Remembering Australian POWs and the Burma-Thailand Railway

Australian memories

In the decades since 1945, prisoners of war (POWs) and the Burma-Thailand Railway occupied a central place in Australia's national memory of war.

There are good reasons for this. Over 22,000 Australians were captured by the Japanese in South-East Asia. More than one-third of these men and women died in captivity. This was about 20% of all Australian deaths in World War II.

The shock and scale of these losses affected families and communities across the country.

Many Australians have championed the stories of ex-POWs to keep their stories alive and ensure their experiences are not forgotten.

1940s to 1960s

We're grateful that many ex-POWs published memoirs after the war. These included eye-witness accounts, such as war correspondent Rohan Rivett's book, Behind bamboo (1946).

There are accounts from the Australian Army nurses interned on Sumatra, such as While history passed (1954) by Jessie Elizabeth Simons and White Coolies (1954) by Betty Jeffrey.

Some memorable novels are based on accounts of captivity, such as Nevil Shute's A town like Alice (1950), which was made into a popular film in 1956.

Some books were immensely popular. Russell Braddon's The naked island (1951) sold well over a million copies and stayed in print for decades. Many POW accounts were also adapted over the years for commercial films and television series.

The 1950s accounts of captivity spoke to a deep anti-Japanese prejudice and racism in Australia. More positively, some of them turned a story of atrocity and suffering into an affirmation of Australian courage and resilience.

Australian POWs were often portrayed not so much as men who had been humiliated by defeat, but as Anzacs who, in captivity, had triumphed over adversity. They displayed humour, resourcefulness and mateship in profoundly difficult situations.

In this way, the POW narrative became integrated into the national memory of war that had been dominant since the Gallipoli Campaign of 1915 and the Anzac legend.

The flow of POW memoirs continued in the 1960s and 1970s, albeit at a slower rate. More novels and memoirs were published by ex-POWs, such as Hugh Clarke's The tub (1963) and Ray Parkin's Into the smother (1963).

1980s and beyond

Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, there was a resurgence of POW stories as part of the 'memory boom'. The reasons for this were complex and had much to do with nation-building in the post-Cold War era.

This new wave of remembrance also generated a new sympathy for victims of trauma, such as genocide and captivity.

More POW books emerged in the 1980s. The testimony of the now-ageing POWs was also captured by the academic Hank Nelson and journalist Tim Bowden in a memorable series of radio interviews for the national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), later published as Prisoners of War, Australians Under Nippon (1985).

Films and television series followed, such as Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road (1997) and John Doyle's Changi (2001).

More recently, a novel by Australian writer Richard Flanagan, The narrow road to the deep north (2013), follows the postwar traumas of an ex-POW who worked on the Burma-Thailand Railway. It was adapted into a popular TV miniseries in 2025.

Memorial sites

World War II veterans, in their retirement, began returning to sites of their wartime suffering, including Hellfire Pass (Konyu Cutting). Progressively from the 1980s on, they developed new rituals of remembrance, often with official support.

So too did their families and other 'pilgrims'. As digital resources became widely available, many Australians turned to the past, researching their family histories, visiting battlefields and war cemeteries, and positioning their personal stories within the national narrative of war.

National memorials to POWs were created in Canberra at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, in 1988 and the Victorian town of Ballarat (2004), home to a POW doctor, Albert Coates of A Force.

The Australian Government invested in many overseas sites of war memory. These included battlefields such as:

• Gallipoli in Türkiye
• Isurava in Papua New Guinea
• Le Hamel and Villers-Bretonneux in France
• Sandakan in Borneo
• and the Hellfire Pass Interpretive Centre.

With its remarkable topography and dramatic narrative, Hellfire Pass came to stand for the wider Australian experience of captivity.

The Australian War Memorial, the country's national museum and memorial to war service, also profiled POWs in exhibitions such as 'Stolen years', which travelled the country from 2003 to 2005, and 'Great escapes' in 2019.

Some years earlier, a statue by Peter Corlett of the POW surgeon Lieutenant Colonel Edward 'Weary' Dunlop was installed outside the War Memorial. Although Dunlop was only one of 106 Australian POW medical officers, he had come to represent the values of self-sacrifice, courage and compassion they all manifested in captivity.

The Bridge on the River Kwai

The bridge on the River Kwai is the best-known site on the Burma-Thailand Railway, but its fame is due to a fictional film.

Spanning the River Kwae Yai in Kanchanaburi, the bridge was built in 1942 and 1943 by British POWs based at Tha Markam. It consisted of 11 steel spans on concrete pillars. Using materials from Java, it was the only steel bridge built by the Japanese in Thailand.

