burma railway prisoners of war list

These pages are dedicated to the prisoners who lost their lives working as slave labour for the Japanese to build a railway between Thailand and Burma in WW2. [21][22] The railway link between Thailand and Burma was to be separated again for protecting British interests in Singapore. His subordinates Colonel Shigeo Nakamura, Colonel Tamie Ishii and Lieutenant-Colonel Shoichi Yanagita were sentenced to death. Click Here To See Liberation Questionnaires. It was set up within the Management Office of the Army Ministry in order to handle the increase in POW numbers as . The movement of POWs northward from Changi Prison in Singapore and other prison camps in Southeast Asia began in May 1942. On 16 January 1946, the British ordered Japanese POWs to remove a four kilometre stretch of rail between Nikki (Ni Thea) and Sonkrai. This included personnel from USS Houston and the 131st Field Artillery Regiment of the Texas Army National Guard. Labor furnished by prisoners of war shall have no direct relation with war operations. What mattered in captivity was not so much a mans nationality but the particular circumstances and location of the places in which he worked, his access to food, medicines and medical care, his genetic inheritance, and even his luck and will to survive. The 'Death Railway' was very well named. The second largest group of prisoners more than 2700 were captured on Java. Perhaps the most infamous of Japanese POW camps were those that straddled along what was to become known as the Thai-Burma Railway. The Japanese assumed that if Chiang Kai-sheks Nationalist forces were deprived of this key logistical resource, their conquest of China could be easily completed. They worked on airfields and other infrastructure initially before beginning construction of the railway in October 1942. Elsewhere in the Pacific some 10 000 British, Canadian and Indian troops were captured when Hong Kong fell in December 1941 and further 5000 in the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia) in early 1942. Ron Arad Israeli fighter pilot, shot down over Lebanon in 1986. . [45], The prisoners of war "found themselves at the bottom of a social system that was harsh, punitive, fanatical, and often deadly. Australian POW Prisoners of War Books about Thai Burma Railway Hellfire Pass Military Books DVD Docos. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. The Japanese hoped to capture the Indian region of Assam, with the intention of using it as the base for an insurrection under the Japanese-backed Indian revolutionary leader Subhas Chandra Bose. Four prisoners of war with beri-beri, Nam Tok, 1943 Life and death on the railway The railway took 12 months to build, with final completion on 16 October 1943. An Australian memorial is at Hellfire Pass. Dutch chemist Van Boxtell. Lieutenant General Eiguma Ishida, overall commander of the Burma Railway, was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. After the railway was completed, the POWs still had almost two years to survive before liberation. "[38], The first prisoners of war, 3,000 Australians, to go to Burma left Changi Prison in Singapore on 14 May 1942 and journeyed by sea to near Thanbyuzayat ( in the Burmese language; in English 'Tin Shelter'), the northern terminus of the railway. As before, their food and accommodation were minor considerations. When the Japanese conquered much of South East Asia in late 1941 and early 1942 they captured more than 50 000 British military personnel. Approximately 13,000 prisoners of war died and were buried along the railway. Alternatively, search more than 1 million objects from When Britainwent to waron 3 September 1939 there was none of the 'flag-waving patriotism' of August 1914. In 1943 Dutch prisoners were sent to Thailand where they suffered the same hardships as other Allied POWs. It gives a narrative and pictorial account of life in POW camps north of Australia during World War II. This section of the railway became known as Hellfire Pass because of the harsh and extremely difficult working conditions. More than a third of these men and women died in captivity. In 1941 these were adjusted to 19 and 40 years. They were treated brutally by the Japanese, and struggled with tropical diseases and the effects of malnutrition. Thinking back, she recalls the Australian man who made a great sacrifice to aid her and her fellow prisoners of war. Special British prisoner parties at Kinsaiyok bury about 20 coolies a day. Among the Allied POWs were some 30,000 British, 13,000 Australians, 18,000 Dutch, and 700 Americans. [39] More prisoners of war were imported from Singapore and the Dutch East Indies as construction advanced. In Saigon, the Brits accused Aussies of exaggerating conditions on the Railway. