To fill a few days in Thailand we went to a place called Kanchinaburi, a relatively small town close to the border of Burma (Myanmar). Our main purpose was to visit the very famous and very beautiful 7 tier waterfall. The town has a very dark past as one of the many POW camps that were created to construct the Burma - Thailand railway that the Japanese desperately needed to supply their war effort against British India. A very famous bridge was built here and is commonly known as the Bridge over the river Kwai. The bridge itself isn't actually over the river Kwai, but over a tributary that joins the Kwai about a mile down stream, one for QI there.
Anyway, the waterfall was a 2 hour bus journey away so we had a day to kill and decided to take in the WWII sights. The quality of what was on offer varied hugely, but then so did the entrance fee's. The conditions in which the American, British, Australian and various other soldiers from the British colonies were kept were extremely basic. Sleeping on bamboo cots that were either infested with lice or splinting causing sores and infections. All this coupled with long working days of hard labour in tropical heat, dysentery and malnutrition rife among the population and periodic abuse from their Japanese guards. You can get a picture of life for these men, who were assured prior to being sent here that conditions would be far far superior, but were in fact basically fighting for survival.
The Japanese were desperate to have this railway built as their navy could not defend supply ships trying to head to Burma via the Andaman sea. Massively unrealistic goals and deadlines were imposed on the engineers in charge of the build who, in turn, put pressure on the guards and foreman to make these goals a reality. They responded by working the men harder, quite often employing brutal beatings and torture to achieve this. The result when combined with the working conditions described previously led to men literally dropping down dead. The guards quite often had to be persuaded to allow the men to be buried, or even moved from where they fell. It was at these times of grief that the soldiers remained alert and secretly buried records of the people who had died with the bodies and has led to a remarkably accurate picture of how many people died, when and where.
One of the most moving parts of Kanchinaburi was the WWII cemetery. It is like most around the world and beautifully simple with each grave identical, decorated with a few flowers and the name of the person buried along with his regiment.
During our travels there has been a steady stream of Japanese tourists on their AC buses to all the beautiful sites as we make our way there by the cheapest means.
We did not see one single Japanese tourist while we were in Kanchiniburi.
There is something we British are very good at and that's accepting our past, understanding that sometimes we've made terrible mistakes and committed terrible atrocities against groups of people. We don't tend to hide away from it but are genuinely interested in our history, sometimes learning from our mistakes, sometimes not. Sadly not all countries have the same attitude and deliberately avoid confronting or even apologising for actions in the past but I feel the UK is one who has.
