The Bridge on the River Kwai and King Rat: protest and ex-prisoner of war memory in Britain and Australia

Hack, Karl and Blackburn, Kevin (2007). The Bridge on the River Kwai and King Rat: protest and ex-prisoner of war memory in Britain and Australia. In: Hack, Karl and Blackburn, Kevin eds. Forgotten Captives in Japanese Occupied Asia: National Memories and Forgotten Captivities. Routledge Studies in the Modern History of Asia. Abingdon, Oxon., UK and New York, NY, USA: Routledge, pp. 147–171.

URL: http://www.routledge.com/books/details/97804154263...

Abstract

[Opening]. Two important films depicted the prisoner of war (POW) experience under the Japanese in the first two decades after World War II: The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and King Rat (1965). Together they portrayed conditions at the biggest concentrations of Western prisoners in the East: at Changi in Singapore, a holding area for 87,000 POWs who passed through the camp at one time or another, of whom 850 died there; and, on the Burma-Thailand Railway, a string of jungle work camps stetching 265 miles, where a total of 61,806 British, Dutch and Australian POWs laboured alongside many more Asians.

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