# POW visit to Burma-Thailand railway



## Mweiga (Sep 24, 2010)

A few months agao via this website I got involved with handling the local organisation and logistics for a planned visit by former British POWs on the so-called "Death Railway" plus other veterans of the WW2 south-east Asia campaign. This has just concluded and readers may be interested in some details.

This very much privately organised and funded (UK National Lottery) group of veterans from UK with accompanying family members as minders duly arrived 9th November. They had just spent 3 days in Singapore visiting Changi war cemetery and whilst there met up with another veterans group organised by the Royal British Legion attempting the same Singapore - Thailand trip. Sadly the RBL group paid heed to Foreign Office / Embassy advice not to travel to Thailand due to the floods and aborted , returning to UK. Our group followed my advice to come anyway as Rama 2 road link to Kanchanaburi from Bangkok was still clear.

The 14 strong group included 5 veterans (aged 87 to 92) of which three had been POWs on the railway while the other two were involved with fighting the Japs in this region till their surrender in 1945.

We stayed at the excellent Yoko River Kwai resort at Saiyok on the banks of the Kwai Noi with two minibuses in attendance for daily trips to : Kanchanaburi war cemetery, Railway Museum alongside it, Chungkai cemetery, Poppy Day Commemoration service, Hellfire Pass museum and Hin Tok railway cutting , train ride from Nam Tok to the Tha Markham bridge ("Bridge over the River Kwai") at Kanchanaburi , and a boat trip up the Kwai Noi river.

The whole visit was conducted in light hearted mood laced with amusing incidents. My favourite was when Victor Vale (92 , ex-East Surrey regiment) who had worked on putting in the piles for both the Tha Markham bridges , was strolling along the track over the bridge when an Austrian TV camera crew spotted him and requested an interview. Thinking they were Germans, he replied with a terse "No!" whereupon a couple of us hurriedly intervened to explain they were Austrian. Fifteen minutes later we had to drag him away whilst in full cry recounting one anecdote after the other to the delighted TV crew. The previous day in Chungkai cemetery I'd helped him locate the memorial stones of three friends executed by the Japs for attempting escape.

The six day visit was very much summed up during the final day's river trip when Eddie Peak (92, ex-Signals) who had worked at several camps right along the railway including the notorious Wang Po viaduct and who had never been back since repatriation in 1945 , declared to me in quiet moment with cold beer in hand "this is a bloody sight better than the last time I was here !".


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## stednick (Oct 16, 2011)

As a member of the US VFW I find the Kanchanaburi war memorials and the upkeep of the same some of the most moving and beautifully maintained testaments to a truely horrific chapter in our worlds history. May we never forget, nor repeat.


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## cnx_bruce (Feb 2, 2010)

I'm very glad the trip was a success. It would have been very moving to be there in the company of people who were there 'at the time'.
On a interesting side-note, I was recently reading a discsussion thread in another forum (not allowed to name here) about a crashed WW2 fighter plane recently unearthed north of BKK.

Some of the people contributing to the thread did a lot of online research to find the name of the US pilot and what happened to him (Cpt. Albert Abraham, 2d Fighter Squadron Commando, 2d Air Commando Group, 10th Air Force). He was captured and spent quite some time as a POW in a Bangkok facility maintained by the Thais (not Japs). The way they were treated during their incarceration could not have been more different from the way the Death Railway prisoners were treated ... they were even given a ration of beer!


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