The 415 km Burma-Thailand Railway was constructed rapidly by the Japanese between late 1942 and late 1943. It was built to supply troops in Burma, bypassing vulnerable sea routes. The project used over 60,000 Allied prisoners of war (POWs) and 200,000 Asian labourers (rōmusha). Despite severe engineering challenges, rugged terrain and a lack of modern equipment, the line was completed in 12 months. Working conditions were hellish. The 'Speedo' period was particularly brutal. Workers endured long hours and brutal tasks, such as carving the Hellfire Pass (Konyu Cutting). The railway became operational, but its construction caused about 102,000 deaths.
It seems to run without much regard to the landscape as though someone had drawn a line on a map!
[EE Dunlop, The War Diaries of Weary Dunlop, 1989, p 212.]
The Burma-Thailand Railway was built in 1942 and 1943 to supply the Japanese forces in Burma (now Myanmar). It would allow the Japanese to bypass the sea routes that had become vulnerable since mid-1942. Japanese naval strength was reduced after battles in the Coral Sea and at Midway Atoll.
Once the railway was completed, the Japanese planned to attack the British in India. Particularly, the roads and airfields used by the Allies to supply China over the Himalayas.
Begun in October 1942 and completed on 16 October 1943, the railway stretched 415 km between Nong Pladuk in Thailand and Thanbyuzayat in Burma.
A rail connection between Burma and Thailand had been proposed decades before World War II. In the 1880s, the British had surveyed a possible route. But they abandoned the project due to engineering challenges including:
- thick jungle
- endemic disease
- lack of adequate roads.
The Japanese surveyed the project in the 1920s. Then, after completing another survey in early 1942, they decided in June 1942 to go ahead with the build. They would use the large workforce of Allied prisoners of war (POWs) at their disposal.
In June 1942, a small number of POWs worked with Japanese engineers, marking and roughly clearing the route of the railway.
Aiming to finish the railway as quickly as possible, the Japanese decided to use a workforce of POWs and Asian labourers (rōmusha).
The terrain the railway crossed made its construction very difficult. However, its route was not entirely through the dense, inhospitable jungle of popular imagination. At either end, in Burma and Thailand, the railway track ran through gentle landscape before entering the rugged, mountainous jungle on the border between the 2 countries.
When the track reached Wampo, about 112 km from the Thai terminus, it began crossing jagged limestone hills dotted with streams and gullies. During the wet season from May to October, the land became waterlogged and unstable. This posed problems for construction, transport and supply.
As far as possible, the railway track proceeded at a gentle gradient, as steam trains could only climb a slight incline. Where the railway met unavoidable hills, cuttings were dug to allow the line to proceed. Often, the line emerged from a deep cutting onto a series of embankments and bridges.
The project included building 688 bridges and more than 60 stations, as well as refuelling and watering points.
More than 60,000 Allied POWs were used in the Burma-Thailand Railway project, including British Empire troops, Dutch and colonial troops from the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia) and a small number of United States (US) troops. About 13,000 were Australian POWs.
The Japanese also enticed or coerced about 200,000 rōmusha to work on the railway. These included Burmese, Chinese, Javanese, Malay and Tamil people.
Despite being repeatedly bombed by the Allies, the Burma-Thailand Railway operated as a fully functioning railway after its completion.
Between November 1943 and March 1944, over 50,000 tonnes of food and ammunition were carried to Burma, as well as 2 complete divisions of troops for the Japanese offensive into India. This attack, one of their last, was defeated by British and Indian forces.
The Japanese used the railway in Burma until the end of the war. They used POWs and rōmusha for maintenance and repair tasks along the line.
For much of its northward route through Thailand to the Burmese border past Songkurai, the map shows the railway following the Kwae Noi river. Other major rivers nearby are the Mae Khlaung in Thailand, which joins the Kwae Noi at Kanchanaburi, and the Ataran further north in Burma. An arrow on the map above indicates the direction north from Thanbyuzayat to the town of Moulmein in Burma. Other arrows indicate the directions to Bangkok (east) and Singapore (south) from Nong Pladuk. The Burmese coastal towns of Ye and Tavoy are shown on the Andaman Sea to the west.
Why the railway was built
The Japanese advance in the Asia-Pacific region in late 1941 and early 1942 was a dramatic period of the war.
Rapid Japanese advance
In just 5 months, Japanese forces occupied territory that stretched from British Burma in the west to the US-administered Wake Island in the east.
The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in the Republic of China in 1931 was the start of an expansionist policy aimed at creating the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. In 1937, Japan attacked China. In the following 2 years, Japan occupied much of northern China and key coastal regions.
When Nazi Germany defeated France in 1940, Japan also occupied the French colonies in Indochina.
The US imposed an oil and economic embargo in response to Japanese aggression in 1941. In turn, the Japanese decided on a southward expansion to gain strategic resources from South-East Asia and the Netherlands East Indies.
The Japanese planned to capture other areas, including the Australian-mandated territories of New Guinea and Papua, as well as various Pacific Islands, to create a protective military barrier against Allied counterattacks.
Despite having feared war with the Japanese in the Pacific for some time, Australia and the United Kingdom were unprepared to meet the growing threat. They were preoccupied with the war against Germany and Italy in Europe and the Middle East.
