364: The Bridge on the River Kwai with Jon Parshall

Dan LeFebvre  03:05

As we always do here, on based on a true story. Let’s kick this off with an overall historical letter grade. What grade does The Bridge on the River Kwai get for historical accuracy?

Jon Parshall  03:17

D, maybe, maybe a C minus, if you’re lucky, I mean, yes, there was a bridge on a different river that got blown up by airplanes much later, you know. But that’s, that’s about as far as you can go. And, you know, if you’re like, one of these real world war two gearhead kind of people, you know, you’re gonna look at this thing gonna say, Oh, come on, the Japanese Okay, yeah, they’re in Japanese uniforms, but they’re using British Lee Enfield rifles and Vickers 303, machine guns inside, you know, British lorries. You know, there’s not a lot of a lot of capital being expended here on on realistic kit and equipment and that kind of thing.

Dan LeFebvre  04:05

You talk about there was a bridge that got destroyed, I feel like that happened a lot in World War II.

Jon Parshall  04:13

And the really, the really funny thing is, okay, so the author of this book, Pierre Boulle, who’s a French guy who was actually in what is now Vietnam during the war, and was collaborating with the Japanese because they were running that place too, you know, he heard about this bridge being built on a place called the river Kauai. But the actual bridge is not on the river Kauai. It was on a river at the time that was called the meikong, which was close to the river Kwai. And so what ends up happening, actually, is that this movie is so successful, it comes out in 57 and it’s just a global phenom, right? And so the Thai government ends up renaming the river in 1960 Oh, so that the 20. Tourists can find it. So that’s a whole thing, you know, try and nail down what actually was the name of the river at that time. But yes, the bridge that we’re talking about is actually still there. It was not a wooden structure. Well, there was an original wooden structure that was then replaced by a concrete and steel structure. It was blown up, but the concrete and steel bridge is now still in that location. So there you go. Well,

Dan LeFebvre  05:28

you mentioned the author, Pierre Boulle. The movie’s based on a novel, so I’m gonna just guess that a lot of the main characters are fictional people. I’m sure we’ll talk more about them throughout this episode, but I’m thinking of like commander shears, major Warden, of course, Colonel Saito and Colonel Nicholson. Are they fictional people? Then,

Jon Parshall  05:45

by and large, yes, there, but there are some interesting sort of nuggets here, and that there were some kind of analogs to real life guys in the movie. So our colonel Nicholson here. There actually was a British colonel of senior officer on this project. Was a guy named Tuesday, and so he’s real the camp in question. There was an actual guy named Saito there, but he was a sergeant, and he was actually one of the more compassionate Japanese guards in the camp, which is kind of weird, because compassion and Japanese guards didn’t often go well together during this war. And then one of our four commandos in this movie is a guy named Chapman, and we’re going to talk about him a little bit later on, but it’s interesting because in the novel, it’s a three person commando team, and there is no Chapman. But this Chapman dude gets added to the screenplay in the 50s, because the real life Chapman was actually a very famous British commando during the war, and we can talk about him later at

Dan LeFebvre  06:58

the beginning of the movie, we would kind of get introduced to the whole plot with Colonel Nicholson and his men arrive at the Japanese POW camp called Camp 16, that’s run by the Japanese Commander, Colonel Saito. That camp, according to the movie, Camp 16, is there were some prisoners already there, but then on arrival of these new prisoners, Colonel Saito explains that there’s no need for barbed wire or watchtowers at the camp because they’re on an island in the jungle. Escape is impossible because they die in the jungle even if they leave. So the purpose for being way out in the middle of nowhere, according to the movie, is to build this bridge that we talked about in the River Kwai connects Bangkok to Rangoon, according to the movie. And I’m sure we’ll talk a lot more about the details in a moment. But can you unravel just kind of overall, how this plot actually, how much of this actually happened?

Jon Parshall  07:44

Okay, so let’s do a crash course in the early part of World War Two. Okay, so the the initial Japanese campaign that happens right at the same time at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese invade Malaya, and they begin moving down the Malayan peninsula to capture the critical bridge Port of Singapore. That’s the prize of this whole thing, and and they they do that. It’s a total curb stop of a campaign. They just route the British and at the end of that campaign, then on February 15, Singapore falls, and it is one of the most catastrophic British defeats in their history, something like 160,000 POWs go into captivity. The majority of them are Indian. But there are a lot of British troops, Australian troops as well. And at the same time, even as the Malayan campaign is unraveling, the Japanese then invade Burma as well, because Burma is right up next to India. India is the biggest, most important colony in the British Empire, and the Japanese do exactly the same thing to the British forces in Burma as well. They route them, drive them out by about april of 1942 so now you’ve got the situation where the Japanese have got three or four divisions in Burma, and they need to keep them in supply. And instead of wanting to sail ships all the way around the tip of the Malayan Peninsula and then up the coast to Rangoon, which is exposed to British air attack and submarine attack, gee, wouldn’t it be nice if instead, we could just sail our ships to Bangkok in Thailand, unload our stuff, put it on a train, and run that train over to Rangoon. Great. The only problem is that you’ve got about 200 miles worth of absolutely virgin jungle here with not a road or anything in sight. So they got to build this 200 mile long railroad. So what they end up doing is they start working from both ends, you know, west to east from Burma and then east to west from Thailand and Malaya. And they end up rounding up about 200,000 indigenous laborers to work on this railroad, both. Burmese and Thai and Malayan. And then they also bring in about 60,000 Allied POWs. Again, the majority of them are British, a lot of Australians. There are some Dutch who were captured in Java and Sumatra and places like that, who are also put to work. And there are smattering of Americans who were either captured from the cruiser Houston, which our guy here is supposedly a member of that’s legit. That’s true. And there were also some American troops in Java, some but any aircraft and artillery guys that get captured, and all those dudes end up on this railroad, and it’s horrific. So of those 200,000 indigenous laborers that are going to work on this thing, about half of them die. Okay, it’s horrible. It’s horrible, and the POWs do better. Only one in five of them die, but you end up within about 13,000 dead Allied POWs and around 90,000 dead civilians, which means that over the course of this railroad, it cost about 350 to 400 dead for every mile or a grave about every 15 feet. So that’s sort of the backdrop to this thing. It is. It’s a horror show. It’s disease mostly that gets rid of these people. You had these massive cholera outbreaks in the camps because there isn’t adequate sanitation, and it just mows people down. So malaria, dengue, fever, tick, typhus, cholera, all of the maladies of the jungle are preying on these people. So to Saito’s comment that, you know, I don’t need, you know, watchtowers and that kind of stuff, there’s a certain element of truth in that there were guards, obviously, but they didn’t have to invest the same sort of human capital in guarding these camps, particularly the ones that are way out in the jungle there. Because, yeah, if you escape, what are you gonna do? Do you know enough to get food and water and that sort of thing? That’s not a trivial problem. That really

