Kanchanaburi claim to fame is that it is the site of a Japanese-operated WWII prisoner of war camp made famous by the movie The Bridge over the River Kwai or more recently The Railway Man starring Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman. During the war, the Japanese needed a railway to connect Burma (now Myanmar) to Thailand so that they could move supplies and manpower around. About 60,000 Allied POWs and 200,000 Asian laborers worked on the 415 km/258 mile line. With little else besides picks, shovels, dynamite, and pulleys, they shifted three million cubic meters/3.9 million cubic yards of rocks and built over 600 bridges totaling 14 kilometers/9 miles. Engineers estimated that the railway would take five years, but the Japanese made the workers finish it in just 16 months. By the time it was completed, it had earned the nickname The Death Railway. An estimated 16,000 POWs and 100,000 Asian laborers died while working on it. Historians say it wasn’t necessarily the forced labor that killed the men, but more the poor living conditions, lack of proper food and medical supplies, maltreatment from guards, and the diseases (mainly cholera, dysentery, and malaria) that wiped out most of the men.
The 300m/984 ft bridge over RIver Kwai. The original span was only used for 20 months before it was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1945.
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