In 1941, 2 brigades of the 8th Division of the 2nd Australian Imperial Force were based in Malaya (now Malaysia) alongside British and Indian troops. Another 3 battalions of the 8th Division's third brigade were divided between the islands of Ambon, New Britain and Timor.
On 7 December 1941, the Japanese launched a surprise attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. This attack brought the US into the war on the Allies' side. At the same time, Japanese forces landed in Thailand and Malaya and began rapidly advancing down the Malay Peninsula. They also attacked the British colony of Hong Kong and the US-controlled islands of Guam, Midway Island and Wake Island.
The better-led and more experienced Japanese troops rapidly pushed the British, Indian and Australian troops southward towards Singapore. Despite some local tactical successes, such as at Gemas, Bakri and Jemaluang, the Allied forces could not stop the Japanese advance.
Singapore fell to Japanese forces on 15 February 1942. Over 130,000 Allied troops, including over 15,000 Australians, became POWs.
From late 1941 onwards, Japanese forces successfully attacked:
- the Philippines
- New Guinea
- the Netherlands East Indies
- Burma.
In mid-February 1942, some units of the Australian 7th Division landed in Java to stop the Japanese advance. They were captured as POWs after brief fighting. The men were joined by the survivors of the sinking of HMAS Perth and USS Houston in the Sunda Strait on the night of 28 February to 1 March 1942.
By early March 1942, the Japanese had conquered Rangoon in Burma and were threatening the British in India.
US resistance in the Philippines all but ended in April, after which Japanese forces moved to consolidate their conquests by capturing a buffer zone of territory in New Guinea, Papua, Solomon Islands and the wider Pacific region.
Japanese naval losses
During the Battle of the Coral Sea from 5 to 8 May 1942, Australian and US naval forces turned back Japanese transports and warships aiming to capture Port Moresby. This reversal forced the Japanese to try to take Port Moresby by land, over the Owen Stanley Ranges along the Kokoda Track.
From 4 to 7 June 1942, the US Navy won a massive battle near the Pacific island of Midway Atoll. This was a severe blow to Japanese naval power. While not defeated, the Imperial Japanese Navy was now stretched in its ability to control the seas around the territories it had conquered.
The shipping lane through the Malacca Strait off the coast of Malaya was one of these vulnerable routes.
The Japanese decided to construct a railway to connect their front in Burma with Japanese forces and supplies in Thailand and Malaya. This would reduce the need for naval escorts.
To free up military resources for other fronts, the Japanese decided to use POWs and local labourers to build the railway.
Why it's called 'Hellfire Pass'
The place earned the title of Hellfire Pass, for it looked, and was, like a living image of hell itself.
[Jack Chalker, Burma Railway: Images of War, 2007, p 59.]
Hellfire Pass (Konyu Cutting) was the deepest and longest cutting along the entire length of the Burma-Thailand Railway. The site is a formidable combination of solid limestone and quartz rock, described as 'semi-marbleised limestone'. It was not easy to excavate.
The name 'Hellfire Pass' came from the appalling working conditions at and around the site, located about 150 km from the start of the railway at Nong Pladuk.
Over the years, Hellfire Pass came to symbolise the suffering and maltreatment of Australian prisoners of the Japanese across the Asia-Pacific region.
Speedo period
In mid-1943, the Japanese introduced a 'Speedo' to meet tight deadlines for completing the railway.
During the Speedo period, POWs were forced to work long hours into the night to speed up construction. Oil lamps and bamboo fires lit their worksite. The flickering light, the noise from the drilling of the rock and the shuffling of hundreds of poorly fed prisoners seemed the very image of hell.
Around 1,500 British and 2,000 Tamil workers started work on the Konyu section of the railway from November 1942. Some 400 Australians from the T Battalion of D Force began work in the region of Konyu Cutting in late April 1943.
By June 1943, work had fallen behind schedule, and the Konyu area had become a bottleneck. It held up work further along the railway.
The Japanese brought in an extra 600 POWs, including British and Australians of H Force. Around 1,000 rōmusha also worked in the vicinity of Konyu Cutting.
Hellfire Pass is a dramatic cutting, some 75 m long and 25 m deep. The approach to this cutting has a longer series of excavations, creating a bench on the hillside that follows the contour line. Whether POWs thought this too was 'Hellfire Pass' is unclear, but working conditions here were harsh.
Carving cuttings by hand and removing rubble were back-breaking, exhausting tasks for hungry, ill workers.
A large workforce was needed to excavate Hellfire Pass and to build the bridges and embankments beyond it. The POWs and rōmusha lived in a network of camps below and above the railway line. Even before starting work, they might walk several kilometres up or down steep and treacherous mountain slopes to the site each day.
As the line-laying parties neared Hellfire Pass, Japanese engineers increased the pace of work, leading to the infamous Speedo period from April to August 1943.
During the Speedo period, a POW was expected to drill 2 m to 3 m each day into solid rock, instead of 1 m per day. The workday extended to 15 hours, or sometimes 18. If the pace of work seemed too slow, the Japanese resorted to physical punishment.
Wet season deaths
The wet season rains worsened conditions. It turned worksites and camps into quagmires and made steep hill faces impossibly slippery.
It is difficult to know precisely how many men, Australians and others, died at Hellfire Pass itself. However, the graves in the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery show a concentration of deaths not just at Konyu and Hintok but across the length of the railway from June to August 1943.
Glossary
- Allies
- counterattack
- endemic
- occupation
- rōmusha