Dan LeFebvre  12:10

puts it in perspective of just the lies lost in order for, I mean, which I’m sure they didn’t care about net. I mean, that’s they knew it. They knew it was gonna happen.

Jon Parshall  12:21

Wow, and that’s important to keep in mind, too, there, there. This is actually one of the more benign railroad projects that the Japanese undertake during this war. There are a couple others that happened down in Sumatra and Java that are almost 100% indigenous labor, and the the cost per mile are even higher, which is, is almost incomprehensible. But from the Japanese perspective, their supply of labor is unlimited, and so they don’t care about these people. You know, it’s amazing what you can accomplish when you you know, I’ll just throw human death and suffering at it until it’s done. You know, I just, I don’t, I don’t really care. And so they had no incentives to take care of these labors. They knew they could just go to Rangoon or wherever and just impress another gang of local laborers, and I’ll just refresh the crop. I just don’t care, which

Dan LeFebvre  13:12

probably just added even more to it. Like you’re talking about the illness being one of the main things that killed like, well, if you’re not going to take care of them, that because you are just replacing them, then not going to invest in hospitals or things like that, you know, sick days and things like that. That’s

Jon Parshall  13:30

exactly right. And so the interesting thing here, though, is the reason that the pow casualties were actually lower than the civilian casualties is because these military units maintained discipline sufficiently that they could tell the men, okay, we’re building latrines over there. You must use the latrines, you know. So there was, there was still discipline and order in the military camps, whereas the civilians didn’t have anybody telling them how to take care of themselves in the face of a cholera outbreak, and so they just died like flies.

Dan LeFebvre  14:05

Going back to the movie, when Saito tells Nicholson that even the officers have to work on the bridge, we see Nicholson pulling out a copy of the Geneva Convention. He points Saito to Article 27 it says officers aren’t supposed to do manual labor. Saito doesn’t care. His orders are to finish the bridge by May 12. So he says, all the prisoners will work. Nicholson refuses, and even goes so far as to put in a little box they call the oven. And when that punishment doesn’t work, Saito tries to bribe Nicholson with a nice dinner of English corned beef. But Nicholson still refuses, and he even gets to the point of Saito or he’s actually threatening Saito of reporting him, although he doesn’t really say in the movie who he’s going to report him to he’s the prisoner here, or how he managed to do that. Do we know of any situations like this, where the British officer tried to hold the Japanese officer to the Geneva Convention? I

Jon Parshall  14:54

am not aware of any, and I cannot imagine that. That would have been six. Successful, among other things. It’s really the history here is super convoluted, but in a nutshell, the Japanese they signed certain articles of the second Geneva Convention, but they didn’t ratify them by their own government, and so they weren’t they were not really legally held to those agreements they did announce in 1942 that, yes, we will adhere to them, but that was all a bunch of baloney. I mean, they they flagrantly did not hold to those conditions throughout the war anywhere. There was a famous incident during the Malayan campaign where a group of British and Australian wounded get left behind by a bridge called the parrot Sulong bridge, and the Japanese captured them there and killed them all, you know, 145 wounded POWs, and they just, you know, burned them and shot them and did whatever they did. So the Japanese, you know, the notion of being held to, uh, a Western document telling us how to make war when we have defeated you is just laughable to the Japanese. They’re not going to adhere to that at all. Yeah,

Dan LeFebvre  16:14

when I saw, I mean, I don’t, don’t know the history there, but when I saw that in the movie again, just watching it again. And I was just like, article really, like he even pulled it out, like he brings it with him, you know.

Jon Parshall  16:30

Sorry, no, wow, yeah, it would take a pretty ballsy, uh, British officer to do that. And again, we should. We should contrast that with the real life British colonel, this Tuesday guy. He did not collaborate with the Japanese. In fact, when this movie comes out, there are a lot of British veterans who was just like, What the what? You know, you’re portraying our beloved Colonel to z as a collaborator. And he was not too Z was actively and subtly trying to sabotage this bridge. With every opportunity that he had, they would do things like surreptitiously gather termites and try to put them on the bridge pilings and stuff like that to weaken the structure. Um And toosie was a real Gent. When he finally gets rescued at the end of the war, he weighs, I don’t know, 90 pounds or something like that. They’re like, Okay, we’re gonna evacuate you down to Singapore. He’s like, No, you’re not. We’re going out into the jungle now, and we’re gonna make sure that all of the POW camps are liberated. And I’m not gonna be relieved until I know that all of the men are safe. So, yeah, he was a very upright stand up guy. And you can understand why there would be some tension here between the POWs and, you know, the real life POWs and the portrayal of the British colonel in the movie as being, you know, willing to work with the Japanese. They didn’t like that at all

Dan LeFebvre  18:04

right, around this point in the movie, was something I know you wanted to chat about, when Saito is about to murder Nicholson and his officers for refusing to work. So let me play that Clip real Quick here. Yeah,

Dan LeFebvre  19:00

I obviously want to ask you about that, but even what you had just talked about, you know, with the civilians that died and everything like that. I can already tell that this is, is this your code, right? I mean, yeah, yeah, it’s

Jon Parshall  19:27

our code. This is what we do. This is how we roll. And the notion that, oh yeah, the witnesses in the hospital saw it, yeah, okay, we’ll kill all them too. We don’t care. We have a limitless supply of labor. We will kill you all, and we will get new laborers if you’re going to be uppity. So don’t get me wrong. I mean, it’s a beautiful scene for a movie, but from a realism standpoint, you know, the notion that a guy like Saito would have even batted an eye at gunning these dudes down, in my opinion, is, is laughable.

