52 results in Across the Three Pagodas Pass
Frontmatter
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Glossary
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Chapter 26 - The Rainy Season: The Monsoon
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Summary
In Thailand, Malaya and other countries in the South-East-Asia region, a round of sudden squalls of rain falls every day. Out of a clear sky it suddenly becomes misty, one expects big drops of rain to fall, it becomes a cloudburst. It sweeps everything away in its fall, but after some ten minutes it stops. The clouds clear off and with sunlight filling the neighbourhood the temperature rises, pools on the ground soon dry up before one's very eyes. Such squalls become frequent, intervals between them brief, it seems to go on pouring in a series of rainstorms. Such is the rainy season.
The rainy season in the Thailand-Burma regions usually lasts from May until the end of August, In Japan it lasts a long time so the volume of rain there is large. Particularly in the Three Pagodas Pass region the rainfall in this Tenanasserim belt approaches the world's heaviest rainfall of over 200 ml a day, with occasional rare cloudbursts with 100 ml falling within an hour. In some months a total of 2,000 ml is reached; in Japan this equals a year's average rainfall. In the dry season there were no cloudy skies and the way it cleared up was a marvel. The rainy season was also called the period of monsoons.
When the rainy season opened the surface-drainage of the roads became bad, rainwater accumulated, it got very muddy. Cars had their wheels trapped in quagmires, unable to move. Automobile accidents often piled up and in the end it became extremely difficult to get through at all. Over the deep ruts even bullock-carts with their wide diameter wheels could barely get through. The engineers could move on foot only. Prisoners-of-war and coolies moved blindly on from Kamburi to Wanyai and from Wanyai to Kinsaiyok carrying their heavy baggage, trudging on, soaked by the rain. In single file they stumbled on all mixed together, engineers, prisoners, coolies, Japanese troops aiming at the frontier. These troops carried stripped-down mountain-guns and heavy machine-guns on their shoulders, trudging on in silence carrying equipment-parts on their backs.
Chapter 31 - Soon to the Three Pagodas Pass
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Summary
It was at the end of August that we drew near the Pass. Since our advance from Kinsaiyok in June the second extension of railtrack-head, accompanied in its progress by roadbed construction, gradually approached Thā Khanun. The railtrack-head on Burma-side, too, was nearing the frontier and all the roadbed in the Nikki area was in mid-construction. At this juncture the section of railtrack to be completed was about 100 km plus, and the situation was that the railway could not be completed by the scheduled end of August. Five months after rush-construction had been pushed ahead in earnest, that five months had proved insufficient. The whole railtrack made a railwayline about 300 km long, and a third more work on construction was calculated to be needed. Once the line was open to traffic a base was needed for complete equipment for rolling stock in the running of trains, with necessary equipment for security, for engine-shed equipment, for water-supply equipment and so on. Firewood, too, for engines had to be stockpiled. To complete what was left there were 100 km of railtrack to be finished within about a couple of months.
In mid-August Major-General Takasaki was completely confined to his sickbed (with malarial fever) and had to hand over command. His successor, Major-General Ishida Hideguma, took up his post as GOC, Thai-Burma Railway Construction. From his HQ at Kamburi he reported to his superior at Southern Army HQ his determination to complete the railway in a planned period of about two months. The connecting-up point for the Thai-side and the Burma-side regiments was definitely laid down as to be Konkuita at 262 km, and the regiments were instructed to push the work ahead.
On Thai-side the CO of 9 Railway Regiment advanced his effective command to Tamuron Part, and the regiment disposed their entire force on the gap up to Konkuita, putting their maximum effort on hastening the work on the remaining roadbed construction. On Burmaside, 5 Railway Regiments established their HQ at Kyandaw, and from the Three Pagodas Pass at the frontier there was a section of track of about 40 km into which they threw the total strength of the Regiment and hurried on the work.
