Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [124]
Though it had established its brutal pattern of treatment of POWs in China through the 1930s, Japan had haltingly committed itself to the principle that prisoners should not do work that was militarily useful to their captors. Japan had ratified the Hague Convention of 1907, and in 1928 it signed (but a year later refused to ratify) the more expansive 1929 Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War. The Imperial Army pressured the Japanese privy council not to ratify the convention because it was unlikely to bring reciprocal benefits: Bushido warriors did not become prisoners. Japan’s refusal to ratify the Geneva Convention would provide the cover it needed to deny that its prisoners of war were entitled to legal protections.
In March 1942, the commander of the Southern Field Railway Group in Saigon ordered preparations to begin for construction of the railway. On June 20 came the Army’s formal decision to proceed. Given the pressures of wartime, they needed it done fast—in twelve months. The job was assigned to the Fifth Railway Regiment in Thanbyuzayat, Burma, and the Ninth Railway Regiment in Ban Pong, Thailand. It would fall to a civilian engineer named Yoshihiko Futamatsu, who worked for Japan’s national railway, to bring to fruition the most ambitious and notorious of World War II’s civil engineering projects.
Futamatsu, promoted to major in wartime, determined that the best route for the railway was to follow the Kwae Noi River west from Ban Pong. That plan would run headlong into nearly insuperable obstacles of terrain, not to mention weather. A landscape broken by rocky ridges and snaking jungle rivers and tributaries would require exhaustive rock cutting, bridges, and viaducts along sheer cliffs. Moving north and west from the rice paddy plains of central Thailand, the terrain grew jagged and steep. As construction bogged down in the spring monsoon season, workers’ lives would be at risk from a mélange of tropical diseases and breakdowns in supply. Less difficult paths were available, but the route along the Kwae Noi had one surpassing advantage: The river, with its barge traffic, made heavy transport much easier. Large bridge trestles and heavy loads of ballast and other materials could be carried upriver from Ban Pong or cut or quarried locally. Heavy construction equipment was unavailable, but a swarm of manual laborers could more than make up the difference.
By the end of June 1942, the project’s infrastructure was taking shape. Twelve hundred British prisoners from Singapore began building base workshops and storage facilities around the town of Nong Pladuk, on the Thai end of the line. With its foundries, forges, engine shops, power stations, and an oil refinery—much of it scavenged or pillaged from Malaya, Sumatra, and Java—the town of Kanchanaburi in Thailand, often called Kanburi, became the headquarters for the entire line. Meanwhile, plans were afoot to bring prisoners to Burma to begin work from the northwest. A huge workforce of Burmese, Chinese, Tamil, Indian, and Malay natives—as many as 350,000 of them would be lured into imperial servitude—had built a chain of work camps every three or four miles along the right of way. They were joined by sixty thousand Allied prisoners of war, who rounded out the workforce and constituted its trained and disciplined core. Under their captors’ plan, they would build the railway simultaneously from either end, inland from coastal Burma and central Thailand, joining