The fame of the bridge is due to the 1957 film by David Lean, The bridge on the River Kwai. Based on a 1952 French novel by Pierre Boulle, the film features an unhinged British POW commander, Captain Nicholson (played by Alec Guinness), who takes such pride in British technical expertise that he cooperates with the Japanese commander, Saito, to build a towering wooden bridge. The bridge is finally destroyed as Nicholson, wounded in the shoot-out between the Japanese and the commandos, and realising what he has done, falls onto the detonator.

The plot is entirely fictional, although Nicholson was supposedly based on the British colonel at Tha Markam, Philip Toosey.

The bridge in the film looks nothing like the steel bridge at Kanchanaburi. However, the film was such an international success – it won 7 Oscars – that tourists flocked to Thailand searching for it.

In 1960, the town of Kanchanaburi changed the name of the Mae Klong River in the vicinity of the bridge to the Kwae Yai (or 'greater tributary'). And so, the 'Bridge on the River Kwai' was created. The tune whistled by the POWs in the film, 'Colonel Bogey's march', is often played by buskers on the bridge.

About 100 m downstream from the Kanchanaburi bridge, a wooden bridge carried light diesel rail trucks during World War II. Transporting construction materials while the main bridge was being built. Allied aircraft regularly bombed both bridges from December 1944 to June 1945. Several spans of the steel bridge were destroyed. The wooden bridge, which could be more easily repaired, partially filled the gap.

The bombings also killed and injured Thai civilians and Allied POWs at Tha Markam. The worst attack on 29 November 1944 killed 19 prisoners and wounded 68. A further 15 prisoners were injured on 5 February 1945. The Japanese then evacuated the prisoners to Chungkai further downstream.

The bridge on the River Kwai is now a tourist attraction and the hub of intense commercial activity. Memorials to the war and locomotives sit almost unnoticed among market stalls selling souvenirs and faded wartime photos. Tourists can ride the Death Railway to Nam Tok or take a toy train for a shorter ride across the bridge and back.

Nothing remains of the Tha Markam camp. The car park behind the market on Mainamkwai Road marks its location. In the war years, the town of Kanchanaburi was located some 5 km south of the bridge.

AWM P02491.261

Kanchanaburi today

Kanchanaburi map

In the north-west corner of this map, the bridge on the River Kwai spans the Kwae Yai River as it carries the rail line from the south. Near the bridge is the site of the former Tha Markham POW camp and the 1944 Japanese memorial on Maenamkwai Road.

Once over the bridge, the rail line loops back through Kanchanaburi, running close and parallel to Highway 323. Just off the highway, a couple of kilometres south-east, are the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery and the monument to rōmusha (Chinese Cemetery). Nearby, on the other side of Highway 323, on the rail line, is Kanchanaburi Railway Station.

Less than 2 km further south on Pak Prak Road (near the junction of the Kwae Noi and Mae Khlong rivers) is the house of the Thai trader Nai Boonpong Sirivejabhandu, who smuggled food and medicine to the POWs, near the site of the Japanese headquarters.

Chungkai War Cemetery is located along the Kwae Noi, outside the town, a couple of kilometres south-west of the river junction. The Chungkai cuttings, through which the present rail line runs, are about 1 km further on (at the bottom right of the map).

Other national memories

The Burma-Thailand Railway was built by a multinational workforce, consisting of Allied POWs, Asian labourers (rōmusha) and Japanese and Korean engineers and guards. Although their experiences had much in common, the way in which they remembered the railway after the war varied according to national 'politics of memory'.

For the British, the memory of 'Far Eastern' POWs was somewhat eclipsed by other events, such as:

• the Battle of Britain
• the 1940 Blitz
• Dunkirk
• El Alamein
• and D-Day. 

The war against Japan was overshadowed by the war in Europe and the Mediterranean. It involved the 'difficult' memory of the humiliating defeat in Singapore in 1942 and foreshadowed the collapse of British imperial power in Asia.

So far as there was a British 'myth' of captivity during World War II, it was one of escape from German POW camps, particularly Colditz, the high-security fortress in Saxony. The image of the prisoners of the Japanese in popular media, in films such as The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and King Rat (1965), was unflattering and less glamorous.

In the Netherlands, the memory of prisoners of the Japanese was more prominent. This was partly because the Netherlands East Indies was an important part of its empire for 400 years. There were also large numbers of 'Dutch' (including Eurasian) soldiers and civilians captured in 1942 who emigrated to the Netherlands after Indonesian independence in 1949.