Chapter 11 - Banpong
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It was May 1942, six months after hostilities had broken out. Thailand had declared war and permitted passage though her territory, adopting a helpful attitude, and to that extent she co-operated overall in the Japanese Army's transportation. Trains for military duties ran from Indonesia and Cambodia, and from Malaya, and movement of troops to Shōnan had become a comparatively harmonious practicality. The Thailand National Line's southern part gave on to the Bansoe junction in Bangkok, crossed Rama I bridge over the River Menam in the city and going South into the northern part of the Malay Peninsula reached Hat Yai. From the junction with Malayan Railways western line at Batam Bazaar on the frontier the line made possible unbroken transportation from Bangkok right into Singapore. Banpong station is about 80 km from Bangkok on this southern line. Construction of the railway began here. Its small station was the point of entry, and Japanese Army units on construction work and a labour force were moved into it, the labour force being prisoners-of-war to be employed as navvies and brought up from Malaya. Together with Nong Pladuk, 5 km east of Banpong, it became the construction base with huts, provision and fodder, a temporary ‘anchorage’ for groups passing through. Huts were built on the outskirts of the town in the Nong Pladuk direction. Materials were stockpiled meanwhile and the stockpiles grew taller and taller.
West of the town flowed the River Mae Khlaung which ran through about 50 km of the prefecture whose office was in Kanchanaburi town. From the front of Banpong station the highway to Kanchanaburi extended straight to the North. In front of the station was a small inn on the highway and in it 9 Railway Regiment's 1 Battalion (Sakamoto Unit), who had moved up from Sumatra, set up their HQ provisionally. On 20 May I reported to this HQ. Sakamoto Unit had been moved into Malaya at the outbreak of hostilities and had been restoring the captured Malayan Railways. Since March they had been running Sumatran railways. In May, on orders to prepare the construction of the Thai-Burma Railway, they had moved into Banpong as the regiment's advance party.
Footnote
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Chapter 4 - The River Krian
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Summary
On 8 December the Japanese Army had landed at Singora and Kota Bharu on the Malayan Peninsula. The invasion force, successful in their landing and surprise attack, immediately crossed the frontier and assaulted the British possession of Malaya. The brigades, which set up the route to the whole of the Malayan coastline, on their way South pushed aside the resistance of the British Army's defence-position at Jitra, north of Alor Star, and towards the end of December reached the line of the River Perak. On 1 January Ipoh caved-in and our Army closed-in on the line to the north of Kampar.
Our bridging unit used Malayan Railways after a surprise infantry attack and pursuit and got into Sungei Patani on 2 January. The airfield was bombed, the enemy destroyed his railway-lines with mines: it became pretty dangerous. On 4 January the unit was ordered to the Krian River railway bridge and told to prepare temporary bridgegirders. The bridge was 100 km from Sungei Patani going South and while the girders were being put up the retreating enemy's time-fused charges blew up three trusses, a 40-metre gap. At the same time the road downstream of the bridge was also damaged so a temporary bridge had to be put up.
During their retreat the British Army held us up by destroying the highway over bridges regardless of size. Our infantry drove on in pursuit and to the bridges which enemy field engineers had collapsed repairs had to be made. The advance continued and on both the Perak and the Krian rivers the demand was for installing temporary bridges quickly. All of us gunzoku gave demonstrations of our skills and pressed on with the work, everyone in high spirits, having been accorded such an opportunity of taking an active part in the Japanese Army's invasion of Singapore.
The bridges covered about 200 metres in total extent and their construction-framework comprised three 40-metre-span trusses. In addition, two 40-metre-span trusses had also fallen down in mid-river together with their bridge-piers. In re-installing the fallen trusses there was no margin to spare in the time available and so we had to make wooden temporary bridges downstream.
