Railway to Hell

The Thai–Burma railway was built in 1942–43 to supply the Japanese forces in Burma, bypassing the sea routes which had become vulnerable when Japanese naval strength was reduced in the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway in May and June 1942. Aiming to finish the railway as quickly as possible the Japanese decided to use the more than 60 000 Allied POWs who had fallen into their hands in early 1942. A particular stretch called the Konyu Cutting was the deepest and the most dramatic of the many cuttings and clearings to make way for the railway lines. Groups of men worked around the clock for 16-18 hours to complete excavation of the 17 metre deep and 110-m long cutting through solid limestone and quartz rock. Sixty nine men were beaten to death by Japanese guards in the six weeks it took to build the cutting, and many more died from cholera, dysentery, starvation, and exhaustion. Forced to work at night, Konyu Cutting was nicknamed X because of the mixture of hammering noise, lighting from fires, oil fired bamboo torches and carbide lamps that created an eerie illumination that looked like the fires of hell.