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By Root 1612 0

rails as far as 18 Kilo Camp. Jim Gee, fully recuperated from his bout with malaria, rejoined his fellows at 26 Kilo Camp, where the work, far less advanced, involved laying sleepers atop the finished railway embankment. Brooking no delays and urgently pressed for time, the Japanese ordered 1,850 men from Branch Five to leapfrog from 18 Kilo Camp all the way up to 85 Kilo Camp, where the railway was little more than a surveyed right-of-way through virgin jungle. Against the wishes of the doctors, the sick moved with them. As commander of Branch Five, Captain Mizutani decided to move them to the hospital at 30 Kilo Camp. He took it upon himself to decide which of the no-duty sick at 18 Kilo would make the trip on foot and which would be driven. He unsheathed his sword, walked up to each man in turn, and struck him a swift, flat blow. If the prisoner got to his feet, he was ordered to march. If he didn’t, he was borne on a stretcher and loaded onto a truck. Humping along the service road that paralleled the right-of-way, the healthy said goodbye to the lowlands and launched their forced assault on Burma’s mountains.

Hastily built by romusha who doubtless had faced unimaginable suffering, the camp at 85 Kilo was filthy. The prisoners arrived to find pit latrines adjacent to the kitchen hut. Some of them had partially fallen in. Sour, mildewed rice was strewn about in piles. No boiled water was available. Touring the camps, Brigadier Varley noted a pig’s carcass suspended from a tree near the kitchen, black with flies. Working in the field was in many ways preferable to languishing in that squalor. Still, wielding a pick under the hot Burmese sun, hacking out clumps of bamboo and their roots, was draining and dusty work. On March 30, some welcome showers cooled them, temporarily suppressing the dust. Up to then there had been only one rain in the past five months, totaling about an inch of water.

The 85 Kilo Camp was the real jungle. Here they faced dangers many and manifest. The root structures of the bamboo were alive with snakes: deadly bamboo snakes, tan in color, two to three feet in length; cobras; pythons. Without axes or hoes to root them out, Pryor used a small hand pick. “We’d get in there, and you’d hit one and sling him out there…. We were always conscious of snakes.”

The hills and rocks slowed the work, introducing new engineering challenges. High in the hills, the prisoners worked far from their sources of food and medicine, the flow of which up into the mountains was restricted like blood flowing through a calcified artery. Already inadequate supply trains had a hard time keeping up. Once a prisoner of war had dragged himself far enough into the mountains, there was no getting food to him, and no getting his half-starved carcass out. The natives who ran the canteen stores near the base camp knew better than to set up shop that far upland. The prisoners were thus forced to subsist on the rations they got from their masters, unfortified by the private market. Adding to their isolation was an administrative quirk: Captain Mizutani’s Branch Five was technically administered from Singapore, which seemed to give it a second-class status that slowed provisioning from base camp. Branch Five was going to conquer this mountain on its own.

Clearing work at 85 Kilo lasted three weeks, then the workers were moved back to 80 Kilo. The terrain there was cut through by several tributaries feeding the Zami River. Several of the cuts were so deep that something more than ordinary cutting and filling was required. Bridges would be necessary to span the gaps.

Bridges would become the signature feature of the Burma-Thailand Railway; indeed, Hollywood would define the very concept of Allied POW servitude in Asia around their construction. The largest and most famous of them would be built by British POWs in Thailand, far to the southeast of the Burma-Thailand border, the eastern limit for most Americans working on the railway. Though most of the American prisoners did not participate in the initial construction of the so-called