Dan LeFebvre  19:58

Yeah, yeah. And. It really plays a lot more into you’re talking about, not even with the soldiers there too, but civilian life and they just their code, code. Didn’t care,

Jon Parshall  20:12

right? But, but, of course, the centerpiece of this whole movie is the developing relationship between Nicholson and Psycho and so you can’t very well, you know, do away with that. You know. The bottom line is that a movie is is telling a story, and unfortunately, this story is, as I say, largely made up. I hope you appreciated to the British truck with the British machine gun.

Dan LeFebvre  20:39

I wouldn’t have pointed, I wouldn’t notice that, but yet, that’s

Jon Parshall  20:43

couldn’t even bother getting ourselves, you know, a Nambu machine gun to put in a truck. I mean, anyway, it’s just all kind of funny, as far as I was concerned,

Dan LeFebvre  20:51

even though Saito said that escape was impossible earlier, we do see an escape happen in the movie. It’s the American shears. He manages to escape. Eventually, he’s helped by local villagers, and that’s the first that we see any locals. But it’s not the last, and we’ll get to when shears comes back with the British commandos later. But when they do that, they meet a local man named Yai. He says he’s helping the British because he hates the Japanese for taking all the men in the village. How realistic would it be for local villagers to help against the Japanese, like we see in the movie?

Jon Parshall  21:21

That happened all the time. Actually, what’s happening throughout the course of this war is that the local economies in this neck of the woods are just falling apart because the Japanese are terrible administrators, and they gave no thought to civil administration before they started this war. This war was a very pickup kind of affair on the part of the Japanese. They had to really hurry up and throw together some plans just to get a military operation put together. Who the hell cares about you know, how we’re going to actually administer these countries after we take them over? So what you see in places like Malaya, for instance, Malaya was the world’s largest rubber exporter, and when the Japanese came in at the end of the campaign, they just plundered about 160,000 tons of rubber from the plantations, and they took it all back to Japan. They didn’t have an auto industry that was big enough to actually utilize that amount of rubber in the first place. That was pretty much the last rubber they ever bought from the Malayan economy. And so now you’ve got all of these. You know, used to be rubber farmers who are now like, where am I getting money? And they have to turn to subsistence farming. And this happens again all over Southeast Asia. The same thing happens in Java, the same thing happens in Burma. All of these economies collapse by, like, more than 50% it’s one of the biggest economic collapses in recorded human history. So you can imagine that. You know, first of all, layer this, this economic malaise in all of these countries, against the backdrop of just continued Japanese cruelty, because these indigenous labors are being shanghaied out of theaters and, you know, grabbed off the streets, in some cases, with their families a you’re gonna work on a railroad now and half of you Are gonna die. You know, word gets out of that kind of stuff. And so very quickly, a lot of the indigenous populations, guys are bastards, and, you know, they’re worse than the, you know, the colonial governments that they replaced. And so yes, in a lot of cases, the it was, it was dicey. You never know. I mean, there were plenty of collaborators too, but there were certainly instances where you had native peoples who were just like, Yeah, this is baloney. And I hate these guys. Something

Dan LeFebvre  23:53

else we see kind of around this point in the movie is, I have another clip for this. It’s the British soldiers as they’re working on the bridge. It kind of looks like a lot of looks like a lot of them are just kind of splashing around in the river. Let me go ahead and pull this clip here,

Jon Parshall  24:12

cheering, cheering. You have a piece of the bridge is just falling down right. Here are boys out in the river.

Jon Parshall  24:38

Right see the soldiers scampering around in the back, around there,

Jon Parshall  24:54

splashing around, swimming, diving in it’s.

Jon Parshall  25:07

Splash, yeah, this is ludicrous, okay, instead, put yourself in the mindset of what it would have been like to have worked on a sugar plantation in the deep south in the 1860s Okay, so there’s a quote from one of the books, the the economic travails in this region at this time. He says, let’s see if I got my notes here. Do to do? To do worker management favored pain incentives rather than ordinary rewards, to a degree extreme by the standards of slave labor, extreme to this already. Wow, yeah. So we, and we have another uh, account by a British survivor, who says it is necessary to note that most of this continual beating was not disciplinary, but was used to drive men as beasts to efforts beyond their strength. So these projects were horrific. These guys were sick, they were undernourished, and, yeah, the Japanese whipped them and beat them with, you know, bamboo canes and, you know, prodding them with bayonets and yada yada yada these. It’s, it’s, you couldn’t put this on a movie screen. What actually happened? You know, no one would be able to tolerate it. You’d walk out of the theater in five minutes because it was just grotesque. You really have to, you know, fast forward to a certain amount of emotional remove, until you get a picture like Schindler’s List or something like that, that even even that sort of obliquely refers to what’s going on. It’s the same thing happening on these on these railroad projects. They’re just, they’re horror shows. And so the notion that, yeah, you’ve got these British troops splash around in the river and, you know, splash fights and that kind of stuff, no way. Man, not at all.

Dan LeFebvre  27:11

I can’t. I can’t even wrap my head around how that would would be. It wouldn’t, it wouldn’t be entertainment like a movie, for

Jon Parshall  27:17

sure, exactly, exactly, yeah, yeah, you can’t make entertainment out of what actually happened there, so you can only sort of allude to it. But yeah, that that scene is completely unrealistic in that respect,

Dan LeFebvre  27:32

according to the movie, even though he was stubborn at first, Nicholson does end up cooperating with the Japanese to build a bridge. Actually, it’s, it’s more than just cooperating because we see a conference, and I have a clip for this too. We have a conference between the British prisoners and the Japanese soldiers, where the British talk about how they’re going to build a proper bridge, and it’s essential that they take pride in their job, referring to the British prisoners. So let me pull up that clip here.

