Rod Beattie and
Terry Manttan's visit to Moulmein & Thanbyuzayat, Burma (Myanmar)
Rod Beattie comes
from a family with a military background. His great uncle died on the
Western Front during World War I, his uncle Roy, a B-24 Liberator pilot,
died when his plane was shot down over Borneo in July 1945. Rod's father,
an officer of the 2/9th Battalion, Australian Imperial Force, was wounded
during the campaign against Rommel in north Africa and again during
the Australian attach on Buna in New Guinea. Rod and three of his five
brothers served in various branches of the Australian Army.
His military background coupled with his professional training as a
civil engineer make him well qualified to search out and understand
much of what took place during the construction of the Death Railway.
This search has gone of for more than ten years and was initially based
on the simple idea that to better understand the railway, one has to
know exactly where the railway ran and where the prisoners building
the railway lived and died.
The years of searching the jungle of western Thailand have uncovered
many of the mysteries of the railway and exposed some of the myths of
what they are - myths.
The journey to Moulmein
from Yangon (Rangoon) was a pleasant surprise in that it took only around
6 hours. The road was in very good shape (compared to usual) and the
new bridge across the river into Moulmein also cuts an hour or two off
the travel time.
The War Cemetery in Thanbyuzayat was beautifully presented as always.
However, the condition of the old "Museum" was very disappointing.
While the gardens are being maintained the building and it's contents
are slowly falling apart.
With
special permission and local supervision we managed to 'explore' some
of the railway just south of Thanbyuzayat as far as Wegale. We walked
much of the railway bed at the 4 kilo point (4 kilometers down the line),
found some remnants from the railway and several large bomb craters
beside the line showing very near misses from Allied bombers over 60
years ago. Several ex PoWs, recently recalling their railway building
experiences in Burma, have remarked about the "bamboo as thick
as a man's thigh". Well, it was interesting to find an area prolific
with bamboo of these dimensions, another example of 'seeing is believing'.
The highlight of
the journey was finding and talking to an elderly local man who, as
a youngster, worked for the Japanese at Wegale Station as a paid laborer
before the end of WWII, loading rail wagons etc. He recalled his time
as a railway worker on the fully operational "Burma-Thailand Railway"
where he observed a number of PoW fellow workers nearby. He was able
to direct us to the old site of the large station where he worked so
many years ago, now located on Military property.
We
had a fascinating walk around this area (with permission from the Military)
and it was surprising to see how large a station it would have been,
with several track beds side by side. An old original railway sleeper
was uncovered on one of the beds. The old road alongside the railway
is still there and acts as a reminder of the PoWs and Asians who would
ALL have trekked along this road to work on the Burma end of the line.
For them this was just the beginning of an unforgettable and life-changing
experience.
Terry
Manttan's involvement in retracing the Death Railway:
My father, Jack Manttan (known to his shipmates as "Flash"),
was a sailor in the Australian Navy during WWII and was on the ship
'HMAS Perth' when it was sunk by the Japanese in the Battle of the Sunda
Straits (off Java) alongside 'USS Houston'. Both ships were sunk just
after midnight, in the early hours of 1st March 1942. My father was
one of the survivors who were captured by the Japanese and taken as
Prisoners of War. He was 18 years old at the time and was held in the
'Bicycle Camp' in Java for several months until he and most of the HMAS
Perth survivors (and many others) were shipped off to Moulmein, via
Singapore and Rangoon.
After a night in Moulmein Gaol, they were moved by train to Thanbyuzayat
from where they were marched to the 35 Kilo Camp (35 kilometres down
the line) to begin their work on the railway on 28th October 1942..
He worked in what became "Williams Force", a part of the original
"A" Force, which later formed into the "No 1 Mobile Force"
responsible for laying sleepers and rails.
Twelve months later the railway was completed and my best information
is that my father worked on the repair and maintenance of the line,
probably in Thailand, for the remainder of the war. He survived his
3 1/2 years of captivity and went home to Australia, but died from after
effects of his ordeal a little over 3 years later in 1949, at age 25.
In his short time back home he married my mother and they had two boys,
the second one being me who was just 6 months old when he died. So I
never knew my father and for most of my life have not known the details
of where or when he worked on the line, only the misconception that
many of us have, that "they all worked for 3 1/2 years building
a railway".
A short trip to Thailand in 1997 gave a glimpse of the project that
cost so many lives, but the need for more information continued to increase.
I had heard something of Rod Beattie and his work in Thailand culminating
in the building of the 'Thailand-Burma Railway Centre' so did some searching
on the Internet.
Contact and arrangements were made resulting in my 3 brothers and myself
coming to Kanchanaburi in November 1994 when we did a 'Jungle trip'
up the railway with Rod. I became captivated by the Museum project and
the huge amount of work that has gone into providing the information
now available to relatives of ex PoWs. What also became apparent was
the large amount of work still to be done in further research, adding
Galleries, setting up the Library and Research Centre etc, etc, and
I decided I just HAD to come back and make a contribution towards such
a very good cause.
***(See
more photos of Death Railway)***
