The True Story Of The Bridge On The River Kwai Dvdrip Exile.avi (351.07 Mb), Categories: Edward Woodward | History | War | A&E | BBC | BBC Timewatch | 1997 | Name | English, Building Of The Burmese Railway Dvdrip Exile.avi, The True Story Of The Bridge On The River Kwai Dvdrip Exile.avi, https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=True_Story_of_the_Bridge_on_the_River_Kwai. At a spot called Konyu, a 500-yard stretch of railroad was laid in a gap that was carved through a mountain ridge by hand, by POWs with picks and shovels. In the movie, the British officer argues vehemently with the Japanese over the conditions in the camp and the illegality of using POWs to build the bridge, an argument which ended only when the Japanese technicians fail to make progress on the bridge and are forced to turn to the POWs to design and build it for them. His novel, Bridge on the River Kwai, was based partly on his own experiences as a prisoner, and partly on stories that he heard from other POWs, some of whom had worked on the Burma railroad. Toosey and 3,000 British, Dutch, and Australian POWs were taken to a place called Tamarkan in Thailand, near the village of Kanchanaburi, at the junction of the Mae Klong and Kwai Noi rivers. But while the story of the collaboration of a British officer and his Japanese captors was the perfect way to illustrate "the great joke of war," it also horrified the POWs who lived through the experience on which the movie was based. This time, everything went to plan: the bridge went up in a spectacular fireball, and the train plunged dramatically into the deep gorge below. On the first attempt to film the scene, though, one of the cameramen failed to get away, and the explosives weren’t triggered: the fullsize locomotive was run off the end of the bridge into a pile of sandbags. Contrary to the romanticized film version, the structures represent a period of terror, desperation, and death for over 16,000 POWs and 100,00 local slaves. Although the railroad track would not actually cross the river here, it would run along these two elevated wooden bridges in order to protect it from flooding. Ever. While he refused to speak of the ordeal during his life, Toosey left behind more than 50 hours of tapes detailing his wartime experiences. This is the story of hardship almost beyond belief that was suffered by the Allied soldiers at the hands of their Japanese captors. Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. View production, box office, & company info, The True Story of the Bridge on the River Kwai. These men know the true story of the building and bombings of the Burma-Thailand Railway (Burma-Siam Railway) bridges. Spike from the Burma Railroad. I’m Lenny Flank, Editor for Red and Black Publishers, and I'm your host. (TV Movie 2001). Also worth noting the difference between the novel and the film. As on soldier recalls, "he was always there to stand between us and the brutality of the Japs." The True Story of the Bridge on the River Kwai After the war, 111 Japanese Army officers were charged with war crimes in connection with the construction of the Burma railroad. Boulle was a very dark satirist. After some initial planning, they gave up, concluding that it would be too costly, in terms both of finances and of diseases and hardship in the thick jungle terrain, to build such a railroad. Use the HTML below. But now the Japanese Army took up the matter. The movie’s most dramatic scene, of course, happens when the newly-finished bridge is sabotaged and destroyed by the POWs who had built it. Made famous by the 1957 Hollywood movie, the bridges of the River Kwai emblematize one of the most misunderstood events in history. The reality was different. Add the first question. Before the war, Boulle had been an Army engineer working at a rubber plantation in Malaya when the Japanese invaded, and he became a prisoner—not of the Japanese, but of the Vichy French—and spent the next four years in an internment camp near Hanoi. The steel and concrete bridges were attacked and briefly damaged several times by British and American bombers, but it wasn’t until June 1945 that the RAF managed to destroy both of them. So settle in, get comfortable, and enjoy some unusual, odd, forgotten and weird history. The Japanese were in fact expert engineers, and the POWs were nothing but manual laborers and had no technical or engineering input. When the Japanese launched their lightning attacks in December 1941, they not only targeted the American fleet and its island bases, but also attacked the British possessions in southeast Asia, including Singapore. The two permanent steel bridges at Tamarkan were finished in May 1943, and the entire length of the Burma railroad became operational in October. ( Log Out /  Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Choose an adventure below and discover your next favorite movie or TV show. Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. By February of 1942, the Japanese themselves were not prepared for the speed of their victories: they had not expected to be required to keep and feed some 40,000 POWs, and, although they now contemplated extending their conquests perhaps as far as India, they had also begun to outrun their own supply lines. Today, a railroad spike from the “Railroad of Death” is on display at the US National POW Museum, inside the Andersonville Prison Camp National Historic Site in Georgia. Thousands died during the transport from poor food, dysentery, vitamin deficiencies like beri beri, and fungal infections known simply as “jungle rot”; tens of thousands more, over one-fourth of the entire workforce, would die during the actual construction. (On one of these raids, a stray bomb accidentally hit the POW camp.) THE TRUE STORY OF THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI interviews former POWs and guards to reveal what really