Instead he was kept back to help design and engineer the railway. Thanks to this engineering background, he was spared the often fatal work on the frontline of construction. From Changi, Eric and thousands of other POWs were transported en masse by train to Kanchanaburi in the west of Thailand, where they were forced to construct sections of the Thai-Burma Railway.īorn in Edinburgh in 1919, Lomax had worked for the Post Office but trained as an engineer and served as second lieutenant in the Royal Corps of Signals at the onset of war. Along with other POWs, Lomax was marched to the Changi prison (built by the British in 1936). Many Allied survivors are keen to stress that the local Asian workers suffered the harshest treatment.Įric Lomax was one of 80,000 British-led allied troops to be captured and imprisoned by the Japanese – 5,000 were killed in action before the eventual surrender. 6,648 British and 2,710 Australian POWs are known to have died, with many more left traumatised by their experiences. They therefore made the decision to put the Allied prisoners of war to work on the railway.Ĭonditions were horrific. The Japanese Government was not a signatory to the Geneva Convention and deemed that anyone taken prisoner forfeited their rights and was considered to have changed sides. The British had considered building this line forty years earlier but abandoned it due to the difficult terrain – carving through mountains and jungle – the climate, health conditions and the sheer difficulty of the logistics. The missing piece of that line was the 415 km section from Thailand into Burma, a route that would soon become notorious as the “Death Railway.” Death Railway The defeat of the Japanese navy at the Battle of Midway in June 1942 effectively shut off the sea route to the Indian Ocean and triggered a decision to complete a rail link from China to India, to supply the Japanese campaign in Burma. ![]() 25,800 British and 18,000 Australian servicemen were amongst the 200,000 men who found themselves prisoners of the Japanese. Outnumbered, outgunned, with little air support and with virtually no knowledge of fighting in jungle terrain, the Allied forces stood little chance against an organised enemy, who confounded expectations by advancing down through the Malayan jungle instead of attacking from the sea. To Churchill, the Fall of Singapore, on February 15th 1942, was “the greatest disaster ever to have befallen the British Empire”. Much later, to satisfy a growing tourist demand to visit such a bridge, the Thai authorities changed the name of a river crossed by the only remaining prisoner of war built bridge, at Kanchanaburi. The film itself was shot in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. There was in fact no bridge over the River Kwai, because there was no river called the Kwai. In fact, Lomax commented that he had “never seen such well-fed prisoners of war.” To many, the little that is known about the Death Railway comes from the David Lean film, The Bridge On The River Kwai – a great film, but an acknowledged work of fiction. ![]() The victim of torture most certainly does not talk.’ Eric Lomax. ‘The ordinary former Far East POW has probably never talked to anyone about his experiences. Directed by Jonathan Teplitzky, and starring Academy Award-winner Colin Firth, Jeremy Irvine, and Academy Award-winner Nicole Kidman, the film is a powerful tale of survival, love and redemption. ![]() Decades later, Lomax discovers that the Japanese interpreter he holds responsible for much of his treatment is still alive and sets out to confront him, and his haunting past. The film tells the extraordinary and epic true story of Eric Lomax, a British Army officer who is tormented as a prisoner of war at a Japanese labour camp during World War II. THE RAILWAY MAN is based on Eric Lomax’s best-selling memoir and a series of meetings, over many years, with Lomax and his wife, Patti.
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