28:02

Yes,

Jon Parshall  28:13

such a great actor. Oh,

Jon Parshall  28:25

okay, so pause it here too. There’s so much to unpack here. Obviously, what we’re doing is we’re we’re casting aspersions on Japanese engineering prowess, which is ludicrous. I mean, the Japanese have been building bridges, you know, all over Asia, in the colonies that they have already, you know, been occupying. They’re very competent engineers. They knew exactly what they’re doing. They can certainly do soil studies. And so this is all being filmed, of course, in the basking afterglow of a victorious, you know, World War victory, when the British are very self congratulatory. And I say, you know, but you know, the notion that the British would have any ability to lecture the Japanese on how to build a bridge is laughable. And furthermore, just the notion of having any sort of a conference like this, where a bunch of, you know, sort of smarmy British officers would sit down with the Japanese and lecture them on more than just take them out and shoot them. It would never have happened. But anyway, that’s,

Dan LeFebvre  29:28

I mean, that is, that is a great point of, I mean, the Japanese, even, I keep comparing in my mind, you know, the the different theaters, you know, you have the European theater with with the Germans, and they had to build bridges too. But the Japanese, especially, you’re working on islands and jungles and I mean, but I can’t remember what they said in the movie just before this little clip here, it was like, Oh yeah, I’ve worked on like, five or six bridges. I know how to do this, like the British guys, right,

Jon Parshall  29:55

right. Well, I mean, the British were good engineers too, but, but as you say, I mean the Japanese. Been in places like Formosa, for instance, and had built great big agricultural irrigation projects there and that sort of thing. I mean, they they were very, very competent and knew what they were doing. That said the route that they end up picking for this particular railroad does go through probably some of the most challenging terrain to make it over the hills and into Burma. They picked a really challenging route to do that, but again, they could do that because I have unlimited labor that I don’t care about, so I’ll just do it. And

Dan LeFebvre  30:39

another point too, I’m curious about because the Japanese would have sent the engineers to do that work, whereas the prisoners are kind of, like they just happen to be there, like they’re not. Don’t necessarily have to be, oh, there happened to be an engineer that worked on bridges here. So you’re talking about, you know, the British were good engineers, but it’s not like the British were sending engineers there. Would the Japanese have known who the British engineers were to send them to these particular camps to help at all?

Jon Parshall  31:07

I really, really doubt. Again, if I’m the Japanese, I’m just like, Yeah, I’ve got 60,000 units of meat here. You know, I need 2000 units at this place. And you know, I don’t care what you do. You’re, you’re a defeated English soldier, and you have no honor. And I don’t want to know what you your your job is not to think, for me, your job is to, is to lift that rock over there, shut up and go do that.

Dan LeFebvre  31:33

Even though the movie shows most of the British prisoners going along with Nicholson’s desire to build a proper bridge, there are some who don’t seem to like the idea, and probably the most outspoken of them in the movie is the doctor clipton. There are a lot of times where clipton points out that they’re collaborating with the enemy, but Nicholson says his the men are happier. Morale is improved. In the movie, those conversations usually end up with something along the lines of Nicholas, no, I’m sorry Nicholson saying something like honestly clipped in. There are times when I just don’t understand you at all, and then that’s just the end of it. And I’ve got another clip of that here to Play you.

32:57

So well i

Jon Parshall  33:41

There is so much to unpack In this clip, because there’s a really interesting interweaving of things that are true and things that are imagined on the part of Nicholson, Again, the reason that the military units suffered less cruelly than the civilian laborers is because of the maintenance of military discipline in those units. And so Nicholson is absolutely right that it’s essential to the survival of his men, that they retain this self identity as soldiers, and that we are part of a unit and that we stick together and we help each other. So Nicholson is correct that idle hands are the devil’s workshop in this case, and that just keeping the men busy and doing something and focused on surviving and making it through is super important. That’s all correct. But then you also notice this sort of mirroring, mirroring of his language. He talks about other men not happy. And we had the clip of Saito at the beginning of this movie, saying, be happy in your work. And so you can see the sort of convergence of these two kernels here into this sort of, you know, one meta human being who. Um, the medical officer is absolutely right in saying that this could be construed as collaboration on our part, and we should be trying, by implication, to make sure that this bridge is as crappy as possible, so that it falls apart, so that, you know, the Japanese can’t use it to resupply their forces. That’s legit, too. And the other thing at the very end, when, when Nicholson is talking about, you know, one day the wall will be over. And I want the people who live here to remember who built this bridge, because we the British, want to come back and reclaim all of our lost colonies. That’s sort of an underlying subtext here too that, and the only way that we can do that is by establishing a sort of moral superiority of the British soldier. What Nicholson doesn’t realize, and that the movie won’t acknowledge, even though that was made in 1957 is that by having lost the campaigns in Malaya and Burma as disastrously as the British did, and in the case of the Burma campaign, there were a lot of civilian casualties as well, that the British have permanently ceded any sort of moral superiority in this neck of the woods and the the indigenous populations are never going to allow the British to reassume colonial control for any extend period of time. So that’s all a pipe dream, as far as as that’s concerned. Anyway, I just found this as a really interesting clip, because there is a lot of tension there. Nicholson does have to keep his men on. I want to say under control is, you know, the nature of it, but as a cohesive military unit that is very, very important. It’s just that the way he’s doing that is kind of dubious in terms of collaborating with the enemy.

