CASE FILE: Bridge on the River Kwai
THE SCENE: Kanchanaburi, Thailand
LEAD DETECTIVES: Bashar Altabba, Rod Beattie, Renichi Sugano
In 1942, the Japanese army began construction of a railway linking Thailand and Burma, an seemingly impossible endeavor given the miles of overgrown jungle and treacherous mountains it would need to cover. But this was wartime. The Japanese had recently captured more than 200,000 Allied prisoners of war, and they were determined to put the men to work. The POWs, along with thousands of Asian laborers, battled exhaustion, malnourishment and disease to complete the railway with the most primitive of tools. After 14 grueling months — and at the cost of 100,000 lives — the 260-mile “Death Railway” stood finished; less than two years later, a barrage of revolutionary American weapons saw to its destruction.
Remnants of the bridge and railway, abandoned in 1945, stand today, but the Thai jungle has consumed much of their remains. Construction records and documents revealing the railway’s route are scarce; many have long since been lost or destroyed. So just how did a team of men in such poor condition and confronted with so many obstacles manage to build such a remarkable railway? And how did their Allied brethren achieve its demolition? Using first-hand survivor testimony, reconstructions, modern scientific techniques, archival film footage, and hundreds of never-before-seen photographs of the railway in construction, Bridge on the River Kwai pieces together the real story behind the birth and death of this lost railway. The film chronicles the gruesome mistreatment the POWs endured throughout its construction, the Allies’ top-secret development of new, “guidable” bombs designed to dismantle such critical targets, and the Allied raids that reduced the railway to rubble.
