The Pridi Banomyong Library Rare Book Room, Thammasat University, Tha Prachan campus, owns a number of rare and useful items of potential interest to students and researchers, especially those interested in history, literature, education, political science, Asian studies, and related subjects.

Among them is Branch Line to Burma, a book by John Durnford about the Burma Railway, a 415 kilometer line connecting Ban Pong, Thailand, to Thanbyuzayat, Burma.

The railway was built by Allied prisoners of war during the Japanese occupation of Burma.

The railway was also known as the Siam–Burma Railway and Thai–Burma Railway.

The Thailand–Burma Railway Centre is a museum and research center in Kanchanaburi.

It is located in the former headquarters of the Imperial Japanese Army, which was built by prisoners of war and forced laborers.

The TU Library collection includes other books about the Burma Railway.

John Durnford was born in Edinburgh, Scotland.

When the Second World War was declared, he joined the Royal Artillery and was posted to Malaya.

After the fall of Singapore in 1942, he was among the British troops captured by the Japanese.

In October he was sent with 21,000 other prisoners to Siam to work on the Railway.

There Durnford remained for over three years in horrific conditions.

He wrote poetry at night.  Here is one poem, as posted online:

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VJ DAY KHANBURI

“Gentlemen!” he said in tears, “the war is over”,

Looking towards a yellow hurricane light,

Held up by someone in the struggling crowd,

I glimpsed your face, its usual smile

Checked in bewilderment at so much joy,

So you must once have looked, when, as a boy,

They gave us gifts at Christmas – now, this Freedom,

Silent, the men sat on in darkness, bowed and still,

As though at prayers, or sleeping after death.

Then slowly, one by one, as a great crowd

Of ransomed spirits might attend their Lord,

Began impulsive movements towards the door.

Stars filled the jagged hills, the village slept.

The shuffling feet paused. Then someone sang,

Timid at first, their voices, gathered in strength,

Sounding a great hymn from the ragged lines,

While, all night long, drums beat in the darkened shrines.

 

August 16th 1945

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Here is the Author’s Preface from Durnford’s Branch Line to Burma, as posted online:

This account of life as a Japanese prisoner-of-war will be complete twelve years almost to the day after the close of the events it describes. On October 8th, 1945, the first ship reached England carrying men who had been prisoners in the Far East since 1942. This is one man’s story of one of their experiences – the infamous railway built to link Siam with Burma across the Three Pagodas Pass.

Mine is not intended to be a precise documentary record of events, but an attempt to convey the reactions of a young and ill-equipped human being to the circumstances of his captivity and release. […]

There are no escapes in these pages. Escaping in a starved condition from the jungles of Siam across a thousand miles to the armies of Burma was a physical impossibility.

As far as I know it was never achieved successfully by anyone. Those who attempted it – and they were few – were summarily executed, and corporate punishment levied on camps where the sick were already dying from neglect.

Survival of itself came to absorb the spiritual and physical energies of everyone. Many continued to plot and plan while their friends dreamed of girls and pubs and pints of beer. In the early days of captivity, after the fall of Singapore, these characters had patrolled the island at night in dark track suits, mapping gun-sites and enemy installations.

An Australian officer had succeeded in removing a Dakota from its hangar at Seletar, but found it impossible to start, and returned to camp leaving the machine on the apron outside. The “Cloak-and-Dagger” men took their maps and compasses into Siam, but their resolution faded in the reality of starvation, disease, and the savage punishment that overtook their friends.

A similar fate befell the men of military genius and would-be Napoleons. Plans for a widespread insurrection in 1943 were foiled by the discovery of an officer’s diary containing a wistful appreciation of the prospect of overcoming the main guardroom and sentry posts. A reign of terror followed.

Men were removed to bamboo cages and the gaols of Bangkok, and two entirely innocent young officers were beaten to death. Any such scheme had its consequences upon an already exhausted society. It was not merely that a man could be shot for attempting to escape or for being outside the camp boundary.

In 1944 two officers were recaptured near Three Pagodas Pass after a 200-mile journey to the Burma border from their camp at Chungkai. They were brought back and bayoneted to death in front of their own colonel. You could be shot, like one fusilier on Christmas Eve, 1944, for approaching the inside of the perimeter fence to receive smuggled tobacco.

As a result, men already starved or worked to exhaustion were deprived of rations, canteen supplies, longoverdue mail and the bare essentials of life. Their hospitals and huts were ransacked by sword-waving, hysterical maniacs, ordering doctors and orderlies, the sick and the dying out to work.

The railway camps on the River Me-Nam-Kwa-Noi were not ideal places from which to take a correspondence course in law, aerodynamics or the humanities. No one emerged from them after three years with a postal degree. The Red Cross were forbidden there, and correspondence was one-way traffic. Fearful of prejudicing a situation already beyond the scope of conventions and international law, the authorities at home restricted the writing of one letter a month to next-of-kin.

Such letters as arrived were delayed beyond reason for months at the whim of a capricious commandant or withheld altogether. When delivered they were rarely less than six months old. The only form of reply was by a printed field postcard, which a personal message ran the risk of invalidating.

Three of these reached home in three and a half years. There were no love letters written there and no replies. Those not already thwarted by a cruel censorship found themselves mocked by time in the last resort. Some indeed received a postcard of the type not calculated to improve a soldier’s morale under any circumstances.

“Marrying one of the defenders of our country,” said someone, enclosing the photograph of a Colonial hero. Others received a letter of rejection still bearing the months-old fragrance of expensive perfume. Many a man returned home at least, maimed or in fair health, to find his wife had deserted him or refused to live with his deformed body.

This is not a fairy tale, so it has no happy ending. If bitterness followed, it was not the product of the prison camp. But our lives are not measured in days, months, years or material things. The human spirit cannot be bound, and what appears lost is in fact not so. To accept this is to receive much back in many strange ways and to find peace.

Separation in the body is a small matter, although to our limited human view it may not appear so – to understand this is never to be alone again. Why, lastly, after all this time should we choose to remember such things? Not any more for self-pity. What I wish to remember, for myself and others, is that life can never be so cruel again.

Let those who remain to read this, take heart from the suffering and loneliness they endured without complaint and remember with pride the endless cheerfulness and kindness one man gave another. Let them keep this and take it into their present lives, where the world is in need of it. […]

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)