Misconception of ‘River Kwai’

by Stan Lowe, Chairman (retired), Wyoming Veterans’ Commission
Tuesday, February 12, 2008 1:32 PM MST

Probably the best known movie to come out of World War II was “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”

This award-winning film was about the Japanese Army’s construction of the 258 mile-long Burma-Thailand Railway through mountainous and jungled terrain, using slave labor of 61,806 American, British, Australian and Dutch prisoners of war and about 300,000 Asian civilians they forced to build it.

But did it accurately portray the brutality visited upon the POWs driven by Japanese soldiers’ rifle butts and bamboo pole beatings to carry out their work while ravaged by numerous diseases that sapped what little energy they got from eating daily a cup of dirt-filled and worm infested rice?

Those who somehow survived angrily assert it didn’t tell the real story nor explain the horrendous deaths of 12,399 allied POWs and about 100,000 native workers.

An accurate account of this incredibly subhuman episode was written by noted war story author James D. Hornfischer in “SHIP OF GHOSTS: The Story of the USS HOUSTON, FDR’s Legendary Lost Cruiser, and the Epic Saga of Her Survivors.”

The Houston, disadvantaged by a destroyed rear turret lost three weeks earlier in a warplane bombing attack, was sunk in the Feb. 27, 1942, Battle of the Java Sea.

She was in an allied force, comprised of 14 American, Australian, British and Dutch navies’ ships, greatly outnumbered by 49 Japanese warships that were escorting 97 troop transports and cargo ships to invade Java. The allied ships lacked air support against enemy land-based planes.

Of the 1,168 men on the Houston, only 368 managed to survive.

Another 150 were last seen on rafts, lifeboats and floating debris. It was speculated that the powerful currents of Sunda Straight, between Java and Sumatra where the gallant Houston went down fighting, swept them out “toward a fathomless oblivion in the Indian Ocean.”

HMAS Perth (Australian) was sunk near the Houston. Only 324, less than half of Perth’s crew of 681, survived to become prisoners of war with Houston’s men. No details of their ships’ sinking or the number and identity of survivors were sent to their homelands until war’s end.

Upon reaching land, the survivors of both ships soon were captured by Japanese troops, many betrayed by Javanese natives angry at their Dutch rulers.

On May 14, 1942, about 400 sharply uniformed and well-supplied soldiers of the 36th Infantry Division, Texas National Guard, marched into the ruthlessly run enemy Java POW camp.

The Houston survivors at first thought they were liberators, only to suddenly realize they were being “herded in … to kneel alongside the Navy company in submission to Imperial Japan.”

Afterward, they joined the survivors of the Houston and Perth in the slave labor camps in Burma to build the railroad.

Here are some popular misconceptions about that project instilled by Hollywood’s movie.

First of all, the movie bridge was built in Thailand, not Burma, and the POWs did not destroy it.

It was not built on the River Kwai. It spanned the River Mae Khlung, renamed Kwai, however, after Thailand bought the bridge for a tourist attraction.

Also, that was not the only bridge built. There were 688.

As is well known, Hollywood seemingly is unable to get things straight when making war movies. It usually depicts our country’s enemies as misunderstood nice chaps and our side as the bad guys. “River Kwai” was no exception.

David Lean’s 1957 film amply fulfills this notion by depicting the British POWs, who march around whistling “Colonel Bogey’s March,” as chauvinists with engineering expertise far superior to the Japanese and treasonably helping the unsophisticated enemy build that bridge.

Actually, just the opposite was true. As Hornfischer points out, “The real railway was driven from end to end by Japanese ambition and know-how ... there was no lack of design expertise n or ruthless will.”

Occasionally, elephants would be brought in to lift heavy beams, but otherwise starving, disease-ridden POWs and native workers, who somehow survived an ordeal that claimed more than 400 lives per mile of railway track, were beaten into submission to do all the work.

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