Hellfire Pass (Konyu Cutting) today
Since 1945 prisoners of war and the captured by the Japanese when they conquered South East Asia in early 1942. More than a third of these men and women died in captivity. This was about 20 per cent of all Australian deaths in World War II. The shock and scale of these losses affected families and communities across the nation of only 7 million people.
This website focuses on Hellfire Pass (Konyu Cutting), the deepest and most dramatic of the many cuttingsBritish Empire, Dutch and colonial personnel from the Netherlands East Indies and a small number of US troops sunk on the USS Houston during the Battle of Java Sea. About 13 000 of the prisoners who worked on the railway were Australian.
When this workforce proved incapable of meeting the tight deadlines the Japanese had set for completing the railway, a further 200 000 Asian labourers or rōmusha (the precise number is not known) were enticed or coerced into working for the Japanese
The 415-kilometre railway ran from Thanbyuzayat in Burma (now Myanmar) to Non Pladuk in Thailand. It was constructed by units working along its entire length rather than just from each end. This meant that the already difficult problems of supply became impossible during the monsoonal season of mid-1943.
Starved of food and medicines, and forced to work impossibly long hours in remote unhealthy locations, over 12 000 POWs, including more than 2700 Australians, died. The number of rōmusha dead is not known but it was probably up to 90 000.
Remembering the railway
All memory is selective. Communities, like individuals, remember some stories of the past while forgetting others. For memories to survive at the collective or national levelAustraliansThe Naked Island (1951), for example, sold well over a million copies and stayed in print for decades.
There were also memorable fictional accounts of captivity, some of which were adapted for commercial films and television series. The most famous of these was The Bridge on the River Kwai which, though bearing little resemblance to events in 1942-43, generated a popular interest in the railway which continues to this day.
In the 1980s Australian ex-POWs returned to Thailand and reclaimed Hellfire Passdemolished after World War II. The cutting soon became a site of memory for many Australians, particularly on Anzac Day. Its dramatic scale and its towering walls, scarred with drill incisions made by hand, spoke particularly vividly to the hardships endured by POWs along the railway.
The building of the Hellfire Pass Memorial Museumbridges and embankments were needed to keep the railway route along the escarpment level. There were also many camps housing the thousands of workers, including Australians. These have now disappeared into the exquisitely beautiful landscape but this website reclaims them as witnesses to the POW story.
The Anzac legend and Australian memorymedical personnel who, with little equipment or medicines, cared for desperately ill men in primitive hospitalsDunlop. His statue now stands outside the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, not so far from another iconic image of compassion, Simpson and his donkey. Although Dunlop was only one of 106 Australian POW medical officers, in recent years he has come to represent them all ‒ and the values of courage and compassion that they and many Australians manifested in captivity.
hellfire-pass.commemoration.gov.au
Comment