Janice Anderson - War Crimes and Atrocities

Right from the start the Japanese acted without compassion, and they could turn into sadistic executioners at the slightest provocation. It has been estimated that for every sleeper laid it cost one human life – a total of 120,000 sleepers where laid while constructing the Death Railway.

After the railway was completed, the remaining 30,000 prisoners were housed in six camps along the railway track, so that could carry out any maintenance that was necessary. These camps were placed close to the bridges and other strategic positions along the line, so the prisoners became targets of Allied attacks. Many of the prisoners lost their lives in the subsequent bombing raids.

Both bridges were bombed by the Royal Air Force in February 1943. The prisoners of war made repairs and by April the wooden trestle bridge could be used again. It was damaged again in April 1943 by the US Air Force, which meant that repair work had to be carried out for a second time. Both bridges were back in operation by the end of May 1943. Another raid by the Royal Air Force on 24 June finally put the railway out of commission for the remainder of the war.

Following the surrender of the Japanese army from Burma, the British army took out 3.9 km (2.4 miles) of the track on the Thai–Burma border. The railway was in a poor state and when the British carried out a survey it showed that, due to poor construction, the bridge was not strong enough to support commercial traffic. The track was subsequently sold to Thai Railways and the 130-km (80-mile) section from Ban Pong to Namtok was rebuilt. It is still in use today.

The wooden trestle bridge, which was actually blocking the river, was removed, while the steel bridge was repaired by the Japanese. Beyond Nam Tok the line is still abandoned, and parts of it have been converted into a trail for walkers. There have been many plans put forward to rebuild the entire railway, but so far this has not been carried out.

There are several memorials that have been erected to remember the people who lost their lives during the original construction of the track. Right next to the steel bridge is a plaque and an old locomotive, and part of the original wooden bridge is housed in the World War II museum, also beside the modern bridge. Two other museums are in Kanchanaburi, the Thailand–Burma Railway museum, which opened in 2003, and the JEATH War museum. The best memorial is at Hellfire Pass, which was a land cut where a large majority of the prisoners lost their lives. The main cemetery is in the city of Kanchanaburi, with 6,982 prisoners of war buried there, mainly British, Dutch, Australian and American. There is a smaller cemetery with 1,750 graves a few miles outside of the city of Chong Kai.

The Japanese, who were wrong to have pushed their prisoners so far, openly admitted after the war that they were ‘overwhelmed by their tenacious spirit’.

The Great Yu once said, ‘Whoever controls the Yellow River controls China’, and taming its water has proved to be a major undertaking for centuries. Even without the intervention of man, the river has cost millions of people their lives. When the Japanese blew up the flood dykes in 1938, the resulting flood engulfed three provinces and 44 counties resulting in the loss of 893,303 lives and the displacement of a further 3.9 million people.

The Yellow River, or Huanghe, is the second longest river in China and gets its name from the muddiness of its water. Its source comes from the northern area of the Bayanhar Mountains in the Qinghai Province and finally empties out into the Bohai Sea in the Shadong Province. Over the centuries its changes of course have been spectacular and catastrophic, with 26 major changes in the past 2,000 years. As China became more populated, the floods of the Yellow River became increasingly dangerous and many attempts were made to control its flow. After a devastating flood in 1917, the Chinese government sought outside advice on flood management, but the discussions never really found a solution.

In 1931, the flooding of the Yellow River, due to the broad expanse of flat land around it, was described as one of the world’s deadliest natural disasters. It has been estimated that as many as 4 million people lost their lives, either by drowning, disease and resultant famine, although the precise figure is probably far higher.

Political turmoil, war with Japan and civil war prevented any further large-scale projects. After the onset of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, there was a man-made disaster that was to surpass any of the previous floods.

In 1937, the Imperial Japanese Army were making advancements in the heart of the Chinese territory, and by 1938 they had taken control of all of North China. They took control of Kaifeng, the capital of Henan, on 6 June and then threatened to capture Zhengzhou. Because Zhengzhou was part of a major railway network between the Long Hai and Jing Guang railways, the Chinese feared that it would endanger the cities of Wuhan and Xi’an if the Japanese takeover succeeded. The Chinese government decided to take drastic action and the Guomindang Authority burst the dyke at Huayuankou, near Zhengzhou City, in order to stop any further advancement by the Japanese.

The flood waters started pouring out of Huayuankou early in the morning on 9 June, 1938. The river, which was close to its peak annual flood, swept over 14,500 sq km (9,000 sq miles) of the plain, drowning thousands in its path. Millions of people were made homeless and all the devastation was for nothing – it didn’t succeed in stopping the Japanese army.

The situation was made worse by the fact that the Chinese government decided not to inform the public before destroying the dyke, for fear of the news leaking out to the Japanese. This meant that as the flood water submerged millions of homes, the people had no time to flee. Had they had prior warning it is possible that many lives would have been saved.

The dykes on the Yellow River were rebuilt in 1946 and 1947 and the water returned to its original course. Today, the Chinese are managing to control the floods on the Yellow River, but this could be only a temporary measure. The authorities are aware that another ‘100-year’ flood like the floods of 1761 or 1843, would be unstoppable.

The Nuremberg Trials were a series of trials designed to bring the perpetrators of the Nazi holocaust in World War II to justice. Over 100 defendants took the stand in 12 major trials, revealing an extraordinary picture of what Hannah Arendt later called, ‘the banality of evil’. What emerged was that the men and women who committed hideous acts of cruelty on a grand scale in the name of the Third Reich were, in their private lives, often ordinary people: who were responsible, respectable citizens, loving family members and kind neighbours.

The Nuremberg Trials showed that, despite these qualities, the defendants were completely unable to empathize with their victims, or, indeed, regard them as human beings; and that, further, they were able to put aside what moral qualms they may have had by thoroughly identifying with the ideology of Nazism and conforming to what the authorities demanded of them. What also emerged from the trials was just how horrifically cruel, to the point of insanity, the Nazi regime had been: the dreadful stories of what had gone on in the concentration camps traumatized Germany, Europe and the rest of the world, and remind us just how barbaric ‘modern’ civilization continues to be.