good talk

I went to Kanchanaburi, 2 hours by train from Bangkok.  "The Bridge on the River Kwai," won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Actor and 5 more, in 1958.  It was just a story, it depicts the "Death Railway," in Thailand during WW 11, and a bridge which the clever English could build and the dumb Japanese could not, and the scene of Japanese Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), sobbing in his quarters at being bested.  The Thais' touristy Bridge 277, one of 688 bridges, built by the Japanese, is the representation, it was never fully destroyed, has been restored, and I walked across-it.  I stayed at the "River Kwai Hotel," a nice room and a delicious breakfast buffet, I went katty-kornered and got a 2-hour massage.  There's 2 wonderful museums, 2 Allied Cemeteries, and I visited them all, had never been here.  Supplies for the Japanese thrust into Burma became hazardous by sea, after the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, and the Japanese needed a complete railway connecting Bangkok to Rangoon.  Thus began the construction of the needed 258 miles for completion of the Thailand-Burma Railway, from October, 1942 to June, 1943, an engineering-marvel due to its complexity and the harsh conditions under which it was speedily-constructed, the "Death Railway." The Japanese didn't want to use heavy-equipment due to lack-of and transport, but the Japanese Engineers had plenty of raw human labor, the Romusha, and the Allied Prisoners of War, who used only crude implements such as spades and hammers while enduring the jungle-heat, lack of food and medicine, and beatings.  In the Japanese Army, anyone of a superior-rank could smack-around anyone of an inferior-rank, with the Korean Conscripts on the bottom, any Japanese could smack one-around, and this corporal-punishment was showered on the labor, the POW's saying the Koreans to be the most-brutal.  Of the 200 thou Romusha, about half died, and nobody knows where are their graves, of the 60 thou Allied POW's, 12,621 died during the 16 months, these were British, Australian, and Dutch, with the Americans having only nominal representation of 700 with 133 dying from abuse. To the Japanese, who adhered to Bushido, "The Way of the Warrior," a prisoner was beneath contempt (See My Blog for Feb. 11, 2009).  Bridge 277 was permanently bombed-out of commission on June 24, 1945