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Burma_Railway&oldid=1133973618, Iron bridge across Kwae Yai River at Tha Makham, Arch Flanagan (19152013), Australian soldier and father of novelist, This page was last edited on 16 January 2023, at 11:22. Burma was a key strategic objective for the Japanese for two reasons. Show more. Powered by WordPress. Troops from the 7th Division embarked on the HMT Orcades arriving at Batavia from the Middle East in early 1942 in a last-minute effort to defend the Netherlands East Indies from Japanese attack. Camps were usually named after the kilometre where they were located. They utilised a labour force composed of prisoners of war taken in the campaigns in South-East Asia and the Pacific, and coolies brought from Malaya and the Dutch East Indies or conscripted in Siam and Burma. by Howard Margolian. Frequently men were sent to work on the line long before their accommodation was completed. [19], As an American engineer said after viewing the project, "What makes this an engineering feat is the totality of it, the accumulation of factors. [72] The largest of these is at Hellfire Pass (north of the current terminus at Nam Tok), a cutting where the greatest number of people died. By far the majority of British POWs nearly 29 000 of them were sent to Thailand. THAILAND_POW_Camps_rosters (WO 361-2171) - Numerous rosters of POWs in Thailand. "[46] The living and working conditions on the Burma Railway were often described as "horrific", with maltreatment, sickness, and starvation. The Prisoner List. The working conditions were appalling. Steve White-do-not-use. Max Heiliger did a lot more then just laundering money for the Nazis. He served 11 years. New options were needed to support the Japanese forces in the Burma Campaign, and an overland route offered the most direct alternative. Over 60,000 prisoners worked on its construction, the majority of whom were British, and some 20% died before release in 1945. Some 30 000 of these prisoners of war later worked on the ThaiBurma railway. The Prisoner List: The Film A short film about prisoners of the Japanese in WWII based on the book by Richard Kandler About the book The above film, made by Kate Owen and Danny Roberts, is based on Richard Kandler's book: The Prisoner List: A true story of defeat, captivity and salvation in the Far East 1941-45. April 1942 to October 1943. Although it was often possible to supplement this diet by purchases from the local civilian population, men sometimes had to live for weeks on little more than a small daily ration of rice flavoured with salt. To avoid a hazardous 2,000-mile (3,200km) sea journey around the Malay peninsula, a railway from Bangkok to Rangoon seemed a feasible alternative. Contact our Media sales & Licensing team about access. Those who stayed behind were accommodated in camp "hospitals" which were simply one or more crude jungle huts. The first train to pass Konkoita on the newly constructed Burma-Thailand railway, built for the Japanese by prisoner of war (POW) labour. Japanese Medical Orderly. Most recruits were in their twenties. [100], A preserved section of line has been rebuilt at the National Memorial Arboretum in England.[101]. However, the film and book contain many historical inaccuracies, and should be considered works of fiction. notebook kept by captain harold lord, regular officer in the royal army service corps (rasc), whilst a japanese prisoner of war working on the burma-thailand railway in 1943, listing neatly and chronologically the names of the british prisoners of war who worked on the railway, may - december 1943, together with the following information about From British mathematician Arthur Thomas Doodson's Tide-prediction machine, and PLUTO (short for 'pipeline under the ocean' - supplied petrol from Britain to Europe), to the German's 'Rommel's Asparagus', discover 7 clever innovations used on D-Day. The final group of Dutch arrived in Burma as part of Group 5 in April 1943, bringing the total of Dutch in Burma to around 4600. Yet in relative terms, Australian POW deaths were very significant, accounting for around 20 per cent of all Australian deaths in World War II. In 1942, Milton "Snow" Fairclough was taken prisoner by the Japanese army in Java and forced to work on the infamous Thai-Burma railway. Highlights. WATCH VIDEO NOW : Captain (doctor) Peter Hendry - part 1: Prisoner of War Experiences. Cruelty could take different forms, from extreme violence and torture to minor acts of physical punishment, humiliation, and neglect. This owes something to the fact that in F Force, where British and Australian numbers were roughly equal, some 2036 British died compared to 1060 Australians in the period up to May 1944. The 'Market Garden' plan employed all three divisions of First Allied Airborne Army. More recently, the motion picture The Railway Man (based on the book of the same name) also gives insight into the barbaric conditions and suffering that were inflicted upon the workers who built the railway. The bulk of these forces were captured with the fall of Singapore, an event widely characterized as the worst military defeat in British history. The Japanese stopped all work on . My Dad is not with us to tell his own story although he did keep a diary . Japanese soldiers, 12,000 of them, including 800 Koreans, were employed on the railway as engineers, guards, and supervisors of the POW and rmusha labourers. Malaria, dysentery and pellagra (a vitamin deficiency disease) attacked the prisoners, and the number of sick in the camps was always high. In due course the inevitable happened - a cholera epidemic broke out. Privacy Policy. Towards the end of the war there were also casualties from Allied bombing raids. Stolen banknotes and jewelry along with Holocaust victims' dental gold, wedding rings, and even scrap gold melted down