As darkness fell on Christmas Day, 1943, the sight and sound of Allied warplanes flying over the prisoner-of-war camps along the Thailand-Burma railroad of death was the best present the POWs could wish for. "They were the first sign of our world, carrying our own hopes on to their destinations, as we lay in the dark of our huts," my late father said on one of the rare occasions he broke his silence about the railroad.
Two years earlier, in Indonesia, he had spent his last Christmas in freedom but under threat of the Japanese Imperial Army smashing the European colonial empire in south-east Asia. The more than 140,000 soldiers of the defeated British and Commonwealth forces, together with the Americans and the Dutch, were used as slave labour all over the Japanese-occupied Far East to support Japan's war effort. It is estimated that from 1942-45 one in four POWs died as a direct result.
Construction of the 415km railroad through mountainous jungle to link the Thai capital, Bangkok, with the southern Burmese port of Moulmein was one of the most notorious projects of the war in the Far East and was immortalised in David Lean's Oscar-winning film The Bridge on the River Kwai.
The 1957 film was a favourite in Christmas TV schedules, but not with my late father or with Fergus Anckorn, one of the few surviving Far Eastern POWs. Julie Summers, who wrote The Colonel of Tamarkan, about her grandfather Philip Toosey, the officer on whom Alec Guinness's fictional character Colonel Nicholson was supposedly based, also has mixed feelings.
"As a film and as a story it is marvellous, but it is complete fiction, not the story of the railroad," said Summers, who stressed that if her grandfather had behaved like Colonel Nicholson in the film he would not have earned the respect he did among desperate POWs from Britain, Australia and the Dutch East Indies.
Anckorn, now 88, agrees and adds that the film wrongly portrays the Japanese military in charge as incapable of building a railroad. "It was the greatest feat of military engineering in wartime but made possible only by committing countless war crimes," he said.
But there was a third aspect in which the film failed for my late father: the omission of the romusha, or Asian forced labour.
While the remains of the 12,849 prisoners of war who died in captivity (out of more than 61,000 POWs in Burma and Thailand) were laid to rest in perfectly kept Allied war cemeteries such as Kanchanaburi in Thailand, no one knows how many of the 250,000 or more romusha from Burma, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia died, nor where they are buried.
Nationalist leaders in south-east Asia had welcomed the Japanese occupation as a step towards liberation from the British and the Dutch, and collaborated with the Japanese in recruiting labour and forming paramilitary units from which the future armies of Burma, Thailand and Indonesia evolved.
There are mixed feelings, too, about a proposal for the surviving railway bridge over the Kwai Mae Khlong (kwai actually means river) and the cemetery to become a Unesco World Heritage Site. First proposed by Nagase Takashi, a Japanese businessman wanting to atone for his role as an interpreter with the Kempeitai (Japan's equivalent of the Gestapo), the idea now has the support of Thailand.
"It may give the wrong message. It is remarkable how many Japanese visit the cemetery, but I am afraid that some don't treat it with the respect it deserves," said Anckorn, recently returned from a Remembrance Sunday event at Kanchanaburi.
