese engineers overseeing railway construction, the local Japanese commanders demanded that the sick be included in the daily workforce quota. The protests of Dunlop and other officers were often ineffectual.

Work parades ultimately became a deplorable spectacle with men tottering with the support of sticks and carried piggy-back on to the parade ground, unable to walk, in order that fixed figures could be met.

[EE Dunlop, Interim report upon experiences of P.O.W. working camps and hospitals in Thailand, 14 September 1945, AWM54, 554/1/5.]

Cholera broke out at Hintok Mountain camp on 19 June 1943. Since the Japanese were terrified of this disease, they provided vaccines and quarantined the sick at 'cholera gulch', a dismal, flooded area a short distance up the road. Dunlop, pioneered in July 1943 the use of saline drips, which arrested fatal dehydration. With saline being supplied from a still developed by Dunlop's fellow POWs, it was also taken by runners to other camps in the area. It was some 2 months before the cholera outbreak was brought under control.

In the 5 months from March 1943, 57 Australians died at Hintok Mountain camp. Nearly 2,900 were admitted to Dunlop's hospital, the main illnesses being:

• malaria (590)
• dysentery (558)
• enteritis (340)
• malnutrition (194)
• cholera (93)
• tropical ulcers (209)
• skin diseases (221). 

As the illness rates soared, the Japanese agreed to some of the sick being evacuated by barge from the river camps to hospitals further downstream. Carrying stretcher cases over the rugged terrain proved a delicate and difficult operation.

For all the horrors of the wet season when the camp, situated in a mountain hollow, became a bog of foul-smelling black mud, Hintok Mountain could be exquisitely beautiful. It was teeming with exotic fauna, including monkeys, whose presence on the mountain behind the Australian camp led the POWs to speak of a 'baboon colony'. As Dunlop recorded in his diary:

Weather is fine again and the jungle is assuming a new coat of multitudinous shades of tender green. The atmosphere seems to have been washed ineffably clean and pure by the rains so that the sky is a serene, fathomless blue. The morning and evening sometimes positively hurt with their beauty, especially the lovely quarter hour before dawn when the whole sky is aglow with brilliant crimson bands showing through the clearly etched foliage in a brilliant atmosphere and the softest of pale blue.

[4 April 1943, in EE Dunlop, The war diaries of Weary Dunlop, p 202.]
 

Hintok River camp

The river is rising fast and the cookhouse was only just saved by calling out all hands to move it from the swirling waters. There is something about this large swirling stream, so swollen with menace, as if it would be glad to sweep away the lot of us and go on, chuckling and tearing at its banks with malicious satisfaction.

[Ray Parkin, Into the smother, p 170.]

Hintok River camp was the last camp to be occupied by Australians working on the section of the Burma-Thailand Railway that stretched from Hellfire Pass to Compressor Cutting.

By mid-1943, the railway had crept its way along the contours of the escarpment in the Konyu–Hintok region, and the Japanese were redeploying their workforce to other points along the railway route. In early August, Dunlop, commanding POWs at Hintok Mountain, heard reports of:

… a great gathering of the clans at the river camp where O P S T J W Y Battalion remnants [mostly of Dunlop and D Forces] are being assembled and a bridging company and a composite party from all battalions. There are about 750 men at present and they will soon be 11–1200.

[EE Dunlop, The war diaries of Weary Dunlop, p 269.]

This 'great gathering' soon occurred at Hintok River, a site perched on dramatic cliffs high above on a bend in the Kwae Noi River. The camp was in fact several camps:

• a British camp above the cliffs (on land now occupied by a tourist resort)
• an Australian camp a short distance away near the river bend
• a Tamil rōmusha camp further upstream.

As so often was the case, the 'camp' was nothing more than a patch of uncleared ground when the Australians first arrived.

At least there was a natural spring emerging through the cliff face, although access to this became precarious as the river levels rose with the wet season. In contrast to Hintok Mountain camp further inland, supplies could be brought in by river, although heavy rains made the journey increasingly difficult for the Thai barges. Hauling the supplies and water up the cliffs also required considerable ingenuity on the part of the POWs.

The men at Hintok River worked on the excavation of Compressor Cutting on the railway high above the camp. Getting to work meant scrambling up a steep hill face with no steps, which became treacherous with black, slimy mud during the wet season.

Working next to the Australians was a force of Tamil rōmusha trying to construct the 'Pack of Cards' bridge. This construction collapsed so often – hence its name – that ultimately it was abandoned in favour of an embankment leading up to Compressor Cutting.

The behaviour of the Japanese at Hintok River was not brutal by the standards of other camps. One POW later described the camp as 'almost a home'. With the incessant rain and heavy work, the health of the already exhausted workforce deteriorated. Many of the most seriously ill were evacuated to hospitals downriver.

It was at Hintok River that the Australian POW Ray Parkin sketched an image of 2 malaria victims supporting a frail cholera sufferer. In time, this image would become the quintessential representation of the tragedy of the Burma-Thailand Railway, reproduced not only as the logo of the Changi Chapel and Museum in Singapore but as a sculpture at the Thailand-Burma Railway Centre museum in Kanchanaburi, Thailand.