Dan LeFebvre  36:54

When I watch this movie, I can’t help but compare the, you know, the Japanese prisoner camps, to what we see in a movie like The Great Escape, where it’s a similar concept of the prisoners have to keep themselves busy and their morale up, and they do things like, you know, learning about birds. And, of course, they’re building these tunnels too, but like, like, they’re doing things that are not helping the enemy, but they’re trying to keep their minds, you know, going which makes sense, so I can understand it from that point

Jon Parshall  37:23

of view, absolutely. So anyway, yeah, it’s a really interesting passage there. And just the tension between these two guys and they they both embody, you know, correct tendencies in terms of military officers and clipton. Clipton knows more about the army than Nicholson thinks he does so anyway, honestly,

Dan LeFebvre  37:43

Clifton, I just don’t think I understand you,

Jon Parshall  37:47

though. Yeah, he’s such he was such a great actor, too. Oh my God, just it’s a wonderful performance. Anyway, circling

Dan LeFebvre  37:53

back to the shears, character who escapes in the movie, he ends up back in Ceylon, or modern day Sri Lanka, that’s where shears gets recruited by a team of British commandos called force 316 the commanding officer of force 316 is major warden. And through a discussion with spears, we find out that shears was never a commander. He admits to being a swab jockey on the Houston, which I believe is slaying for a petty officer. Second Class swab jockey

Jon Parshall  38:18

is anybody who pushes a mop that and so, I mean shears very well could have been an enlisted man. Yeah, you know, who knows. But he’s obviously very bright and and, you know, clever and adaptable, and has managed to figure out how to survive in this sort of, you know, Lord of the Flies environment that he finds himself in. I do find it questionable, you know, he says he put on the uniform of an officer hoping they would get him better treatment. I don’t really see that as a ticket to the cushy life under the hands of the Japanese. Again, the Japanese, you’re a meat unit. I don’t care what you are, you know, and you’re so, although that said some of the very senior officers, like, Oh, who am I thinking of the guy who was captured on Corregidor, the senior officer Wainwright there, he he’s not sent to war camps. He’s a general, you know, and so you would have been sequestered, but by and large, being an officer wasn’t going to shield you from anything, but cheers, is interesting, cat. Okay, so, so then the question, you know, how much of that is real, okay, so force 316 there was no force 316 but there was a force 136 and that was the actual commando organization the British established in Sri Lanka and Ceylon, as it was called at the time, to run operations in the occupied zone. And we end up running into this character named Chapman, as part of this commando team. And there was a very famous guy named Freddie Chapman, who. Is incredible. He was a British mountaineer and adventurer who decided he wanted to set up a school to train saboteurs that would these parties of saboteurs would be left behind enemy lines and would do things like blow up railways and ambush troop convoys on roads and, you know, do that kind of stuff. And so Chapman goes into the jungle after Singapore falls. He is left behind with a team of four. And there’s a couple other of these teams scattered around here, and he and his men go on kind of a a two week long rampage where they are blowing up bridges and doing all these things. But in the immediate aftermath of the war, a lot more of the malayans were happy to have the Japanese come in. The full horrors of the Japanese occupation hadn’t really, you know, come to the fore, and so a lot of these teams end up getting betrayed by the malayans, one by one, Chapman’s men either get captured or killed. And finally, Chapman is left alone in Malaya. He ends up hooking up with the Chinese Communist guerrillas who were living up in the hills. And Chapman survives in Malaya for three plus years. He is He gets horribly sick. He gets malaria a couple of times. He gets tick typhus. He nearly dies. He gets captured by the Japanese and escapes a couple of times. So he’s a phenomenal physical specimen, but really also a phenomenal mental specimen too. He writes this famous book right after the war in 1949 called The jungle is neutral. My dad had that book as a teenager. He gave it to me as a teenager, and still on my bookshelf, it’s a marvelous account. So there is this real life dude named Chapman, and the fact that there was no Chapman in the novel, but there is a Chapman in the screenplay, hmm, coincidence, I think not. Of course, the Chapman in the movie ends up, you know, dying almost immediately, but nevertheless, there are a couple of interesting scenes with him. That’s sort of the the formulation of this commando team here. So, yeah, not completely historical, historically realistic, but there are some definite echoes of things that actually did happen in the war real.

Dan LeFebvre  42:22

Since we mentioned force 316, if we go back to the movie, we do see it is four British commandos. But then when they parachute in, Chapman ends up dying. His parachute lands in one of the trees and kills him. But the remaining soldiers hook up with the local guy that talked about earlier, guy to get to River Kwai, where the bridge is, and the movie shows this as this long, treacherous journey through the jungle. I’ve got, I got a clip of that too that I’ll show that it’s made even more dangerous when they’re discovered by a Japanese patrol. They kill those soldiers, but it leaves Warden injured. That comes into play at the end of the movie. Maybe it’s just me, but I found a few things about the trip implausible because they parachute into the island. Ei sees the plane dropping the team, and then he says there’s a Japanese outpost that’s just like, three miles away. But apparently they didn’t notice the plane as it’s coming in later on, Japanese patrol happens upon the group of 4316, they shoot at the patrol, but then the movie makes a point of showing how 1000s of bats or birds and trees take to the skies. But again, no other Japanese outpost or anybody really seems to notice any of this.

Jon Parshall  43:31

And I was also going to say there’s also sort of this humorous scene in the movie when they’re still back in Sri Lanka, where they talk to shears about, you know, we should get cheers here some some parachute training, you know, and and then they come back later, and they’re like, well, they tell us that the odds, you know, you’re likely to get injured if you do more than two of these drops. And so it’s actually more efficacious just to not practice at all. We’ll just put a parachute on you and basically shove you out of the plane. That actually happened to the real life Chapman, okay, so he was going to be parachuted back into Malaya at the very end of the war, and the only way to get him in there was to parachute him, and they asked him about training, and that’s exactly the word that came back. I’ll just, you know, after two of these, you’ll probably be injured, not be able to go, so it’s just better to, you know, to put you, uh, in the plane, and just basically shove you out the door. So, you know, you’re laughing about that, and they laugh about it in the movie as well. But that’s an actual that actually did happen to Freddie Chapman, and he ended up surviving his jump. The Chapman in the movie does not the jungle is weird, though. You’re right in saying, Okay, there’s supposed to be an outpost only three miles away, but yeah, if it’s in the jungle and you’ve got crappy trails, man, that might as well be on the moon. There were. Yeah, here’s, this is a great clip. Go ahead and cue this up. Yeah, I love this clip defines the Triple Canopy jungle, crazy birds, if you’ve ever been in jungle, and this was filmed in Sri Lanka, but they’ve got legit serious jungle there too. The density of the undergrowth is just astonishing. If you go to places like Saipan or Guadalcanal. I mean, my God, you can’t see 10 feet in front of your face, you know, so and actually, let’s continue here, because I think we’re, we’re going to be able to get some clips of them using their their machetes as they’re hacking their way through this. Yeah, here we go. I love how the camera is so close in on them, and it’s so dark, because it is dark down on the jungle floor. You’ve got, you know, all these the canopy above you. It’s often very, very gloomy and very dense. See, I really like this. This particular scene of them popping the way through. The other thing you’ve ever actually picked up a machete. They’re heavy as hell doing 10 or 15 minutes worth of machete work, even for a fit man, will leave you exhausted. We have accounts from the Marines on Guadalcanal and the soldiers on Guadalcanal, you know, hacking their way through the jungle with machetes and whatnot. You had to do it in relays because it was just so exhausting. So you can see why. In some cases, if you don’t have a trail to follow and you’re actually having to do some hacking, you’d be lucky to make a mile a day through this stuff. It is just super, super dense, and it’s really easy to get lost and so forth. So yeah, I really liked this clip,