Chapter 36 - Internment
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It was in Thailand that we were stationed and with the end of the war were dispossessed there of our arms and interned. Japanese troops in French Indo-China (Vietnam), Malaya, Sumatra, Java, The Philippines and Burma comprising the southern regions’ war theatre and the zone occupied by the Japanese Army, were all at war-end dispossessed of their arms mostly in Thailand, as we were, and interned together with Japanese overseas residents in various centres like Bangkok, Singapore, Soerabaya and so on. Men attached to Army units, soldiers, gunzoku, all without distinction were treated alike as prisoners-of-war and of course were employed on work for them. It was notable that in the cases of Allied Forces ex-prisoners-of-war, who now had direct control, that they received retaliatory treatment. Apart from Army units in positions on battlefields, there were also Japanese overseas civilians. For them the Allied Forces’ policy was that they were to be repatriated but first their assets had to be administered by the Allied Forces and they were under regulations laid down about how they behaved during internment, the freedom of the individual being greatly restricted.
In the Thai-Burma area, many of the prisoners had been shipped to Japan after the railway opened to traffic, but there were still a number left in the area. For them, in each prisoner-of-war camp, there was the sudden reversal from Japanese management to their own. In this unexpected reversal of affairs, there were disorders at every camp and one cannot deny there was a revengeful spirit among them. The Japanese units themselves carried out the instructions of the Allied Forces and were coerced into various procedures. Those who understood English were used as interpreters.
Japanese troops on the whole complied with the Edict of His Imperial Majesty by ‘enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable’ and obeyed the instructions of the Allied Forces, kept alive their hope of repatriation, and were interned. Some, however, unable to bear the disgrace of defeat, committed suicide and some, unwilling to live under British conditions, escaped. (As did Colonel Tsūji Masanobu, the fanatical architect of the doro nawa training camp in Taiwan in which he laid down the principles of action in General Yamashita Tomoyuki's campaign to capture Singapore, to whom he was chiefof-staff.
Chapter 13 - Constructing the Railway
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The railway construction was set up and operated by forced labour. For survey, air photographs were taken in advance and on a topographical map the selected route was pegged along the centre of the track. At the same time a detailed investigation was made of track, and gradients and curvatures were decided. On the basis of the route-chart, bridges and location of railtrack were decided, the construction-plan finalized, and putting this all together the volume of work was estimated. So, with this volume, the workforce needed was calculated.
Construction work accordingly got under way. To start with, ground-levelling for the roadbed, digging out and embanking was put in hand: bridges apart, this building work was carried out. When it was finished, the railtrack was laid on top of the roadbed, and the railway line completed.
On Thai-side, in July 1942 the Mōri Survey Unit pushed ahead from Nong Pladuk and set up the survey of the central line. From the Banpong area as far as Kanchanaburi there was a 50 km section of level track, and then the centre line was marked out, construction of the roadbed began immediately.
9 Railway Regiment, as construction unit on Thai-side, moved station to Banpong from the Burma front in June by way of Singapore and Bangkok. Regimental HQ at Banpong supervised supporting units as well as the Regiment itself. Colonel Imai was a soldier but he had studied civil engineering at Tokyo Imperial University and made an able commander of railway construction. In January of this year, at the time when I was on bridge operations in Malaya on the River Krian, I had come to know him and so by an odd coincidence had the pleasure of meeting him again. 1 Battalion, having arrived earlier, took charge of survey arrangements. At Banpong 2 Battalion (Yoshida Unit) took charge of track laying, 3 Battalion (Inuyama Unit) and 4 Battalion (Yabe Unit) had the task of building the roadbed between Banpong and Kanchanaburi. Regimental Materials Workshop (Narihisa Unit) at Nong Pladuk and 1 Railway Materials Workshop (Hashimoto Unit) were together responsible for procuring and assembling materials and other resources.
