Unique photos of war graves in Thailand

Chungkai War Cemetery in the 50s

On 15 August, the Dutch dead of the Second World War in Southeast Asia will be commemorated at the military cemetery in Kanchanaburi.

On the occasion of this commemoration, I would like to publish a number of unique photos taken shortly after the Second World War in Thailand of military cemeteries, which have long since been cleared, where the victims of the construction of the infamous Burma railway were buried. This historically very important photographic material comes from the enormously rich and publicly released collection of the Australian War Memorial (AWM).

Immediately after the Japanese surrender in August 1945, the British Army provided a number of volunteers to work with the Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC), the predecessor of the current one Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) to search for the remains of the victims, to recover them and to place them with due honor in a collective cemetery. This initiative soon grew into an international event, when the Australians and the Dutch together with the Bitten also started looking. The Dutch detachment was commanded by a Captain Van Wijnen, who was assisted by Lieutenant GH Schröder, a former prisoner of war who had worked on the railway.

St Luke cemetery in Tarsao

This ad hoc compound Allied War Graves Commission left Ban Pong, Thailand, where there had been a large hospital camp, on September 22, 1945, to Thanbyuzayat, the terminus of the railway in Burma. From there, a systematic search was conducted south along the track beyond Kanchanaburi. They could count on the active support of British troops, who were stationed in Thailand until October 1946. In addition, there were also several hundred prisoners of war with the Allied War Graves Commission classified as interpreters, drivers and burial crews. As a result of their work, 10.549 graves could be found in 144 cemeteries. Only 52 graves, which had belonged to the original target group, could not be found. A remarkable efficient performance when one takes into account the extremely difficult working conditions. It should not be forgotten that the Japanese had two weeks after the capitulation to destroy all documents, so that there were hardly any reliable sources about the cemeteries.

Konyu cemetery

Once the cemeteries were located, identifying the bodies was not an easy task after two or three years. Most of the time there had been no time, let alone energy, to build decent coffins and the deceased prisoners of war were simply buried in a few sewn-together burlap sacks. Consequently, the remains were often already largely decomposed into skeletons. In some places, where the rocky soil conditions made it impossible to bury the dead deeply, scavengers had dug up the corpses and the bones had become hopelessly scattered…

Looking for identification data

In one of the pictures of it Australian War Memorial can be seen how warrant officer L. Cody and Sergeant JH Sherman examining recovered military notebooks of casualties at a cemetery in Thailand in September 1945, looking for useful data to assist in identification. When the camp was evacuated, these pocketbooks, carefully kept by the camp doctor, were safely wrapped in oil cloth and buried in a jerry can in one of the war graves. Cody and Sherman had themselves been employed as prisoners of war on the construction of the Burma Railway and had volunteered to help salvage the bodies of their less fortunate companions.

Tha Mayo Cemetery

They regularly had to look for smaller, often already overgrown and forgotten sites. In some cases even to remote individual jungle graves. The search for the cremated remains of victims of the cholera epidemic that had caused real havoc among the forced laborers in the summer of 1943 was also not without problems, because the ash heaps had very often been dumped in hastily dug pits without any significant markings. It St Luke Cemetery, the cemetery in Tha Sao, present-day Nam Tok was a rare exception. This well-maintained graveyard contained the remains of 613 Allied prisoners of war.

Curikonta cemetery

The small cemetery at the Kurikonta jungle labor camp was, just like Tha Mayo, a good example of the smaller cemeteries that were built in the jungle next to the camps. This site had 13 Dutch and 11 British graves. Konyu with more than 200 graves, on the other hand, could be described as a medium-sized necropolis.

Nakhom Pathom cemetery

In Nakhon Pathom there was a large cemetery that was set up next to the hospital that was operational from January 1944 for the chronically ill and amputees. A large number of the Allied forced laborers succumbed here and were buried in a separate plot behind the camp.

Kinsayok Cemetery No II

At the end of the war there were no less than three allied cemeteries in Kinsayok. On one of the photos from the collection of the Australian War Memorial shows how Japanese prisoners of war, who had been requisitioned for the exhumation of their victims, walk past a row of graves on Kinsayok II.

Phetchaburi POW Cemetery

Phetchaburi was at least 200 km from the railway, but there was an important Japanese logistics base. In 1944, a labor camp was set up where Allied prisoners of war were used by the Japanese to construct an airfield and build bunkers. Most of these prisoners had previously been put to work on the Railroad of Death. A photograph in the November 1945 AWM file shows a very neatly maintained and grass-lined row of 11 graves at the former camp.

Japanese prisoners at the construction of Kanchanaburi War Cemetery

Another historically important photo from the rich AWM archive shows how requisitioned Japanese prisoners of war are digging out a row of graves under the watchful eye of two Australian soldiers in Kanchanburi. This was the beginning of the large collective cemetery in Kanchanaburi. The deceased Western forced laborers who could be recovered in Thailand were buried in two war cemeteries near Kanchanaburi. This proceeded according to a fixed pattern. The remains were trucked to the former Kanchanaburi officer camp and formally identified in a shed before being coffined and reburied. A protocol deed was drawn up for each burial. The funerals took place in groups and were invariably concluded with military honors.

The two cemeteries in Thailand are Chungkai War cemetery en Kanchanaburi War Cemetery. 313 Dutchmen and 1.426 soldiers from the British Commonwealth were buried in Chungkai. There are 1.896 Dutch and 5.085 military personnel from the British Commonwealth in Kanchanaburi. Just like the British graves, the Dutch graves are maintained by the CWGC, but the management of these sites is done in consultation with the War Graves Foundation, the Dutch sister organization of the CWGC. White-painted wooden crosses were originally placed at the CWGC cemeteries along the route of the former Burma Railway, but these proved not to stand up well to the rigors of the tropical climate. A photo of Chungkai War Cemetery from the fifties illustrates this. They were systematically replaced in the XNUMXs by bronze nameplates on a low hard stone plinth. These bronze plates have also suffered from the elements and the ravages of time and are now being systematically replaced.