Truth about "River Kwai"

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Bruce Logan of the CSV Media NI Team on behalf of James A. McCall and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.
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[Film, "Bridge on the R Kwai"]
Total imagination. Didn’t happen. Actually on the River Kwai itself, they talk about, there was only 9 people accidentally killed. And yet there were 17,000 prisoners who died on the Railway. Plus over 80,000 native coolies. According to the Discovery channel, on the NTL or whatever like that, there are only 3 known coolie survivor graves.
We were up on the Burma-Siam border. A place called the Thegaboda pass. The cholera hit there. As prisoners we were more disciplined making latrines. We boiled all water. But the natives, they used to drink just river water. They didn’t have any medical look after at all. With the cholera, they just died in the jungle. And prisoners had to go out, gather them up, put them in piles and set them on fire, burn them. The prisoners had to do that. They got no attention at all.

There’s supposed to be 1,000 Japanese engineering and guards on the whole railway who died. Well, compare that to nearly 100,000 prisoners and coolies.

When I was taken prisoner I had a pair of shorts, and a small shirt, and a size pair of shoes, 10. That was my total equipment. After a couple of years they gave us some Dutch uniforms. When they thought they were sending us to Japan, they gave us a certain amount of clothing. But for nearly 2 years I was in bare feet. On the railway it was bare feet. And a g-string, a loin cloth.

[Colonel Bogey’s March]
Not until I came home. We had another one we used to sing.
“Flying over Tokyo, over Tokyo, over Tokyo.
They’re flying over Tokyo, where they don’t know sugar from shit!”
That’s the one we sang. I’m not a singer. That’s the one we sang up in Burma.

All that in the “River Kwai”, all marching back and all this bit. We struggled back. The bridge over the River Kwai wasn’t bombed by the American Air Force until 1945. That action never ever happened.

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