Horror on the River Kwai
QUESTION Was the film The Bridge On The River Kwai mostly fiction?
THIS 1957 film was David Lean’s adaptation of Pierre Boulle’s 1952 novel Le Pont De La Riviere Kwai. In 1943, Boulle, a Free French agent, was captured by Vichy France loyalists on the Mekong River and suffered two years of forced labour.
He wrote his book based on a combination of his own experience, stories of the Thai-Burma Death Railway and his extremely l ow opinion of collaborating Vichy officers.
The Death Railway was a 260-mile (418km) supply route built by the Japanese using the forced labour of 60,000 Allied PoWs and hundreds of thousands of civilians from South-East Asia.
As many as 90,000 labourers and 13,000 PoWs lost their lives during its construction.
Lean’s film depicts the relationship between the fictional British Lt Col Nicholson (played by Alec Guinness) and Japanese PoW camp commandant Col Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), who demands the PoWs construct Bridge 277 over the Kwai. Nicholson refuses at first, but eventually decides to oversee the bridge’s proper construction as a symbol of his nation’s ‘professionalism’.
The real Allied senior officer, Lt Col Philip Toosey, was certainly no collaborator. He faced regular beatings when pointing out the ill-treatment of his men.
Toosey attempted to sabotage the construction of the bridge, including infecting the wooden sleepers with termites and mixing the concrete badly. However, he could not refuse to work.
After watching the film, Toosey claimed Nicholson’s behaviour was unrealistic, saying: ‘That was never like that. You could never have confronted the Japanese and caused them to lose face. That would have been fatal, I would not have survived.’
PoWs complained that the film did not accurately portray the deprivation of the camps. It’s also been noted that the Japanese were good engineers and would not have required British help.
The real Risaburo Saito was a sergeant-major who was respected by the prisoners for being comparatively merciful. Toosey spoke at Saito’s tribunal and he was not tried for war crimes.
The real commander, Captain Noguchi, was a vile man. Toosey reported that his goal was to break the men’s spirit by threatening and harassing them to the point of rebellion so he would be justified in executing them. There was also a major geographical inaccuracy. Bridge 277 didn’t cross the River Kwai, but rather one of its tributaries, the Mae Klong.
Two bridges constructed across the Kwai were later destroyed by Allied bombing.
James Wright, Liverpool.
THE FILM was mostly based upon fact; however, it was intended to entertain and maybe to also inform a little.
My father was a PoW taken at Singapore and worked on the railway and bridge. When the film was released, we went to the cinema to see it. For most of the film he was quiet except for occasional ‘ahhs’ and ‘oohs’, but his lid came off when Alec Guinness went to the hospital and exhorted the patients to ‘show their captors what British soldiers are made of ’. To the tune of Colonel Bogey, they marched out to go to work.
He jumped up, shouted, ‘What a load of *******’ and we left. I asked him on the way home what the problem was, and he explained that soldiers in the camp hospital were too sick to walk, let alone march to work.
My father returned to the bridge in 2005 with his family.
He collapsed in the Hellfire Pass museum looking at pictures of the conditions in which the prisoners were kept. It was a week later that he told me a film could never depict the true nature of what the PoWs had endured.
It was several years before I got to see the end of what I know now to be a work of fiction based on a grim fact. Many good men died to build the two bridges over the Kwai. The film The Railway Man came closest to showing the problematic home life most of these men suffered as a result of their captivity. John Symon, Oulton Broad, Suffolk.
QUESTION How did slap-up meal come to mean a lavish dinner?
A SLAP-UP meal is a plentiful and delicious one, consumed with appropriate gusto. The word slap-up is usually, though not always, associated with food and drink. From 1660, slap is found in dictionaries with the meaning of eat, swallow, lick or lap up.
A glossary of Yorkshire dialect of 1828 defines to slap up as to swallow greedily or dispatch a meal. Presumably this reflects favourably on the food quality.
Slap-up came to mean anything of quality, not just food. Two dictionaries of 1823 by Grose and Badcock listed slap-up as meaning fashionable or top class. A report in the Sporting Magazine of 1821 described a boxing match as a slap-up battle. William Makepeace Thackeray writes about the slapup, meaning people with money, in The Newcomes of 1854.
At the other end of the spectrum is the slap-bang shop, a cheap eatery, such as the one depicted in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. Customers were expected to pay in advance for whatever food was on offer. They slapped their money on the counter and a plate of food was slammed down in front of them with a bang.
Ian MacDonald, Billericay, Essex.
QUESTION Does a hang glider have only one major bolt holding it together?
AN EARLIER answer described the Jesus bolt – which is the only thing holding a hang glider’s overhead wing to the undercarriage where you sit.
In the late 1980s, a group of work colleagues and I tried accompanied microlighting from Blackbushe airfield near Yateley, Hants. As the only woman, I was nominated to go first and thoroughly enjoyed the short flight.
The next person noticed the Jesus bolt on take-off and spent the whole flight looking at it in terror. Once it had been mentioned, everyone else did the same. I was the only one who actually got to enjoy the wonderful flight!
Cathie Watkins, Barlestone, Warks.
QUESTION What is the most amusing contrived rhyme in a pop song?
FURTHER to earlier answers, the Katie Melua song Mary Pickford contains this gem: Douglas Fairbanks, he was so handsome. He wore a moustache. Must-a had much cash, too, Worth a king’s ransom.
John Hinves, Farnham, Surrey.
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