Colonel Bogey March

This one will be brief. We spent the day catching up with Oui’s family and just doing the general running around that large busy family do. Anyway we had to go in to Kanchanburi for a number of reasons and out of the blue Oui said do you wan’t to go to the bridge over the River Kwai? I said “sure, how far is it?” thinking we had some ways to travel. The answer however was if you take the next left its at the end of the street.

So I found myself walking across the River Kwai bridge made famous by the David Lean film. If you think I could stop myself from whistling the Colonel Bogey March you would be wrong. I should say the film is basically a fiction. The prisoners were treated in a far worse manner than shown in the movie, the British didn’t collaborate on building the bridge faster, in fact they actively sabotaged it. The final insult, the bridge used in the movie is actually in Sri Lanka and not Thailand at all. 

Tomorrow I will actually get to walk in the footsteps of hero’s as we head to Hellfire Pass. I spent a good deal of my early career helping veterans commemorate what they went through ensuring our freedom and way of life. I had the privilege of knowing Mr Joe Coombes a prisoner of war who worked on the railway. One day he honoured me by sharing some of his memories of his life there. He was even incarcerated in Japan and saw one of the atomic blasts. He has no doubt now left this mortal coil but I will be thinking of him as I walk in his footsteps.