Row after row of neatly arranged rectangular gravestones stretch across the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery, forming a dark gray silent phalanx of 6,977 tiles punctuated in precise intervals by close-cropped patches of lush green grass upon which, almost imperceptibly, splashes of water fall from a sprinkler. The graveyard is dominated at its center by a white marble cross that towers over the gray formation. In the late afternoon sun, the cross throws its shadow over a stone, darkening the inscription: â??L.G. Kidd, Royal Army Service Corps, Age 23, 1st November 1943, In Loving and Everlasting Remembrance of Our Only Beloved Son. R.I.P.â? Kidd is one of a few thousand soldiers buried here who died defending Britainâ??s Asian Empire.
Kanchanaburi, a small provincial town in Northern Thailand, is home to the largest allied war cemetery in the region. It is the final resting place of around 7,000 of the more than 12,000 British, Dutch, Australian, Malayan, and Indian soldiers who perished building the infamous Burma-Siam railway â??â??the Railway of Deathâ?â??during the Second World War. (The 700 Americans who died on the railway were repatriated after the war). The approximately 80,000 Asian forced laborers who also succumbed during the construction of the railway from October 1942 to December 1943 have no marked graves.
The town is mostly famous for a railway bridge built by British POWs crossing the Kwai River (also called the River Kwai Yai or Maeklaung River), which became the inspiration for Pierre Boulleâ??s 1952 novel, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and a subsequent movie of the same name. Kanchanaburi has again risen to temporary prominence with the movie adaptation of the book The Railway Man, the harrowing memoirs of the late Eric Lomax, a former British officer and prisoner of war of the Japanese, who was put to work on the railway as one of 60,000 allied prisoners. Like so many of his comrades, Lomax was tortured by his captors and almost died during interrogations by the Kempeiâ??the Japanese secret policeâ??in a prison in Kamburi, a name given to Kanchanaburi by the allied POWs.
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