Dan LeFebvre  46:58

and I like that they also showed, I mean, I showed the monkey there, but it’s showing that it is a clear sky, like it’s blue sky. It’s daytime, but this almost looks like nighttime because it’s so dark in there. And

Jon Parshall  47:08

that’s one of the things that Chapman remarks upon in his book The jungle is neutral, which is still a great read, even today, that, yeah, it’s dark down here, you know? And it’s a really intimidating environment, particularly for a Western soldier who was not used to fighting in this sort of environment. Well, earlier

Dan LeFebvre  47:26

I mentioned the local village in the movie, The villager named ya and he talks about how the Japanese took all his men, and that’s why, in the movie, as we see them going through the jungle, force 316, going through the jungle, we see some women there to help. Speer seems to be a little bit player, not only with the Thai women, but with some of the women back in Ceylon as well. So I’ve got a clip of that too that we can see them.

Jon Parshall  47:59

So all of these women were Thai actresses, and actually, a couple of them ended up being very well known in Thailand after the war of the one of them Villa Lane, who ends up running the mortar up on the top of the hill with warden at the end of the movie, she’s still alive as may 2024 I have a picture of her, you know, sipping a chai. But, yeah, this movie, this movie was very female challenged in that there just weren’t a lot of roles that that they could bring women in. So we saw when shears is is on Ceylon, yeah, we have a couple of scenes, gratuitous scenes with a very fetching nurse there and then here in the jungle, we have, you know, four or five very fetching Thai women as well. In the original book, there is not a single female character. They’re not even, you know, even alluded to. So, you know, I guess the movie is a step forward in that respect. At least we have some women, but obviously they’re, you know, we have this later scene where the women are bathing in the river, and, you know, that’s kind of gratuitous to funny how all five of them are just incredibly beautiful, you know, and that’s who we just happen to have in the village, you know, five babes. But anyway, yeah,

Dan LeFebvre  49:27

talking about the the jungle and chopping through. I do have another clip of combat in the jungle there, and I want to ask about, I

Jon Parshall  49:40

lo and behold, one of them is not dead.

Jon Parshall  49:53

Clearly there would have been a trail or something that this guy is boogieing down. I. Yeah.

Jon Parshall  50:21

Again, can’t see the hand in front of your phrase, practically super dense vegetation. Sound is incredibly important.

Dan LeFebvre  50:42

I so I notice here this is it’s a little bit different from what we just saw before, where the jungle is. I mean, it’s dense, but it’s not as dense. And I kind of got the sense that maybe that was partially for the movie to be able to see a little bit easier, but I think so. How well do you think it does with the jungle combat there? Well, I think it

Jon Parshall  51:34

conveys the tension level of that sort of combat very effectively, which you which you end up reading about when you’re talking about land combat in South Asia and any of these places in the tropics is, yeah, sound is incredibly important, and in many cases it was just incredibly confusing. You didn’t know where your enemy was. In fact, in the culmination of this clip, our man, Joyce here is going to, actually, of course, has to encounter the Japanese soldier. And it happens under relatively unrealistic terms, because the Japanese soldier just stands up right in front of him. He never would have done that. He would have shot him, you know. And you know, there were many, many instances where God, particularly in the combat down in New Guinea, around buna GONA, you’d be advancing along a path with a team of, you, know, a squad of 10 or 1112, guys. You can’t see anything in front of you. And the Japanese would have these bunkers that were beautifully camouflaged. The first indication that you get is as to whether there’s a Japanese fortification out there is when it opens up on you and murders the first you know, couple guys in your column, and now you all go to ground and are trying to peer ahead and you know, is there any telltale smoke that will show you where you know, the Japanese firing slit is, or whatever. And not only that, but the Japanese they had very good flashless powder for their rifles. The Arasaka rifle was a piece of crap in general, and it was too big and unwieldy for jungle combat. But because it had pretty good flashless powder. It made it even more difficult to figure out where the hell you’re being shot at from. So I do like this clip in that it, it gives that sort of claustrophobic sense, which is true to life, but the fact that the Japanese soldier then stands up in front of Joyce at the end of this clip and doesn’t murder him, instead, he would have murdered him. And then, you know, left, left warden to try to figure out, you know, whether he could kill the enemy after that. Anyway, yeah, when

Dan LeFebvre  53:50

the commandos actually do reach their destination, we get the first glance at the Bridge on the River Kwai as it’s finished, and they’re impressed with how nice it is. They say it’s not like the bridges the Japanese usually throw together. Earlier in the movie, they talk about how some of the British, we talked a little bit about that British, have experienced building bridges, and they don’t think that the guy that Japanese assigned to design the bridge actually knows what he’s doing. But then this scene with the Commandos, and they talk about how it’s not like the bridges the enemies usually throw together, it suggests to me that the British were overall better at building bridges. I know we talked about that, but it kind of goes back to the British desire to build a proper bridge, and they seem to do that, at least according to the movie. But do you think that the movie actually does a good job, since it’s the title of the movie, I have to ask we talked a bit about here and there. But is there any truth to the way the movie shows the Bridge on the River Kwai. No,

