The ‘forgotten' war behind The Bridge on the River Kwai

Telegraph

22-04-2025

Australian drama series The Narrow Road to the Deep North, out now on Amazon Prime Video, takes viewers back to the horrors of the Thai-Burma Railway – the 'Death Railway'. Constructed under appalling conditions, it claimed the lives of 12,500 Allied POWs and more than 80,000 Asian workers. They carried out punishing labour while suffering from disease, malnutrition, and physical brutality from Japanese engineers and guards, and conscripted Korean guards.
The series – based on the Booker Prize-winning novel of the same name by Richard Flanagan – tells the story of an Australian doctor, Dorrigo Evans (played by Jacob Elordi and Ciarán Hinds in his younger and older years), his experiences as a POW on the Death Railway, and the continued impact on his life decades later.
The construction of the railway was most famously depicted in The Bridge on the River Kwai, the 1957 classic starring Sir Alec Guinness. A blockbuster success, it won seven Academy Awards, including a Best Actor statue for Guinness. Despite a rocky relationship with director David Lean, Guinness admitted it was 'the best thing I've ever done'.
But it's more Hollywood fantasy than historical fact. The British War Office was unhappy with the film – particularly for its depiction of British soldiers collaborating with Japanese captors – and it's been viewed as controversial among FEPOWs (Far East Prisoners of War) and their families.
Guinness's character was based on POW officer Lieutenant Colonel Sir Philip Toosey, who initially enjoyed the film as a piece of storytelling. 'It was only when the prisoners started saying, 'Sir, it was a terrible slur on your leadership,' that he twigged the public had taken Hollywood for its word,' recalled Julie Summers, author, historian, and granddaughter of Toosey.
The construction of the Death Railway was just one aspect of the Burma Campaign, in which the Allies fought the Japanese over the recovery of Burma. It was sometimes dubbed 'the forgotten war' by the men who were there, and one of the Allies' biggest fighting forces, the Fourteenth Army, is known as 'the Forgotten Army'. On March 3, former British soldier Albert 'Bert' Warne – thought to be the last survivor of the Thai-Burma Railway – died at the age of 105.
Even now, as we approach the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War – with VJ Day on August 15 – the Burma Campaign is overlooked next to the war in Europe.
Japan wanted Burma – modern-day Myanmar – so it could cut off the Burma Road, a supply route into China. Burma also put Japan in a position to invade India.
In February 1942, 35,000 Japanese troops forced 85,000 British, Australian, and Indian soldiers into a humiliating surrender at Singapore – the biggest capitulation in British military history. POWs were kept at the Changi prison camp and work camps around Singapore.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North depicts just a small number of the 13,000 Australian men who worked on the railway – 2,700 of whom died. Around 60,000 POWs in total were shipped to work on railway construction along with labourers from Burma, Java and Malaya, collectively dubbed 'Romusha'. Some of the Romusha volunteered to work on the railway for a pound of rice per day, and many were conscripted by the puppet Burmese government. The best estimate is that a total of 240,000 men worked on the railway, which ran for 415km between Thailand and Burma, and had 688 bridges. It was intended as a military supply line for troops and equipment, and for an invasion of India.
In The Bridge on the River Kwai, Guinness plays Lt Col Nicholson, who is ordered to build a bridge after arriving at a POW camp. As per the Geneva Convention, Nicholson refuses to allow his officers to do any labour which begins a standoff with the Japanese commander, Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa). Saito throws Nicholson into an iron box – 'the oven' – to force him into submission. But Saito underestimates how far the British will go to prove a point, even if it means merrily rotting in a metal box for a week. Saito relents and Nicholson makes building the bridge a matter of patriotic pride, demonstrating the superiority of British engineering and efficiency.
Nicholson's camp is based on the real-life Tamarkan camp in Thailand, where there were actually two bridges – a wooden bridge and a steel bridge – built across the Mae Klong (the railway ran along the Khwae Noi, meaning 'little river', which is where the River Kwai name comes from). In the film, gung-ho commandos blow up the bridge, which didn't happen in real life, nor in the original novel by Pierre Boulle.
