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By Root 1570 0

Nicholson to see the bridge as an expression of British superiority. As survivors of the actual railway see it, Nicholson’s self-satisfaction bordered on collaboration. The British prisoners in particular have taken umbrage at the suggestion that the judgment and integrity of the actual officer who oversaw work on the Tamarkan bridge, Lt. Col. Philip Toosey, was colored by a desire to fulfill Japanese wishes. As the actual prisoners on the Burma-Thailand Death Railway knew, the Japanese engineers understood full well how to build a bridge. As they also knew, there were indeed ways to strike back at the Japanese captors. But on the real-life railway, and all along this concatenation of 688 bridges, the striking back took on forms much more concrete and direct than the fictional Colonel Nicholson’s hollow victory of ego.

As far as the Branch Three and Branch Five prisoners are concerned, the amount of attention that the “River Kwai” bridge commanded obscured the fact that the worst atrocities on the railway occurred further up the line from it. Of the 3,500 men who built the Tamarkan bridge, only nine died, reflecting their proximity to the base camp at Kanchanaburi and the pre-monsoon construction timeline during which most of the work was done. The atrocity was not so much this bridge as the railway that stretched 250 miles into the monsoon jungles to its northwest. And it was there that the subterfuge of prisoners bent on holding on to their dignity found its more dramatic expression, sometimes taking an unexpectedly lethal form.

“Any way you could slow the Japanese down, you tried to slow them down,” Gus Forsman said. “For a cutting, they’d want a certain slope, and if we could, we’d try to make the slope as steep as possible, knowing that when the rainy season came, you’d get a big mud slide down into it. Sometimes I don’t know whether that paid off because then we’d have to go back in and clear it out. Like I say…if you could get away with anything, you did.”

Sgt. Roy Offerle of the Lost Battalion recounted with glee the time that his Branch Five kumi, while trying to move a three- or four-story-tall derrick to drive a new bridge piling, managed to topple the thing over, shattering it to pieces. That little caper was as good as a perfectly executed bomber raid. The prisoners disconnected train hitches and mastered the illusionist’s art of appearing to work hard while actually doing no such thing at all. Through scrupulous inattention they left loose patches of dirt in vital stretches of embankment, laid rails a shade too wide, set aside weak timbers for the most crucial links in bridge trestles, let scarce and valuable tools slip under an alluvial flow of monsoon mud. With the ratio of prisoners to guards in most places on the order of thirty to one, it was not hard to get away with subtle failures. A well-tailored apology rooted in a façade of incompetence usually kept the recriminations from being too brutal.

“I know we Marines had a code among us that you’d do everything you could to slow this railroad,” said Howard Charles. Relating his treatment by the Japanese to the beatings he had gotten from his son-of-a-bitch stepfather, Charles had sworn to himself back at Bicycle Camp, “I would let them get their kicks from beating me, and I would wait, and one day…” Late one night he and Pvt. Frank H. “Pinky” King sneaked out of their hut with sabotage on their minds. Things went further than they expected, however.

It began in a hut, probably near 30 Kilo Camp, where Branch Three languished, when Pinky King crawled over to Charles’s bamboo sleeping platform in the middle of the night. King’s work detail was out at the camp supply depot, near a railroad siding where the rails and other supplies were unloaded for use at the construction site. King poked Charles, waking him. He whispered, “Follow me.” “Where?” said Charles. King shushed him. “Be quiet. Follow me.”

King led Charles outside to the tool shed and told him, “The wirecutters are right in there, right straight on that wall.” Wirecutters? King directed Charles