Question

What is account of history of Pow bridge?

Answer 1

Answer:

THE REAL STORY BEHIND ‘THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI’

HISTORY

By Matt Fratus | May 21, 2019

“The Bridge on the River Kwai” won Best Picture and six other Oscar nods from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences at the 1958 Academy Awards. What the film did not win was the respect and admiration from members of the Far East Prisoners of War (FEPOW) due to the fictitious portrayal of events. One FEPOW member, John Coast, a young British officer who experienced three and a half years along what later became known as the “Death Railway” had harsher words than those from Hollywood. “‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’ (BBC1) was the season’s Distinguished Film,” he said in a clipping sent to Laura Rosenberg in 1974. “As nobody should ever have need telling, the picture is a load of high-toned codswallop.”

Unlike Freddy Spencer Chapman and members from the Special Operations Executive (SOE) who conducted sabotage and irregular warfare operations in the jungle against the Japanese after the fall of Singapore in 1942, Coast — among 61,809 Allied (British, Dutch, Australian, and a small contingent of American) troops and 200,000 rômusha — suffered immensely under the 12,000 Japanese and 800 Korean captors. The Japanese discovered abandoned British plans from the 1880s that estimated the Burma-Thailand railroad could be built in five years and, because of pressures to finish the bridge and the loss of momentum during World War II, the railroad became a priority to complete in a fraction of that, no matter the cost