HELLFIRE Pass is a deep rock cutting made for the Thai-Burma Death Railway in 1943.
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Once a place of unspeakable horror, it’s now a jungle tourist drawcard but also a fitting war memorial.
Was this really a place of blood, toil, tears and sweat on which hundreds of young Diggers slaved in 1943?
Yes, it was — the visitor can still see some rotting wooden sleepers and bits of chisels or drills left in the rock face.
I had wanted to visit the place ever since Albury resident Ned Monte told me he was there when 400 young Australian prisoners of war began work on Hellfire Pass on, ironically, Anzac Day 1943.
This month, I had the chance while touring Thailand.
Hellfire Pass got its name because the Japanese made POWs and Asian slave labourers work 18-hour days, the work at night being lit by candles.
The eerie scene, combined with the brutality of it all, gave the impression this was hell on Earth.
Today, a few wreaths of red poppies, some poignant handwritten notes and a few little wooden crosses are pinned to the walls of Hellfire Pass.
This was not a battlefield like Gallipoli’s Lone Pine, the Kokoda Track or some D-Day beach in Normandy.
Yet what happened there in wartime demonstrated courage, perseverance and mateship among ragged Australian, British and Dutch prisoners of war faced with a cruel enemy.
There’s a big memorial stone where the narrow gauge track once wound its way along a steep, remote hillside.
A bronze plaque notes Sir Edward Weary Dunlop’s ashes lie close by in the bamboo jungle.
Hellfire Pass was cut through rock about 75 kilometres north-west of the Bridge on the River Kwai, which is near the town of Kanchanaburi.
In 1942 and 1943, hundreds of ill-treated POWs and Asians toiled on the infamous bridge, the 416-kilometre railway and cuttings like Hellfire Pass.
The idea that well-fed, fit tourists would one day stroll leisurely through the rock cutting would have been quite preposterous to them.
The Japanese soldiers and engineers building the railway treated their charges with complete disregard for their health, resulting in starvation, sickness, injury and death.
Today Hellfire Pass keeps the memory of the terrible episode alive. It is a well-kept memorial site managed by the Australian government and the Thai authorities.
Today the pass is easily reached by more than 100 wooden steps from the Hellfire Pass
Museum, a modern hilltop building where the tourist coaches drop off visitors.
The museum, opened by prime minister John Howard in 1998, explains why a narrow gauge railway was needed to assist Japan’s expansion into Burma and ultimately India.
At first the Japanese railway engineers estimated it would take 60,000 labourers five years to construct. However, the Battle of Midway when the Allies inflicted heavy losses on the Japanese Navy made the task more urgent, and the job was done in 15 months.
According to historian Rod Beattie, 254,711 people worked on the railway, of which 99,044 died.
About 13,000 Australian POWs worked on the line and 2802 of them died, while British deaths numbered 6904 and Dutch 2782.
Beattie estimates 42,000 Malay labourers and 40,000 Burmese, known as the romusha, also died on the railway.
He has sought to destroy the myth created by the 1957 movie The Bridge on the River Kwai that the railway was built mainly by POWs — he reckons 70 per cent of workers were Asian, and they had a worse death rate than the POWs.
Almost 7000 POWs were buried at Kanchanaburi war cemetery, which is directly opposite the Thai Railway Museum Beattie created and still works for.
More than 22,000 Australian servicemen were captured by the Japanese when they conquered south east Asia in early 1942. More than a third died in captivity.
Beattie’s museum has a far more comprehensive display than the Hellfire Pass Museum; its displays are far more critical of the Imperial Japanese Army’s brutality and indifference.
Mr Monte, 93, still living in Albury, is a former Albury RSL vice-president.
In 2003, he had the good fortune to be able to revisit Hellfire Pass with family where he attended a pre-dawn service that ended as the first rays of sunshine flooded through the rock cutting.
In contrast to marching through the jungle half-naked and starving as a 21-year-old in 1943, he stayed in a motel and ate a hearty breakfast.
“The Thai people were wonderful — I love them,” he said this week.
Mr Monte was part of D Force, a group sent by train through Malaya specifically to build the railway northwards from Kanchanaburi in Thailand.
“At the beginning of the Hellfire Pass cutting on Anzac Day 1943 I had been a POW for approximately 14 months,” Mr Monte says in his memoirs, Bungyabagoose!
“We were only at Hellfire Pass a short time ... for the initial construction of the cutting.”
Mr Monte’s group moved further up the line to the Burma section, the Japanese demanding they finish each section in 10 days or 20 days.
“It didn’t matter how many were sick or how many died,” he writes.
Mr Monte describes how the POWs had beriberi, dysentry, hook worm, tropical ulcers and cholera, plus injuries suffered from beatings with bamboo sticks, pickaxe handles and rifle butts.
His book is remarkable for mentioning the lighter side of things — such as Diggers picking flowers on Mother’s Day and wearing them on their ragged clothes.
They also kept monkeys as pets and Mr Monte himself enjoyed working with elephants dragging logs, creatures he described as “most lovable”.
The railway ultimately proved of little value, especially after the Allies bombed the bridge.
It closed in 1947, though a small section is open today, including the bridge over the River Kwai.
I was able to take a short journey on a passenger train, including the amazing Wang Pho viaduct built on a narrow cliff ledge above the river.
While I was in Thailand, I read that Prime Minister General Prayeth Chan-ocha was in Japan.
He talked of Thailand’s wish to build high-speed rail links between Bangkok and southern Thailand. They would be modelled on Japan’s bullet trains, he assured his hosts.
No one mentioned that once the Imperial Japanese Army had vast experience in Thailand with trains, not to mention bullets.
Memorials such as at Hellfire Pass and Kanchanaburi should ensure no one forgets that.