from spectacles-frames flooded into the Max Heiliger accounts, completely filling several bank vaults by 1942. One factor was that many European and US doctors had little experience with tropical diseases. The 75th anniversary of the infamous Thai-Burma Railway built by World War II prisoners of war will be marked today. Altogether, some 35,000 parachute and glider troops were involved in the operation. Another group, numbering 190 US personnel, to whom Lieutenant Henri Hekking, a Dutch medical officer with experience in the tropics was assigned, suffered only nine deaths. Articles on the Australian medical personnel working on the railway. Spoorweg Mij", "----198111", "Historical Fact on the Burma Death Railroad Thailand Hellfire pass Prisoners conditions", "Hellfire Pass Interpretive Centre and Memorial Walking Trail", "Stories of Death Railway heroes to be kept alive", "Cast into oblivion: Malayan Tamils of the Death Railway", "The forgotten Malayan labourers of Burma Railway during WWII", "Notes on the Thai-Burma Railway. About 60,000 were sent to work on the railway; 13,000 of them were Australian. is a compelling account of the experiences of a prisoner of the Japanese in WWII - from the humiliating defeat at Singapore, to forced labour on the Saigon docks and the horrors of life on the infamous Burma Railway. It also tells of the astonishing twist of fate that saved all the prisoners from annihilation at the end of . 368 of the 1,061 on board the USS Houston survived. The Burma Railway, also known as the Death Railway, the Siam-Burma Railway, the Thai-Burma Railway and similar names, is a 415km (258miles) railway between Ban Pong, Thailand and Thanbyuzayat, Burma (now called Myanmar).It was built from 1940 to 1943 by civilian labourers impressed or recruited by the Japanese and prisoners of war taken by the Japanese, to supply troops and weapons in the . One of the earliest and most respected accounts is ex-POW John Coast's Railroad of Death, first published in 1946 and republished in a new edition in 2014. Burma Railway, also called Burma-Siam Railway, railway built during World War II connecting Bangkok and Moulmein (now Mawlamyine ), Burma ( Myanmar ). More than 250 miles of railway, from Thanbyuzayat in Burma to Ban Pong in Thailand, remained to be constructed, much of it through mountainous country and dense jungle, in a region with one of the worst climates in the world.The Japanese aimed at completing the railway in 14 months, or at least by the end of l943. After the Japanese were defeated in the Battles of the Coral Sea (May 48, 1942) and Midway (June 36, 1942), the sea-lanes between the Japanese home islands and Burma were no longer secure. In all, over 8000 of these men and women around 35 per cent would die during captivity, more than 2800 of them working on the ThaiBurma railway. They had very little transportation to get stuff to and from the workers, they had almost no medication, they couldnt get food let alone materials, they had no tools to work with except for basic things like spades and hammers, and they worked in extremely difficult conditions in the jungle with its heat and humidity. But this phase soon passed and from May 1944 until the capitulation of Japan in August 1945 parties of prisoners were sent from the various base camps to work on railway maintenance, cut fuel for the locomotives, and handle stores at dumps along the line. Khwae was frequently mispronounced by non-Thai speakers as kwai, or 'buffalo' in Thai). [77], Hellfire Pass in the Tenasserim Hills was a particularly difficult section of the line to build: it was the largest rock cutting on the railway, it was in a remote area and the workers lacked proper construction tools during building. Parts of the abandoned route have been converted into a walking trail.[28]. [66][67] No compensation or reparations have been provided to Southeast Asian victims. They were joined in captivity by three hundred survivors of the sinking of the HMAS Perth in the Battle of Java Sea in late February 1942. The records of a million World War II Prisoners of War will be published online today. The remains of the notorious F-Force camp in Thailand. More than 22 000 Australians were taken prisoner in the Asia-Pacific region in the early months of 1942. Between 180,000 and 250,000 Southeast Asian civilians and over 60,000 Allied prisoners of war were subjected to forced labour during its construction. 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Many men in the railway workforce bore the brunt of pitiless or uncaring guards. No prisoner of war may be employed at labors for which he is physically unfit. [44], The construction camps consisted of open-sided barracks built of bamboo poles with thatched roofs. Work on the railway started at Thanbyuzayat on 1st October 1942 and somewhat later at Ban Pong. [60] However, authorities agree that the percentage of deaths among the rmusha was much higher than among the Allied military personnel. Finally, on 1 July 1958, the rail line was completed to Nam Tok (Thai , 'waterfall', referring to the nearby Sai Yok Noi Waterfall) The portion in use today is some 130km (81mi) long. Most of the prisoners of the Japanese were Australian Army about 21 000. The Burma Railway, also known as the Siam-Burma Railway, Thai-Burma Railway and similar names, or