Chapter 9 - The Thai-Burma Railway
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In the Spring of 1942, with a pause after the occupation of Singapore, the campaign to occupy Burma went ahead. As Rangoon was the supply-base for Burma, for Southern Region Army GHQ there arose the urgent problem of the safety of the supply route by sea. In Burma the British-Indian Allied Forces had given in to the Japanese Army's offensive in a crushing defeat, but because of submarines from the British Western Fleet operating in the Andaman Sea off Burma the Japanese maritime supply-route was threatened, so the overland part of the preparations for the campaign to recapture Burma on the way to India was pressed forward. This year in June in the battle off Midway Island the Japanese Navy lost from its main force four aircraft-carriers sunk, a heavy blow which destroyed the hope of any defence in the Andaman Sea. The safety of transports out of Singapore to seas off Burma had become a problem. Southern Region Army used the plan for an overland route to Burma, taking advantage of the study made in 1939 at Daihonéi (Imperial Japanese Army HQ in Tokyo) to find what use could be made of a railway out of Thailand into Burma. In their survey, construction of a railway would need ‘two railway regiments taking about a year’. Major-General Hattori Shimpei, commanding Southern Region Army's 2 Railway Control, resolved in February this year to make a survey on the ground of this railway project. On receipt of his order, Staff Officer Irie, together with Railway Official Nishijima surveyed the area from Kanchanaburi up to the Three Pagodas Pass on the frontier. They judged that the volume of work needed was much greater than in the original estimate, and calculated that it would take over two years. It therefore became urgent for the construction to start promptly, so without waiting for Daihonéi's orders the General assigned in March 1942 the main construction units, namely 1 Railway Materials Workshops, 5 Railway Regiment, and 9 Railway Regiment.
Chapter 18 - The Jungle
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Upcountry from Kamburi the same highway ran from Thā Makham for seven or eight kilometres, crossing the river West of the town. It was a narrow road with an uneven surface, and in heavy rain one got muddy and vehicles had difficulty in passing each other. The engineers repaired it as best they could because it was the overland route for lorry transport. Local inhabitants drove narrow-axled bullock-carts with wheels of large diameter, and these could move in the mud on the road surface. When the road was repaired the engineers commandeered a number of bullock-carts to transport rations and materials. A single bullock-cart load was not much, and the cart being slow it took a week for a load of rice to arrive at its destination: and because the herdsman carried a load of rice as fodder for the bullock, people said the rice delivered was half what it should have been. The way over the unfinished bridge was made of heavy slats made of bamboo. When the river was in flood they sank below the surface so that often in the rainy season there was no transit. In fact, movement of goods by road ceased and in the strong current of the Kwae Noi transport by small boats was the only way, and in September, when trains first ran as far as Kamburi, transport of materials and rations was achieved by loading them into sampans hauled by pompom-powered motorboats.
In the jungle forest the engineers’ and the prisoners’ quarters were tents from which the prisoners marched out daily to the work sites. We selected for these quarters well-drained spots, felled trees and shrubs, made clearings, and in no time at all tents became our mode of living. In the undergrowth of dense forest we survived in the jungle, for cover collecting branches from the tall trees and it all made a strange sight. We mowed down the undergrowth and within a day or so weeds of which I didn't know the names lay buried in the ground.
A day in the jungle: first the rays of the morning sun began to sparkle and dazzle on the leaves of the trees and shrubs. Cicadas sang with their customary vigour. With the heat the damp ground grew hotter, the fragrance of the grass was stifling and even if you didn't move sweat poured out.
Chapter 16 - The Mae Khlaung Bridge
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The railway route in the Kanchancburi area ran from the crossing point over the River Mae Khlaung in the neighbourhood of Thā Makham near the tributary river, the Kwae Noi. The bridge at the present day on the Namtok Line is called the Kwae Noi bridge, but during the construction period it is correct that it achieved its fame as the ‘Mae Khlaung steel bridge’ (in Japanese it was called mekurongawa eikyū kyō, that is, ‘the permanent bridge over the Mae Khlaung’, to an engineer meaning a bridge with steel spans and concrete bridge-piers and bridge-abutments). As well as the steel bridge there was another, a wooden bridge, but that was prepared against flood times. The building of the steel bridge is now to be discussed (among prisoners-of-war it was called the Thā Makham bridge).
