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Among the many laborious tasks forced upon Prisoners of War in Thailand and Burma was bridge building and in the case of the more substantial bridges was the task of building the piers to support the trusses and railway lines. A well documented account relates to the construction of the major bridge across the Kwai Yai at Tamarkan late in 1942. It is stressed that this bridge was constructed using British POWs. The bridge is the existing, now famous, Bridge on the River Kwai. The Japanese engineers gave their highest priority to the construction of a temporary upsteam wooden bridge to allow work to proceed on the far bank of the river. This temporary bridge was virtually finished when much of it was swept away by especially severe floods. It was quickly rebuilt and was used by light trains until the main bridge was finished. The main bridge was referred to as the “Mekuron permanent bridge” (in Western accounts called the steel bridge). When locating material for the bridge, the Japanese searched throughout the occupied territories and located a number of steel spans in railway stores in Java. The eleven 20 metre trusses or spans were to be placed on concrete abutments supported on concrete piers to provide an effective length of 238 metre, enough to cross the Kwai. The bridge building techniques were well known and used universally but little modern machinery was available and on the River Kwae Yai human muscle was used as a substitute. Professor Peter N. Davies in his book “The Man Behind The Bridge – Colonel Toosey and The River Kwai”, described the variation of the standard “well sinking” technique. “The building of a pier commenced with the erection of a temporary coffer dam which was filled with earth. A concrete ring, prefabricated at the side of the river from local gravel and sand, was then placed within the dam and as the earth was removed from the centre its weight would help it to sink. The provision of sharp bottom edges and of additional weights would further help the ring to settle and when it reached an appropriate level a second ring would be slotted on to its upper surface. The gradual accumulation of weight as successive rings were fitted would then slowly force the whole structure down to the lower strata but an essential element in this process was the removal of first the earth, and then the over-burden from within the pier. The normal procedure would have been to use some form of mechanical device to cut into the river bed and then raise the debris to some point outside the pier. The absence of virtually every type of modern machinery meant that even this task had to be undertaken by hand – a particularly difficult and dangerous occupation. Private Robert Hislop of the 2/80 Anti-Tank Regiment recalls: About four of us used to do this work. We used to wear a very old-fashioned diving helmet which was fitted with an air pipe which in turn was fitted to an old-time air pump. We used to have to get inside these concrete pillars and go down to the bed of the river and keep removing the river bed from under the concrete so that the pillars would sink. This was quite unpleasant as it was quite dark and we had to keep our bodies upright because if you bent over water was liable to get inside the helmet. I cannot remember how long we used to be under water before we came up for a spell, but it certainly seemed a long hell of a long time. Private Hislop received extra rations while engaged on this special work but he thought that the real reward was that he was out of sight of the Japanese for brief periods. An immense amount of labour was used on the construction of the bridge and it was completed and became fully operational in May 1943.
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