Hellfire Pass anniversary
Updated
This month marks a dark milestone for Australian and other prisoners of war involved in building the so-called "death" railway between Thailand and Burma during the second World War. It was at this time 66 years ago that the project was completed, allowing the Japanese to move supplies freely through the territories it held across South East Asia.
Presenter: Karen Percy, South East Asia correspondent
Speakers: Bill Slape, manager, Hellfire Pass Memorial Museum
PERCY: Walking along Hellfire Pass is to walk back in history. Fifty kilometres from the Burma border it was part of the death railway that engaged by force more than 300-thousand men. They were prisoners of war from Australia, Britain, the Netherlands and the US. And they were Asian labourers from across the territories controlled by Japan at the time. About a third of them died.
Now more than six decades later the site is busy again but with tourists paying homage. They wander absorbed in the tales and sounds coming from their headsets.
The recorded commentary tells in sometimes chilling detail what the prisoners were contending with.
COMMENTARY: "Men cut through the mountain with hammers and man-held drills. This work became known as hammer and tap."
PERCY: Are you still finding them as you're going along?"
SLAPE: Oh yes.
PERCY: Bill Slape manages the Hellfire Pass Memorial Museum, which operates under the office of Australian War Graves.
SLAPE: You are walking on the old Thailand Burma railway. This is the width of it, it's really hard to conjure up how a train actually got through here.
PERCY: And why is it called Hellfire Pass?
SLAPE: Because from what was written the men were working at night time, they could hear the hammering and the clamoring and the pit fires down in Hellfire Pass, and all the bamboo lanterns along the wall face of the pass itself. And men up top were saying it just looks like looking into the fires of hell, and that's where it came from, from the prisoners of war during that period.
PERCY: The death railway linked Burma's main rail link with one in Thailand. The British first had the idea of building this line, but dismissed it as too hard and too dangerous. The Japanese proceeded when they realised their shipping routes were too vulnerable to attack. They commended building from each end and in mid October 1943 the two lines met up. The project was completed in record time in appalling conditions. Museum manager Bill Slape.
SLAPE: They would slip and slide on the way to work because they were in poor condition a lot of them. Most of them didn't have shoes, their apparel was bare, was skin to say the least, and they did it very, very hard, extremely hard. And it was only the mateship when you listen to them, if they didn't have a mate they didn't survive. And that's true from what you read in all the novels that have come out, all the praises that have come out from different prisoners of war. It was that mateship that got them together to help them survive.
PERCY: Hellfire Pass is a really beautiful tranquil place, I'm sitting by a lovely spring, a lovely creek that has been filled by the recent rains. There are birds and lush forest. It's an incredible place to reflect on what happened here so many years ago.
PERCY: John Hennah first made the trip to this museum in 2006 after he discharged from the navy. Now he's back with his wife, Angela.
HENNAH: It's very emotional to me, I don't know why, every time I come here, but I want to bring my wife to show her.
PERCY: And what did you think?
WIFE: Can't talk.
PERCY: Why, what is it about this place?
HENNAH: It's just horrible, what happened here was horrible, but just amazing at the same time. Just listening to the voices and seeing the pictures and the drawings.
PERCY: The Perth couple are expecting their first child in just a few months.
WIFE: Yeah definitely that we're able to take him here, it's a little boy yeah, so I don't like it when I see him cry because it makes me cry.
PERCY: More than 2,500 Australians died working on the railway. Most have been taken to the war cemetery in Kanchanaburi about 80 kilometres away. Some of their families visit here to find answers. Over the years many of the survivors have returned as well. Bill Slape again:
SLAPE: It is extremely emotional for them, you can't think of what they're thinking, but you can see it in their faces. They're possible remembering their mates, the times that they had there, the ones that couldn't come home, and I know a couple of POWs have spoken to me and said I can't believe why I survived and they didn't. And that's hard for a lot of the men I would assume, and you can only assume, you don't know.
PERCY: When the war was over much of the track in these parts was ripped up.
SLAPE: The Thais had to pay reparations to the Allies for their part in working together with the Japanese. And for all accounts and from records the Allies really didn't want the railway line operating because it wasn't safe.
PERCY: The allies were also keen to ensure that no one else was able to use the line. This year close to 100,000 people will visit this museum alone. More and more of them are Asian, including small numbers of Japanese.
SLAPE: When they make an effort to come here they've heard of some really bad stories about Japan, about World War Two, and it really gives them a huge emotion of I think the magnitude of what went on here, because in Japan today you don't, there's not too many libraries that have stories of or novels of what happened in Japan during World War Two. It's not taught in schools, not taught in universities.
PERCY: 12,000 14,000 Asian students make the journey here every year, many of them from Thailand, which sided with Japan during the war.
SLAPE: The Thai people have become more engrossed in their history of late; I think it's been taught more readily in schools. They know about the Burma Thai railway, the word just in the recent years that I've been here with the growth of numbers from the Thais, it's all about the interest in World War Two now.
PERCY: Some of those veterans who remain are expected to return for a remembrance day ceremony next month.
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