At the crossing at Thā Makham you had a river 300 metres wide with a water-surface of about 200 metres, and part of the crossing of the water-surface was the steel bridge with its steel trusses and concrete bridge-piers as a precaution against being flashed out by floods. The total length of the bridge was about 300 metres and over part of the water-course eleven spans of 20 metres each made the crossing. The wooden bridge was about 100 metres across with spans of five metres each. The big bridge was the only steel bridge on Thai-side and it was the longest bridge. In 1945 it was bombed and collapsed, but after the war it was repaired and is today's steel bridge on the Namtok Line.
After the war the film Bridge on the River Kwai (in Japan called ‘The Bridge Built in the Battlefield’) was based on the Frenchman Pierre Boulle's novel and together with the tune of ‘the River Kwai march’ (actually the military band piece called Colonel Bogey) spread throughout the world the story of the building of the Thai-Burma Railway and of the prisoners-of-war who were the labourers on it. There are many fabrications in the story-line which forms the background of the film and it did not transmit the truth.
Chapter 3 - Opening of Hostilities
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On 8 December 1941 I was at the HQ's lines-of-communication hotel in a corner of Rue Catenar, Saigon. At the hotel entrance an Imperial Guard Division sentry stood on guard. In the garden red canna flowers basked in the morning sun, blooming in a blaze of colour. I went into the hotel lobby and listened to a radio broadcast in Japanese. It was nine o’clock in the morning. The broadcast was serious.
The source was an IJA GHQ communiqué. What we heard was that the Imperial Japanese Empire was involved at midnight in a state of war following the joint American-English proclamation of war on Japan, and in an instant our feelings became taut and tense. The successful surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was reported. As I stood there in the lobby, I heard the news repeated, that the American-British declaration marked the start of the war for Japan. When the negotiations with America were broken off, this had meant war. This news came as a shock. Since our departure from the homeland the unit had been reorganized and up to embarcation was under strict orders to keep secret that it was an undercover transport unit and so we made a showy departure for the front and each individual was furnished with a copy of a meaningful label: but we really knew it meant war. On the Cambodia frontier the circumstances made everyone tense. One began to unravel that mysterious order of a few days ago. One renews his decision to give selfless patriotic service and even if one became a victim there's nothing he can do about it but resign himself to the thought that in the end he returns as a hero to the Yasukuni Shrine. We had tended so far to lose our bearings, got needlessly worried. The unit commander addressed us and boosted our morale.
We soon became front-line troops at Phnom Penh. At the crossing-point on the Mekong river our trucks had to await their turn on the ferry. At Phnom Penh was the royal palace and the streets of this Cambodian capital were newly completed.
Chapter 6 - The Fall of Singapore
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In the early hours of 8 February 1942 the Japanese Army's 5 and 18 divisions, who had been awaiting their opportunity to invade the Island's North coast by The Straits at Johore, crossed The Straits in the dark in small boats and made a decisive landing in the face of the enemy, a landing achieved bit-by-bit under enemy shell-fire. The Straits echoed with their voices encouraging one another. Their campaign to take Singapore Island was beginning.
The surviving British, Indian and Australians were now all on the Island, and the GOC commanding its defence, Lt-General Percival, had been strengthening its defence-works, but part of the British 18 Division reinforcement had still not arrived. The Island had lost mastery of the air and day-after-day the streets of the City were exposed to bombing, bombing on streets which sustained damage and had no military equipment.
An officer of a British reinforcement group landed on the Island on 5 February. His company was in the supply and barracks corps (the Royal Army Service Corps). He was Lieutenant Geoffrey Pharaoh Adams, and in his book, No Time for Geishas (1973) he tries to recount how it happened. I quote from it:
In February 1942 we were approaching Singapore in our transport. Lying off Cape Town in South Africa we had heard that two British battleships had been sunk. The ship altered what had so far been her course and we proceeded in haste to Singapore. I am a butcher's son, volunteered for the Army, became a lieutenant and because of my trade was posted to the Royal Army Service Corps. When we left England in December 1941 America was a neutral power vis-à-vis the war with Germany, but on 8 December when Japan started the Pacific War the joint Allied Forces group was formed. At this point my first acquaintance with Singapore came into my thoughts and I knew nothing of the fighting in Malaya, so I could guess what might happen when we reached the Island a few days before the Japanese Army landed on it.