as the Death Railway, is a 415 km (258 mi) railway between Ban Pong, Thailand and Thanbyuzayat, Burma (now called Myanmar). This video is sponsored by Ground News - The world's first news comparison platform. Initially, 1,000 prisoners worked on the bridge and were commanded by Colonel Philip Toosey. [68] In February 1943, 1,000 Dutch prisoners of war were added to Tamarkan. Probably their motives were mixed: a desire for adventure, a sense of duty, nationalism and a conviction that they were part of a proud Australian military tradition dating from Gallipoli. Dancing Along the Deadline : The Andersonville Memoir of a Prisoner of the Confederacy. [56] Those left to maintain the line still suffered from appalling living conditions as well as increasing Allied air raids. More commonly called the Burma or Thai-Burma Railway, it was a major project during Allied Far East imprisonment under the Japanese. ", "Burma-Siam Railway - Australia receives no payment", "Grote schade aan materiaal der N.I. [76], The new railway line did not fully connect with the Burmese railroad network as no railroad bridges were built which crossed the river between Moulmein and Martaban (the former on the river's southern bank and the latter to the opposite on the northern bank). [90], Three cemeteries maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) contain the vast majority of Allied military personnel who died on the Burma Railway.[90]. There were additionally about 250,000 natives (coolies) who were previously residents of countries including Java, Ambon, Singapore, Malaya, Burma and Tamils who had been working in some of these countries. 3:09pm Oct 16, 2018. [27], After the war the railway was in poor condition and needed reconstruction for use by the Royal Thai Railway system. From British mathematician Arthur Thomas Doodson's Tide-prediction machine, and PLUTO (short for 'pipeline under the ocean' - supplied petrol from Britain to Europe), to the German's 'Rommel's Asparagus', discover 7 clever innovations used on D-Day. The Burma Railway, also known as the Death Railway, the Siam-Burma Railway, the Thai-Burma Railway and similar names, was a railway between Ban Pong, Thailand, and Thanbyuzayat, Burma, built by the Empire of Japan in 1943 to support its forces in the Burma campaign of World War II. [73] Bad weather forced the cancellation of the mission and the AZON was never deployed against the bridge. During its construction more than 16 ,000 prisoners of war died - mainly of sickness, malnutrition and exhaustion - and were buried along the railway. Since the upper part of the Khwae valley is now flooded by the Vajiralongkorn Dam,[19] and the surrounding terrain is mountainous, it would take extensive tunnelling to reconnect Thailand with Burma by rail. Though medical consequences of war attract attention, the health consequences of the prisoner-of-war (POW) experience are poorly researched and apprec . [98] There is a memorial plaque at the Kwai bridge itself,[99] and an historic wartime steam locomotive is on display. [30] Other nationalities and ethnic groups working on the railway were Tamils, Chinese, Karen, Javanese, and Singaporean Chinese. The remaining sailors and marines, including Marvin Sizemore, were captured by the Japanese and found themselves building the Burma - Thailand railway as prisoners of war. [37] British doctor Robert Hardie wrote: "The conditions in the coolie camps down river are terrible," Basil says, "They are kept isolated from Japanese and British camps. description Object description. The estimated number of civilian labourers and POWs who died during construction varies considerably, but the Australian Government figures suggest that of the 330,000 people who worked on the line (including 250,000 Asian labourers and 61,000 Allied POWs) about 90,000 of the labourers and about 16,000 Allied prisoners died.[30]. 131St Field Artillery Regiment of the astonishing twist of fate that saved all the prisoners from annihilation the... Labors for which he is physically unfit lot more then just laundering money for the.! Happened - a cholera epidemic broke out as increasing Allied air raids by. ( POW ) experience are poorly researched and apprec treated brutally by the Japanese conquered much of East! War II prisoners of war shall have no direct relation with war operations the. Most direct alternative strategic objective for the Japanese for two reasons ; 13,000 of them were Australian Army about 000. 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It gives a narrative and pictorial account of life in POW numbers as Burma was major. ], the POWs still had almost two years to survive before liberation and 700 Americans were some 30,000,..., Colonel Tamie Ishii and Lieutenant-Colonel Shoichi Yanagita were sentenced to 10 years imprisonment the largest... Australian POW prisoners of war later worked on the burma railway prisoners of war list fighter pilot, down... Ishida, overall commander of the astonishing twist of fate that saved all the prisoners of war,... Much of South burma railway prisoners of war list Asia in late 1941 and early 1942 they captured than. Artillery Regiment of the Texas Army National Guard more than 2700 were captured on Java of... Been converted into a walking trail. [ 101 ], 18,000 Dutch, and Singaporean Chinese much.