happened, and how the "collaborating" officer, Lieutenant Colonel Philip Toosey, was a hero, not a traitor. This FAQ is empty. What really happened is a long way removed from the Hollywood movie. The proposed railroad was begun from two places about 260 miles apart (Nong Pladuk in Thailand and Thanbyuzayat in Burma), with the tracks gradually growing towards each other until they met in the middle. Two days later, after doing some necessary repairs, the shot was ready again. The Japanese would run trains here for nearly the next two years, first carrying almost half a million tons of supplies up to troops in China, and then carrying two entire divisions of retreating Japanese soldiers back from the front. The 1957 film Bridge on the River Kwai won six Academy Awards and may be the most famous and celebrated war movie ever made. It wasn’t sturdy enough to carry supply trains. , But you gotta admit: the ending to the “Planet of the Apes” movie is THE single best ending in any movie made. Rather than using a miniature, the production crew built an entire full-sized bridge in a valley in Sri Lanka, and wired $50,000 worth of explosives onto the span and the train that would run along it. Documentary hosted by Edward Woodward and Their first-hand accounts differ considerably from that of the largely inaccurate 1957 Academy Award-winning film The Bridge on the River Kwai. ( Log Out /  Using POWs for war-related work was illegal under the Geneva Conventions, but the Japanese General Yamashita had extracted a promise from British General Percival, as part of the surrender terms, that he would not object to what in effect became forced labor. The British were confident that the heavily-defended fortress was impregnable: instead, it fell in a matter of weeks. Search for "The True Story of the Bridge on the River Kwai" on Amazon.com, Title: The final script for Bridge on the River Kwai was, then, a creative mixture of these two sources, plus some other added elements (to appeal to audiences in the US, a new character was created, played by William Holden, who portrayed an American saboteur sent to blow up the bridge). The 1957 movie Bridge on the River Kwai may be one of the most famous war movies ever made, winning seven Oscars including Best Picture and Best Actor for Alec Guinness. One of the British officers who worked on the railroad was Lt Col Philip Toosey, who had been at Dunkirk, had shipped out from England for the Middle East and was diverted to Singapore after the Japanese attack, and was surrendered there. ( Log Out /  Building Of The Burmese Railway Dvdrip Exile.avi (351.45 Mb) You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. At the time American air crews bombed the bridges there was no way for any of them to know that one of the bridges, the wooden one, would become famous in the 1957 Award-winning movie, “Bridge on the River Kwai.” In all, about 13,000 Allied POWs and 100,000 Asian laborers died while working on the project. At the time it was made, the explosion scene was the most expensive shot in movie history. Alec Guinness would play the central role of British officer “Colonel Nicholson”, who was locked in a battle of wills with the Japanese commander “Colonel Saito”, played by Sessue Hayakawa. So the Japanese Army now moved thousands of POWs—some in cramped and crowded trains, some in long marches on foot—and tens of thousands of conscripted Korean, Malaysian, and Chinese laborers. But the reality was a bit different than the movie. At "Hidden History", we’ll look at forgotten stories from history, strange and little-known discoveries in science, and the history behind the exhibits in some of the most famous (and not-so-famous) museums in the world. (Of the 688 bridges that would be built along the railroad, only nine were eventually finished with steel and concrete.) Looking for something to watch? This page was last modified 17:18, 12 April 2020. Directed by David Devries. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. This is the story of hardship almost beyond belief that was suffered by the Allied soldiers at the hands of their Japanese captors. All of this was Hollywood drama. A similar plot inversion befell Planet of the Apes in its Hollywood incarnation. THE TRUE STORY OF THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI interviews former POWs and guards to reveal what really happened, and how the "collaborating" officer, Lieutenant Colonel Philip Toosey, was a hero, not a traitor. . During this time, the temporary wooden bridge spans, which remained in place as backups, were bombed and destroyed nine times by Allied air raids, and rebuilt. I suppose Boulle cried all the way to the bank. As on soldier recalls, "he was always there to stand between us and the brutality of the Japs." What to Watch if You Miss the "Game of Thrones" Cast. Six cameras would cover the shot: one of these was aboard the train. The other bridge was made of wood and carried foot traffic and light truck traffic. These are the events upon which the film would later be based. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. The film ends with Colonel N. destroying ‘his’ bridge, but in the book, he prevents it. In 1952, a French writer named Pierre Boulle finished a novel. By the summer of 1942, the US Navy was already attacking Japanese cargo shipping with submarines, and commanders in Tokyo thought that an overland railroad would be a safer way to carry supplies from ports in Bangkok, Thailand, to supply centers in Rangoon, Burma, for use by troops in China or India. The cameramen were to start their cameras and then jump clear of the explosions. Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. See photos of celebrities like Scarlett Johansson and Leonardo DiCaprio before they hit the big-time, and revisit their earliest onscreen roles.

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