Jon Parshall  54:41

not really as as I say that the eventual steel and feral concrete bridge that gets put in there, if you look at it today, it’s pretty unimpressive, whereas the bridge pretty unimpressive, but very well engineered and very sturdy, because it’s made. On the concrete, you know, whereas this bridge in the movie is super it’s really interesting looking, because it’s got all these trestles and all that good stuff, you know, it’s so it’s a good looking bridge. But again, I think what you’re seeing here is the sort of rank prejudice on the part of a British American movie having to portray ourselves. Well, we build proper bridges, you know. And the Japanese, we’re simply incapable of that, which is all Balderdash, but, yeah, but they have to make it look that way again in the afterglow of our triumph in World War Two. So

Dan LeFebvre  55:35

I’m assuming that’s, I think you sent me a picture of that bridge, and I’ll make sure to add that the actual bridge, right? Yeah, that looks quite different that. I mean, the bridge is beautiful in the movie, I will give it that. I mean, beautiful wood and

Jon Parshall  55:49

wooden bridge, and it’s not a model. That’s the other thing that’s kind of cool about it. It was, oh, wow, yeah, it’s full size. And they actually drove a real train over it and blew it up, you know. So, so that’s, that’s kind of cool, and actually, it’s even worse than that. They, they when they were about to film the demolition scene. Spoiler alert, the bridge gets blown up. Feel

Dan LeFebvre  56:12

like that’s spoiler trying to spoil that Titanic. Hopefully people know by now. Yeah,

Jon Parshall  56:18

they there was a, there was one of the actors was in the shot as the train is starting to come over, and he couldn’t get out of the shot in time, and so they couldn’t actually detonate the bridge then. So they had to let the train just, which is unmanned, just roll across the bridge, and it ends up, you know, running into a wall, and ends up really beating up the train. So then they, the next day, there were going to be a whole bunch of muckety mucks there from the Sri Lankan government to witness this thing. And so they had to patch the train up real fast overnight, you know, get ready for its demolition The following morning. But, yeah, the reason that the demolition scene is as impressive as it is because it’s a real bridge with a real train.

Dan LeFebvre  57:00

We will talk a little bit about the way the movie ends there, but after the bridge is completed on time, in the movie, we see it was an interesting scene. There’s British soldiers celebrating with performance and kind of a makeshift theater. But meanwhile, there are some cutaways, and I have a clip here of Colonel Saito. He’s writing a note cuts off some of his hair to put it in the note. Saito doesn’t really say anything in this scene, and I can’t read Japanese, so I’m not really sure what his note says. But the way this all kind of plays out in the movie, it seems to imply that Saito is about to commit suicide. For some reason, it seems almost a little bit odd. Well, I

Jon Parshall  57:33

think that no, the implications are clear, that he is going to commit suicide, but what he’s doing here is he’s composing his final letter home, and I find it a very poignant scene, because we’re sort of humanizing Saito here, and that we see him writing, we see a picture, presumably of his wife sitting on that desk there. He’s then cutting off a lock of his hair. This was very common. When the Japanese would write their final letters home, they would either send some of their hair or fingernail clippings. In some cases, you know, something to remember me by. But yeah, all of the the unspoken under underlying context here suggests that Saito is going to kill himself, and I think it’s because, okay, I’ve made my my bridge building date in time, but the only way I was able to do it was by throwing in my lot with these uppity British officers who have essentially taken over this project from me. At this point, they’re in control of this thing. I’m sort of the nominal figurehead, which is incredibly shameful. And so, yeah, I think that he’s, he, he feels he has disgraced himself. And he is, he is going to be taking himself off stage right here at as soon as that bridge is in commission.

Dan LeFebvre  58:58

And I mean, we’ve already talked about how it’s implausible that the British would actually take over a command like we see in the movie. But in a what if scenario, if this had happened, would that be something that a Japanese commanding officer would do is as because being so shamed?

Jon Parshall  59:15

Well, I mean, the Japanese, the Japanese kill themselves all the time. I shouldn’t laugh when I say that one of the sort of enduring, what I want to say, fascinations around the Imperial military for us as Westerners, particularly people like myself who study them, is just how completely different the Japanese think about a lot of different things, and they have a completely different mindset and a completely different moral code that we as Westerners often find utterly baffling. And so to a pragmatic Westerner, you know the fact that I got my bridge build, everybody’s happy, right? Everyone’s. Would be cool. The fact that Saito is is actively considering killing himself is kind of weird. But throughout this conflict, the Japanese, if they felt a sense of shame or failure over military setbacks and so forth, yeah, there was an absurd mortality rate amongst the officer corps, and frankly, among the the enlisted men as well. You know, a lot of viewers probably don’t know this, but anytime we went into an island fight in the Pacific and had to capture an island that the Japanese held, we typically had to kill between 97 and 98% of that Garrison before that piece of real estate was ours. Okay? And a lot of the prisoners that we would end up taking would have been prisoners who were too injured to have killed themselves, or had been knocked unconscious, or what have you. The number of Japanese who willingly surrendered to us was around 1.3% on average. So this is a very different military. They just have a completely different mindset when it comes to actually doing combat. And it was one that made this war just incredibly terrible, because that obdurates, you know, and unwillingness to be captured, didn’t do anybody any good. Didn’t do them any good, because in many cases, they were fighting to the death when there was no recognizable military benefit from having done so, and yet, that’s just how they were trained and how they had been indoctrinated, frankly. So yeah, it’s a very different military culture than we as Westerners are used to

Dan LeFebvre  1:01:47

what you talked about. The actual during the movie, the bridge being blown up. And at the end of the movie, we do see the train coming across the bridge, but just before it arrives, it’s actually Nicholson, who is the one who spots the explosives wired up to the bridge that the British commandos had set up, and then it’s Nicholson who calls attention to the Japanese that the bridge is mined, and even when they come across, when the force 316, members, Joyce, he’s coming across, Nicholson’s trying to stop Joyce from blowing up the bridge. Japanese soldiers are alerted in the ensuing gunfights, all the commandos are killed, except for Warden, because he’s the one that was injured earlier in the movie. So at this point I talked about, you mentioned this earlier, he’s kind of providing distracting fire using a mortar. Well,

Jon Parshall  1:02:30

yes and no, although in the final, the final mortar shell that Warden fires is the one that kills Nicholson. And it’s and it’s deliberate. And you know, because you see the horrified looks on the part of the Thai women, it’s just like you just killed those dudes. And he turns around and says, I had to do it. They might have been captured alive, yada yada yada. And you can see right there, a lot of sharks have gotten jumped in that section of the movie, Nicholson has obviously gone completely over the line. You know, you’re no longer just sort of skirting collaboration. You’re you’re working with the Japanese now to preserve this bridge and are actively collaborating against armed soldiers of your own army who are trying to accomplish a militarily legal and, and, you know, correct sort of thing, they’re trying to blow up an enemy asset here. So that’s weird, you know, Nicholson has gone crazy. And of course, he realizes at the end, you know, what have I done? You know, right? But then you also see Warden jumps the shark too, in that he ends up killing Nicholson, and arguably, also ends up probably putting the coup de gras to shears as well.

