Remembering the POWs who suffered building the ’other’ Death Railway

The suffering of prisoners of war and slave labourers forced to build the Thailand-Burma "Death" Railway amid appalling conditions was immortalised in The Bridge Over the River Kwai. More recently, Colin Firth’s role in The Railway Man shed fresh light on long-lasting psychological harm inflicted on POWs toiling on the huge engineering project by their Japanese military captors. But there was another railway built elsewhere in occupied South-East Asia which is often overlooked – despite the fact more than 80,000 people perished during its construction, almost 700 of them POWs. The last nail of the 200km Sumatra railway was hammered into place on 15 August 1945. It was the day Japan surrendered to Allied forces, bringing about the end of the Second World War. But it would be several days before the POWs and slave labourers lined up in the jungle to watch the formal completion ceremony, would learn that the war was over. Now, 70 years on, a University of Leeds researcher has painstakingly pieced together for the first time a roll call of the 855 British soldiers, sailors and airmen who laboured on the Indonesian island line.