Chapter 25 - Bridge-Building and Shifting Earth
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Building a roadbed meant both building bridges and shifting earth. A roadbed to carry a railtrack had to be designed with gradients and line-curvatures, but when one looked at it on the ground it became essentially a matter of high ground being cut through and levelled offand of low places being plugged up to bring them to ground level. This is how the roadbed was formed. Mountain streams had to be crossed by building bridges and this meant unavoidable extra labour.
The total length of the railway was 415 km and there were over 300 bridges, apart from the culverts, but few of them were over 100 metres across. On Thai-side there were the Mae Khlaung steel bridge and the double plank viaduct at Arrow Hill at 103 km; on Burmaside there were the three steel bridges with their wooden by-passes over the Zami, Apalon and Mezali rivers. For small spans of 10 metres and larger spans of 70 to 90 metres the railway engineers used standard ‘text book’ bridge-building methods. Bridges occurred about one in every kilometre. For girders on the wooden bridges they used 30-cm squared timbers, one per rail. On top of the foundations made by piledriving the bridge-abutments and bridge-piers, the framework was made in the form of gate-styled columns one against another. It being entirely a temporary method, clamps were used to bolt up the timbers. It was enough to carry the weight of a train on the bridge but not enough for oscillations on impact. Location and extent were decided, and when the height of the bridge-piers was fixed it became a viable job because the construction was simple. This type of construction was not for permanence so the weak places needed strengthening against flood-times and heavy rains, the safety-factor of the foundations being low. After the railway was opened to traffic the enemy's bombing interrupted movement of traffic, the bridges being the constant target, and the construction being simple they collapsed, but again because of their simple construction they could be repaired.
The area included many jungle mountain streams which had to be bridged, and so a lorry thoroughfare was really necessary.
Index
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Chapter 20 - Rush Construction
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On 1 January 1943, at Sakamoto Unit HQ at Wanyai we decorated our billets with the shichi-go-san (7–5-3, lucky numbers) ornaments, but in bamboo only, for New Year's Pine & Bamboo, and on a Thai-Burma site celebrated the New Year with mochi (rice balls) made with Thai rice. In the midst of the jungle with the heat making one sweat, a hot New Year, no one was able to feel quite the full New Year spirit. We prayed for our homeland's prosperity and when we had completed the formal ceremony of bowing from afar to the Imperial Palace, many of the troops took a siesta and listened to the shrilling of the cicadas. Officers and men wondered for how many months they would be living the jungle life, bathing every day in the Kwae Noi, and bit-by-bit becoming used to enduring the heat, the dangers, the coarse food and clothing … all this was what their sense of duty led them to accept in this job.
After the previous November when the order to construct this railway was formally promulgated, the Construction Unit HQ also inaugurated it, and the GOC, Shimoda, also held an inspection of the current circumstances. Already from September the previous year trains had been running between Nong Pladuk and Kamburi, but the roadbed West of the Mae Khlaung bridge, together with work on the Chungkai cutting and the plank viaduct at points 103 and 109 km, and also the building of the bridge over the Mae Khlaung not having been completed, the situation was that the temporary wooden bridge was said to be nearing completion. The van of the Thai-side's Survey Unit was nearing Thā Khanun, but the embankment for the centre-line had not as yet reached Kinsaiyok. On the other side, the survey in Burma had got as far as Nikki in November, but the roadbed had only reached Thanbyusayat. Engineering had been planned to take one or two months until the end of the year, but the volume of work on Thaiside which remained to be done, together with that on Burma-side, added up to over two-thirds of the total volume of work.