Philip Toosey, the inspiration behind Guinness's Lt Col Nicholson, was among the British troops taken prisoner in Singapore. He was sent to Tamarkan, on the east side of the Mae Klong, where he was in charge of 2,500 men – British, Australian and Dutch – who worked alongside Asian labour.
Emaciated workers heaved around the materials while Japanese engineers did the technical construction. Those engineers were equally as offended by The Bridge of the River Kwai: they didn't need British expertise and they'd been planning the railway as far back as 1937.
Another soldier captured at Singapore was Corp Bill Norways, a commercial artist from Hackney who was drafted into the Cambridgeshire Regiment.
Norway's son, Toby Norways, a screenwriter and lecturer at the University of Bedfordshire, explains how his father was shipped to Thailand. 'He was part of H Force, a group of 27 men put on steel cattle trucks,' says Norways. 'They hardly had room to lie down or sleep. They'd be fed intermittently. People died en route. They spent five days on the truck. The majority of them were suffering from dysentery or malaria. They had nowhere to go to the toilet. They were just defecating and pissing.'
Once the men arrived, they had to walk to whichever camp they were instructed to work at. 'They were weak and enfeebled but had to march up to 20 miles a day, largely at night, with limited rations and footwear,' says Norways.
Bill Norways worked at the notorious Hellfire Pass, where men had to blast through rock faces to create a railway cutting. The conditions were horrendous. Men were forced to work brutal hours in monsoon season, ravaged with illness and with insufficient food. They ate a thin gruel made from a small helping of rice and vegetables. The food – originally intended for a workforce of 50,000 – had to stretch to 200,000-plus.
Whole camps of Malayan workers were wiped out by cholera. For historian Robert Lyman, author of A War of Empires: Japan, India, Burma & Britain, this is a key omission from all Burma railway stories: the sheer numbers of Asian labourers, many of them Tamil Indians from Malaya, who died. 'No one talks about them at all,' he says. An estimated 56 percent of Malayans – 42,000 men – perished, as well as 40,000 Burmese.
The men were so vitamin deficient that a small nick from bamboo could lead them to having limbs removed. One doctor took 120 legs over a nine-month period using just a basic hand saw usually used for wood. Some camps had anaesthetic, others didn't. In one uncomfortably realistic scene in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Dorrigo saws a chunk of gangrenous leg off a fellow POW.
Bill Norways himself was stabbed in the buttock with a bamboo spear, a wound that was treated with maggots, and – after the railway was completed in October 1943 – he spent six months in a hospital camp suffering from cardiac beriberi, bronchitis, malaria, dysentery, and an abscess.
Like many FEPOWs, Norways never talked about his experiences. 'They were told not to when they got home,' says his son. 'They were issued a document from the British Army telling them not to speak to friends and relatives because it might upset people.'
There was, he suggests, a sense of shame too. The older Dorrigo says something similar in The Narrow Road to the Deep North. 'More humiliating than anything,' says Dorrigo about being a POW. 'Letting yourself be incarcerated when others are fighting is hard for a soldier's spirit to accept.'
While the emotional heft of The Narrow Road to the Deep North lingers on Dorrigo's memories of a decades-old love affair, its depiction of the railway is painfully bleak – relentless torture and skeletal, diseased men stumbling to their deaths. It's a sense of harrowing realism that's far beyond The Bridge on the River Kwai.
The Bridge on the River Kwai had its difficulties, though. Shot in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in punishing heat and humidity, it was a difficult production that required an actual bridge to be built (and blown up) in the jungle. Director David Lean fell out with almost everyone and there were serious accidents – near drownings and a car crash that killed second-unit director John Kerrison.
Guinness was reportedly concerned with the film being anti-British. But, on the contrary, its Britishness is something to revel in. 'Colonel, do you suppose we could have a cup of tea?' says Nicholson at one point, getting his priorities straight before starting work on the Death Railway.
According to Julie Summers, who spoke to me in 2020, the difference between Guinness's character and Philip Toosey was that 'Alec Guinness was all about the bridge and [her] grandfather was all about the men.' The death rate among the Brits was 22 per cent, but just a handful of men at Toosey's camp died.
