Documenting the Death Railway

The following information was taken primarily from an article in the military newspaper "Stars and Stripes." The Death Railway was characterized in the film "Bridge on the River Kwai." The railway is known for POW atrocities in World War II.

Ron Beattie is a 67-year-old Australian engineer who has lived in Thailand since 1990 and admits to having an obsession with the Death Railway. Using his own funds, he has searched the jungle near Kanchanaburi, a key railway terminus and site of the infamous bridge on the River Kwai. He has traced the 257-mile route of the railway built for the Japanese army by Allied Prisoners of War and civilian prisoners.

In the mid-1990s, Beattie and his pregnant wife cleared almost two miles of the railway, taken over by the jungle, using chain saws and machetes. In 2003 he opened the Thailand-Burma Railway Center in Kanchanaburi. The center is a research facility and museum containing thousands of the artifacts Beattie has uncovered. He says he is intent on destroying the myths and telling the true story of the building of the Death Railway.

Some of the Japanese guards were brutal in their treatment of the prisoners, and prisoners were executed while others died from disease and malnutrition. More than 12,000 Australian, British, Dutch and American prisoners of war died, along with an estimated 90,000 Asians.

The Japanese kept index cards on every Allied prisoner, and these cards have been valuable to Beattie. He has also researched diaries, military and cemetery records from around the world. He has had the children and grandchildren of former prisoners come to honor the dead. According to the article in Stars and Stripes, "One daughter he escorted was able to learn for the first time exactly where her father, Pvt. Jack McCarthy, died on July 21, 1943, of what diseases and where he was initially buried."

Beattie has been recognized and received decorations from Great Britain, Australia and the Netherlands for his work in preserving this piece of history. He has plotted out the entire route of the railway and made note of places of importance for anyone who comes along after he is gone.

Jack Dragoni attended Boston College and served in the U.S. Army in Berlin and Vietnam. He lives in Chaffee, Missouri.