Introduction
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A horror story of brutality, inefficiency and inhumanity may be described by a writer from a totally different culture in terms which we in a Christian society must find inadequate. It is fascinating to uncover, so far as we can, the reasons lurking behind such apparent inhumanity and to describe the actual situation in which these things took place.
Futamatsu himself was a dedicated professional railway engineer and also, like his CO, fair-minded, always ready to see both sides of an argument. During the Pacific War he was not greatly affected by the militaristic propaganda with which the Army flooded the nation in ‘the dark valley’ of the 1930s. His commander had read engineering at Tokyo Imperial University, but of course, as a regular soldier, he had to comply with superior orders which in theory emanated from an Emperor who was still divine. I suspect that Futamatsu heroworshipped his Colonel, and the Colonel certainly recognized his subordinate's professional skill. Their association ripened into warm friendship.
The Thai-Burma Railway was a necessary concomitant in the Japanese Army's assault through Burma into India, one which came to the fore as a result of the US Navy's successful action off Midway Island in the Pacific in 1942 when most of Japan's aircraft-carriers were sunk or damaged. The British Far East Naval Squadron took control of the Indian Ocean, in particular of the Andaman Sea off the coasts of Malaya and Burma, so it became vitally necessary for the Japanese Army to develop an overland trucking route across the Three Pagodas Pass and on to Moulmein in Burma, to facilitate their invasion of India.
Looking ahead to the possibility of some such eventuality, Imperial Japanese Army General Headquarters in Tokyo had taken on a civilian railway engineering expert in 1939. Using Thai maps, Kuwabara proposed the building of a railway to connect Thailand with Burma. He calculated that it would take two years to complete. Officially ‘The Railway to link Thailand with Burma’, it became known as the Thai-Burma Railway.
Translator’s Acknowledgements
- Edited by Peter N. Davies
-
- Book:
- Across the Three Pagodas Pass
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 13 May 2022
- Print publication:
- 01 June 2013, pp lxi-lxii
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Chapter 22 - The Labour Force
- Edited by Peter N. Davies
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- Book:
- Across the Three Pagodas Pass
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 13 May 2022
- Print publication:
- 01 June 2013, pp 106-110
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Summary
In an investigation pre-war at IJA GHQ it had been estimated that two railway regiments could build a railway linking Thailand to Burma in one year, but careful thought was not given to what mechanical gear might be needed. Accordingly, in practice, labour for roadbed construction was assumed to depend on human effort. In March 1942, under Southern Army's 2 Railway Control, from the start it was assumed that a human labour force would do it. From topographical maps the earth-work of roadbed construction on which the railtrack could be laid was estimated to total at least 15 million cubic metres of earthwork, and bridge-building a distance of upwards of 30 km. The period of construction was estimated as two years and the number of labourers needed was assessed as over 25,000 each day. On the fall of Singapore, in the Malayan battle-area and the successful occupation of Java and Sumatra, the prisoners-of-war of British, Dutch and Australian nationality were numbered in March 1942 as around 100,000, and they were mostly in prison-camps at Changi on Singapore Island. For the Japanese Southern Army it was in the natural order of events that, as these men were still alive, that they were seen as the labour force for constructing the railway. However, one does not know whether it was an infringement of the Geneva Convention International Pact on Treatment of Prisoners-of-War because Japan did not ratify it. The British and American Governments started the war so whether their action was against the Japanese Government's diplomatic stance and whether Southern Army really understood the situation and were well-informed or not one does not know. However that may be, in Southern Army's plan it was stated that prisoners-of-war and locally conscripted coolies would be used as the labour force.
As a result of the survey mentioned in Chapter 9 it was forecast that the volume of work required was greater than had been forecast in 1939, but by January 1943 it became strategically essential to demand that the time-scale should be shortened, to be effected by rush-construction, and that work force had to be augmented.
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