In the film, Nicholson forbids anyone from attempting to escape. The real soldiers signed a document – under duress and therefore illegally – agreeing that they wouldn't escape. Some did escape from the camp but were recaptured. They were taken out into the jungles and forced to dig their own graves before being killed. The soldiers were shot, the officers bayoneted. 'My grandfather said it was terrible,' said Summers. 'The look of loss in their eyes as they were driven away. They knew they were going to be killed.'
Toosey himself faced brutal treatment from the Japanese guards, largely for complaining about beatings his men suffered. 'Almost inevitably, he'd get hit over his head,' Summers said. 'He wasn't tortured but bashed about. He was once made to stand outside the guard hut in the boiling sun for 24 hours. There were times when he thought, 'I can't go to that guard hut again… no, the men need me to!''
And though Toosey wasn't locked in 'the oven', a similar thing happened to translator Capt William Drower, who upset his captors. His arm was broken and he was imprisoned in an underground hovel for 76 days. While in there, a rat ate into his foot.
When Toosey saw Alec Guinness confronting Saito in the film, Toosey said: 'You could never have confronted the Japanese and caused them to lose face. That would have been fatal. I would not have survived.' There was a real Saito at Tamarkan, though the name connection is likely coincidental. Toosey thought the real Saito was 'fair', and spoke up in his defence after the war. In 1984, Saito came to Britain and visited Toosey's grave.
On a similar note, Bill Norways struck up a friendship with a Japanese guard, Kameo Yamanaka, and they exchanged letters for 30 years. In 2015, Toby Norways travelled to Ibaraki, Japan to meet Yamanaka's family. He found that a poem his father had written to the guard had been inscribed on a slab of granite next to Yamanaka's grave.
In The Narrow Road to the Deep North, there's an inkling of a friendship between Dorrigo and camp commander, Major Nakamura (Shô Kasamatsu), before the pressure to deliver the railway sees Nakamura order the protracted torture of one POW. In truth, friendships like the one between Norways and Yamanaka, notes Toby, were 'extremely unusual'.
When The Bridge on the River Kwai was released, POWs wanted the filmmakers to include a statement explaining that the film was based on a book, and not the true story.
'But they never did,' Summers said. 'And why would they? It's Hollywood. They were out to make the greatest war movie of all time – and some would say they succeeded.'
In reality, the wooden bridge was completed by February 1943 and the steel bridge in May 1943. The wooden bridge was hit by bombs nine times and rebuilt nine times. The steel bridge was hit by the US Air Force in 1945 and rebuilt. It still stands today, and that part of the Mae Klong has been renamed the Khwae Yai.
The Burma Campaign was hugely important in ending the Second World War, argues the historian Lyman. Following the initial defeat to the Japanese, the Allies regrouped. Lt-Gen William Slim's 'forgotten' Fourteenth Army – which was 87 per cent Indian – won crucial victories at Imphal and Kohima in 1944, though its heroism was not widely reported back home.
'That constituted the first major defeat of Japanese field armies in the Second World War,' he argues. 'It was the destruction of this marshal bubble, this samurai idea that defined what Japan was and what it could achieve through use of force. Japan needed to be persuaded there was nothing further they could achieve by use of force.'
But he continues: 'British soldiers in the Far East considered themselves to be at the end of a very long, dirty stick. People in the UK didn't appreciate what was going on.'
The fight for recognition continues. FEPOW families still take offence when the war against Japan is overlooked. Complaints have been made, for instance, when the BBC has erroneously called VE Day the end of the Second World War. The BBC made one such error during a two-minute silence to mark the 75th anniversary of the Second World War.
'This incenses people involved because VJ Day wasn't until August 15 and actually many people were still in prison camps waiting to be repatriated,' says Norways. 'My dad didn't come home until October 1945. While everyone was waving flags in Trafalgar Square, people were still dying in Singapore.'
The memory of what the men experienced is fundamental to The Narrow Road to the Deep North, though, of course, it's just an approximation of what happened. Neither the brutality of the new series nor the Hollywood version in The Bridge on the River Kwai can possibly give the full picture.
As Dorrigo tells a reporter, it's impossible to comprehend. 'Because you weren't there.'