Hintok River

Kinsaiyok camps

[Kinsaiyok] was on flat ground close to the Menam Kwai Noi River, and as the weather was still extremely wet, for the most part constituted a quagmire.

[Prisoners of War Camps Thailand—Report of Kinsayok Camp and Hospital/Report on Tarsau Base Hospital 1943-1944, AWM54, 554/5/1.]

Located a short distance beyond Hellfire Pass, Kinsaiyok consisted of a cluster of camps where Australians of D Force, Dunlop Force, and K and L Forces worked on the Burma-Thailand Railway in 1943 and 1944.

In Thailand, D Force was divided into 4 'battalion' work units (S, T, U and V). Of these, Q and V would work at Kinsaiyok from March 1943. Q Battalion, consisting mainly of men from the 2/40th Battalion, 2nd Australian Imperial Force. They arrived, by truck or foot, in mid-March. Later, they moved 7 km downriver to a satellite jungle camp, where they cleared a line leading back to Kinsaiyok. On 24 July, they moved again, to Krian Kri, by barge and foot, where they stayed until the line was completed.

On 31 March, V battalion, consisting of 487 Australians, arrived at Kinsaiyok, which was already occupied by 300 British and 600 Dutch prisoners. Their first tasks were to cut a track through the jungle ahead of the rail-laying gangs and to excavate a long cutting. Seven men of V battalion died during their 32-day stay at Kinsaiyok. They left in early May, marching north to Brankasi (Brenkassi) camp.

Later in 1943, elements of 2 multinational medical groups, K and L Forces, were raised by Japanese raised to help the rōmusha, who were dying in vast numbers on the railway. These medical groups also worked at hospital for rōmusha established at Kinsaiyok.

In September 1943, when railway construction around the Hintok sector was completed, the Japanese concentrated Australians from Dunlop Force at Kinsaiyok, where they remained until January 1944. Among these prisoners was the Australian surgeon, Dunlop, who became Senior Medical Officer at the camp.

The main Kinsaiyok camp was situated close to the Kwae Noi River, where waterfalls cascaded into the river. Above the camp was a major rail terminus, with several loop lines, a storage shed and a water standpipe. In the vicinity were some bridges, which the prisoners constructed in 1943 and were required to maintain in 1944. The marshalling yard was damaged by Allied bombing later in the war.

Accommodation at Kinsaiyok consisted of long attap huts typical of railway construction camps. But many of the huts were little more than collapsing hovels, their roofs easily penetrated by the constant rain. The kitchens were subject to flooding.

The proximity of the river allowed prisoners to trade with Thai merchants. This was an incalculable advantage, since the food supplied by the Japanese was a bare subsistence ration of rice, sometimes supplemented by meat and vegetables. At the jungle camp, hunger drove the prisoners to eat monkeys. The access to the river also meant the camp could be supplied secretly with money and drugs by a member of the Thai resistance, Boonpong Sirivejabhandu.

Conditions at Kinsaiyok eased as the railway progressed. Dunlop noted on 20 September 1943 that, before the men moved off to work and when returning, they were required by their sergeant major to sing songs: 'highly approved by the Nipponese'. These songs included: 

• He'll be coming round the Mountain
• Daisy
• Sons of the Sea all British Born.

"Rule Britannia" has been employed but "Britons never, never will be slaves" rang rather hollow.

[EE Dunlop, The war diaries of Weary Dunlop, p 286.]

Still, the prisoners at Kinsaiyok suffered many of the illnesses that were endemic on the railway. Dunlop's first impressions were that:

Things at Kinsaiyok are very much at sixes and sevens. ... Each group looks after its own sick, the hospital being run by a 'Soviet of captains', but no common policy, no common stores, no arrangements for diets or special segregation of disease. ... Sanitation poor, with only one big latrine for all ... More latrines are being put down, of the open type unfortunately, though otherwise well made. Flies as usual and an offensive smell. For ablution a little stream pouring down to the river with a walk of 440 yards.

[EE Dunlop, The war diaries of Weary Dunlop, pp 283–284.]

Dunlop soon organised the pooling of medical supplies, a camp fund to buy food for the sick, and the construction of a new hospital. This had a dedicated kitchen, an operating theatre with an earthen floor, and horizontal bamboo platforms for the 'beds' with passages between to allow nursing access to the patients. No sooner had he implemented these changes than Dunlop left Kinsaiyok for the hospital at Tha Sao on 25 October 1943.

A small hospital was maintained at Kinsaiyok until 1945, serving the groups that maintained the railway. Kinsaiyok had 3 cemeteries with around 400 graves.

Kinsaiyok today

The campsite today is part of the Sai Yok National Park, which can be accessed by road from Highway 323, a few kilometres beyond the Hellfire Pass Memorial Museum. Just beyond the entrance to the park, on the left, is the site of the Kinsaiyok railway station. This space is wide enough to accommodate 2 lines where trains passed each other. Remnants of a coal dump that fuelled the locomotives are marked here. A section of the railway has been cleared as a walking trail.

The main campsite was above the waterfalls that still cascade into the Kwae Noi River. A signposted track beyond today's campsite and shops leads to the ruins of a Japanese storehouse and the impressive gully where a 3.5-tier bridge was constructed in 1943. The concrete emplacements of this are still visible.