BBC Sgt Frank Foster On Building The Burma Ra

The Japanese told us that our job was to build a section of the new railway from Saem to Burma. I especially remember one Daven engineering child of a working party. His favourite way of getting into it is quickly carried out.

It was to check down Iron River to barse from his purse on the top of the beach. On to the heads of our officers and men working below. When the Monsoon broke out with a 72 hour non-stop downpour, most of us prisoners were very nearly at our last gasp.

The rains would immediately turn the embankment and cuttings into progmas, drenched us day and night, and sent the death rate soaring. Almost at the same time, cholera broke out, and decimated the crowded camps. You'd have thought that the Japanese in their own interest might have taken some steps to check the ravages of disease,

but they didn't. Instead, they actually started a speed up, who had to work in shifts of 14, 20, and 36 hours of the stretch. We are practically naked by now, for the Japanese issued highly any clothing.

We're in worn out, we used to alert back to our huts to eat the rice and slush called stew, but often infect nothing but a reddish or bamboo root in boiling water. Then we'd relax into exhausted slumber, wet and damned on top of each other in leggy, when swept huts.