Dan LeFebvre  1:03:51

I was going to say I think he was, he was injured there. We don’t really see him dead, but yeah, the mortar seems to take him out there too. Yeah,

Jon Parshall  1:03:57

right, so there’s just a lot of nobody, nobody ends up winding up happy as a result of this. You know all, all of the characters are dead, except for Warden, who has kind of gone insane and is completely destroyed any relationship with with his his Thai porters, who have also lost their village head man as a result of this fight as well. Yeah, I is also killed in this movie. So you can see why, you know, clipton comes in at the end and just says, madness, madness, you know, because that really is the culmination of this movie. And even

Dan LeFebvre  1:04:38

though Warden is alive, he barely even made it there, so that trip back, I mean, I don’t know that he would, especially without the help of the women, if they don’t end up helping him.

Jon Parshall  1:04:49

Yeah, you don’t, and we don’t know that’s all sort of unspoken at the end, whether or not he makes it back or not, but yeah, his odds if he has to go alone, no, he’s. Not going to make it. He is not going to make it. I was

Dan LeFebvre  1:05:02

going to say you sent me a picture of the real bridge. So I’m assuming the way the movie ends is not anything like what historically actually happened at all.

Jon Parshall  1:05:09

Right? So what ends up actually happening is that we use a much more viable military asset than a commando team to blow up this bridge. We use airplanes, because that’s what airplanes do. And so in 1944 there is a campaign that is going through Burma. The British Army eventually counter attacks into Burma at the end of the war, and really puts the hurtin on the Japanese it’s one of the biggest defeats the Japanese army suffers during that war. And obviously one of the things they’re trying to do is shut down the supply line, and so they send army aircraft over, and they bomb the bridge, and they eventually knock the bridge out. So that puts paid to that portion of the railroad. And actually that railroad no longer really exists, because the route that it went through was so rugged and whatnot that, you know, there are segments of the railroad still left but, but by and large, it’s not used today, other than to take tourists up to the bridge and, you know, show them portions of that sort of thing. Um, there’s another sort of little Danu mA here in that one of the very first engine the Japanese used to run over that railroad is preserved today in the ushicon Museum in Tokyo. And when I take tours with with guests from the World War Two Museum, we go to that museum, and it’s the first thing you see when you walk in the door of this museum is this sort of, huh, you know, the railroad engineer, you know. And the English placards don’t really say anything about it. They say, Oh, this engine was manufactured in Japan, and it was used in Thailand for economic development after the war. And it doesn’t mention the fact that, yeah, it basically was the first rent engine that went over this railroad that cost the lives of 102,000 civilians and POWs and whatnot. But that’s the you should con museum for you. It’s got a very hard, right, sort of interpretational slant, and so as far as they’re concerned, you know, it’s a lovely railroad engine. But anyway, yeah, that’s how the historical bridge ends up getting put paid to we bomb it with airplanes. So

Dan LeFebvre  1:07:24

then I’m assuming, since they take people on tours there, I’m assuming, did they rebuild it then for tourist purposes? If it’s not really being used, or is it, I think

Jon Parshall  1:07:33

that segment of it they actually do use. The actual historical bridge is actually by a fairly large town. It’s not actually out in the middle of the jungle, as movie portrays. So. So it is still in use, so far as I know. But as I say, they ended up renaming the river to be to be KY so it would be more in keeping with what, you know, what the tourists want to see typing

Dan LeFebvre  1:07:56

into GPS, you’re not going to find it if it’s not even who

Jon Parshall  1:08:00

wants to go to the river over the big long you know, nobody wants to go there yet.

Dan LeFebvre  1:08:06

Well, thank you so much for taking time away from your new book to come on the show. I’ll make sure to add a link to your book’s website so everybody can sign up to get updates on your new book. The Bridge on the River Kwai, covering that movie. It’s been highly requested here on my podcast, and I’m sure a lot of people want to learn more about the railway of death, Japanese occupation and more, and I know you’re touching on a lot of those subjects in your new book as well. So can you share a peek for what fans of the movie bridge on river Kwai can look forward to when your book is published? Sure. So

Jon Parshall  1:08:35

it is a new history of the year 1942 just basically talking about how the Allies turned around their train wrecks worldwide. So I’m talking about Battle of the Atlantic, the Eastern Front, the Mediterranean, but also a lot about the Pacific. And I’m fascinated by these early campaigns in the Pacific in places like Malaya and Burma. So yes, I do talk about that. And I also do have a segment in one of the chapters that talks about just how badly the Japanese mismanaged this whole, their whole new empire that they conquered. You know, they have this, this phrase that this is going to be the the Asian co prosperity sphere. That’s sort of the propaganda phrase that they use, and really what it ends up being is sort of the Asian co impoverishment sphere, as all of these economies fall apart, and so I do delve into some of that as well.

Dan LeFebvre  1:09:27

Wow, yeah, it sounds like a fast, a lot of stuff to cover there. I can’t wait to check that one out.

Jon Parshall  1:09:34

Yeah, it’ll definitely, it’ll definitely occupy the reader for a while. But yes, it should be, it should be coming out from Oxford University Press in the early part of 2026

Dan LeFebvre  1:09:44

Fantastic. Thanks again. So much for your time, Jon.

Jon Parshall  1:09:53

Thank you, I appreciate it.