I went to visit a famous bridge – and it wasn’t there
Riding on the Death Railway is an incongruously jaunty experience, like a trip on Puffing Billy. We trundle past mountains, fields, coconut palms and jungle, all a brilliant green. The locals sell food and the tourists chat cheerfully. It takes a huge feat of imagination to picture what it was like to be one of the poor PoWs or Asian labourers who were forced to put down these tracks for the Japanese.
There are tributes to these men, of course. I visited a well-tended Thai cemetery in Kanchanaburi and a modest museum with a replica of the bamboo huts where they lived. It displays some horrifying photographs and paintings of skeletal and sore-ridden bodies.
The actual bridge over the River Kwai, in Thailand.Credit: LOOK Die Bildagentur der Fotografen GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo
When the train gets to the bridge, the tourists are puzzled. Where is it, they want to know. Where is the wooden bridge on the River Kwai, so famously portrayed in the classic 1957 film? There’s a bridge here all right, but it’s made of concrete and steel.
It turns out the wooden bridge never existed, except as a film prop. As our Thai guide explains, The Bridge on the River Kwai is a made-up story. The film is based on a 1952 novel of the same name by a Frenchman, Pierre Boulle. He was a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II but never worked on their hellish Burma-Siam railway.
It’s a story of heroism and craziness. The British commander of the captured men, Colonel Nicholson (portrayed memorably by Alec Guinness in the film), is a super-stubborn hero determined to show the Japanese a thing or two by building them the best bridge British engineering skills and labour can create. He becomes a little too attached to his creation. Boulle based his character on his experience with collaborating French officers.
Pierre Boulle’s 1952 book, The Bridge on the River Kwai.
In reality, PoWs did build a bridge under horrendous conditions, and they showed a different kind of heroism: they were determined to sabotage the construction in whatever way they could, risking the wrath of their captors. The bridge was bombed by the Allies and restored after the war.
There are many books, both histories and fictions, about the notorious construction of the Burma-Siam railway, which involved about 13,000 Australians. One outstanding novel is Richard Flanagan’s Booker-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North, inspired by his father’s ordeal (now adapted as an Amazon Prime miniseries). Another fine Australian novel set in part on the railway is David Malouf’s 1990 Miles Franklin winner, The Great World.
Our guide wanted to tell us about another film, which he said was much more accurate than The Bridge on the River Kwai. His pick was 2013 film The Railway Man, starring Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman, which was based on a 1995 autobiography by Eric Lomax, a British Army officer who underwent brutal tortures when working on the railway. The experience left him with mental scars and a desire for revenge, but the story also asks about the possibility of forgiveness for your tormentors.
All these books and more show different facets of the PoW experience and what it can tell us today. I’ve just read The Bridge on the River Kwai and can recommend it, with a caveat that it’s a book of its time, and so contains some gratuitous racist remarks about the Japanese that would never be published today.
That said, the irony makes it more than just an exciting adventure story. Colonel Nicholson may be a fiction, but he’s an honourable gent who lets his honour overwhelm his common sense. He forgets what he’s fighting for.
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