The war cemeteries in Kanchanaburi and Chungkai, which contain the remains of over 2,200 Dutch POWs, became a focal point of remembrance for Dutch ex-POWs and their families. The Beata Mundi Regina (Beautiful Queen of the World), a church near the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery, was funded by a Dutch ambassador to Thailand in 1955 and 1956 as a war memorial.

The number of other Westerners on the railway was small – 650 from the United States (US) and fewer than 10 each from New Zealand and Canada. So their experiences were often marginalised in national narratives of World War II.

Despite their terrible losses, the stories and experiences of rōmusha have struggled to find a place in any national memory. They lacked the organisational structures of the Allied armies and, being mostly illiterate, left few records of their experiences. Unlike some Australian POWs, they did not write memoirs of captivity.

Part of the reason rōmusha were forgotten was that they were considered second-class subjects of pre-war European empires. When they died, they were buried in communal pits, nameless, unlike the POWs who were given funeral services and erected named memorials.

Nor did the suffering of rōmusha fit with the triumphal narratives of independence of the postwar states of South-East Asia. The wartime exploitation of civilian populations by the Japanese occupiers, with whom some independence leaders had cooperated, was an uneasy and uncomfortable memory.

The Burma-Thailand Railway also has an ambiguous place in Thai memory. Faced with the Japanese demand for free passage for its troops through Thailand in December 1941, the Thai government capitulated after short resistance by their defence forces. On 25 January 1942, Thailand declared war on the United Kingdom (UK) and the US.

This was a pragmatic accommodation to the realities of power in the Asia-Pacific, but it meant that World War II had an uneasy place in Thailand's national history. Unlike Singapore, the Philippines and Burma, Thailand does not have a national day remembering the war. Only at the local level in Kanchanaburi are the railway and the workforce who built it actively remembered.

For the perpetrators, the Japanese, the memory of the Burma-Thailand Railway is even more difficult.

Since 1945, Japanese society has been divided on its responsibility for the war in the Asia-Pacific region. Manly individuals, not the Japanese state, have sought reconciliation for the war crimes committed by their compatriots during the building of the Burma-Thailand Railway.

Driven by a desire for peace, the former Japanese interpreter, Nagase Takashi, invested in education and peace temples in Kanchanaburi.

Various Japanese associations built the Thai-Japan Friendship Memorial, known as Shinto Park, at Lad Ya, about 16 km from Kanchanaburi town.

Tourists and pilgrims

The Burma-Thailand Railway is a tourist attraction for the Thai province of Kanchanaburi. In contrast, Myanmar's political isolation in recent decades has limited the number of visitors to the Burmese end of the railway.

It's easy to reach Kanchanaburi from Bangkok, and Thai tourists are drawn to its natural beauty and eco and adventure tourism.

Since the valley of the Kwae Noi River was historically a route for Burmese invasions, Kanchanaburi province also contains many ruins of fortresses and battlefield sites, such as the Nine Army Battle Historical Park.

The Bridge on the River Kwai and the operating sections of the railway between Ban Pong and Nam Tok are also major drawcards. Many bus tours from Bangkok stop briefly at the bridge precinct and the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery before heading north to the national parks and resorts. Often, tourists ride the Death Railway from Kanchanaburi to the Wampo viaduct or Nam Tok, then rejoin their buses.

The railway's length in Thailand is not listed under heritage protection. Under Thai regulations, railway maintenance is fragmented among several agencies, with only some concerned with heritage preservation. It's unclear how this will affect the future of the railway, which plays an important role in local transport between Kanchanaburi and Nam Tok, as well as in tourism.

Kanchanaburi has a memorial to the rōmusha, the countless Asian labourers whose suffering has often been forgotten in the history of the Burma-Thailand Railway. A plain white column bearing inscriptions in Chinese, the memorial is located at the back of the so-called Chinese cemetery, just a short way along Saeng Chuto Road from the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery.

According to local sources, in 1948, the temple monks and local people found the remains of some 4,500 bodies nearby.

Several museums have been established in Kanchanaburi.

The Hellfire Pass Interpretive Centre, above the famous Hellfire Pass, was established by the Australian Government in 1998 with the cooperation of the Thai government.

The Thailand–Burma Railway Centre, across the road from the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery, explains the building of the railway in Kanchanaburi. The centre was established in 2003, following several years of research and exploration of the railway by Australian expatriate Rod Beattie.

Some tourists from the UK, the US, Australia and the Netherlands engage in a kind of 'pilgrimage'. They come to the railway as a personal journey, seeking to pay their respects to those who died, tracing their family histories or simply trying to learn more of this catastrophic episode in human affairs. Some groups, including veterans' associations, commercial companies and organisations, are committed to keeping the memory of POWs alive.