On Earth, there is a railway called the Death Railway, also known as the most "terrifying" railway on the planet, this railway is made of 100,000 human lives, and each track has 38 pairs of white bones. This is the Thai-Burma Railway.
The Thai-Burma Railway, which was built by Japan during the Second World War, was a land supply route from Thailand to Burma, in early 1942, the Japanese army invaded Burma and obtained the actual control of the British colony.
But if it was necessary to resupply the troops in western Burma, because it was difficult to pass by land, the Japanese army had to go by sea, bypassing the Malay Peninsula, passing through the Strait of Malacca, and entering the Andaman Sea to reach western Burma.
With the outbreak of the Pacific War in World War II, the sea lanes of the Japanese army in the western Pacific region became more and more dangerous, and American submarines often attacked Japanese ships in the western Pacific region, so the Japanese army decided to build a railway connecting Bangkok, Thailand and Yangon, Myanmar, in order to avoid sea risks and shorten the supply time, and the Thai-Burma Railway came from this.
At that time, Japan had to muster only 10,000 soldiers to build the 415-kilometer-long railway, which had to cross the Santa Pass, a mountain pass in the Tanintharyi Mountains on the border between Myanmar and Thailand, and the valley of the Mekong River, both of which were very difficult to build. As early as 1885, the British surveyed the route of the railway, but the British abandoned it because it was too difficult to build.
So if 10,000 soldiers came to build it, according to the speed, it would take more than ten years, and for this reason, Japan thought of building a railway with prisoners of war and laborers.
The Japanese army recruited more than 60,000 Allied prisoners of war and about 300,000 Southeast Asian laborers that year. The railway line was divided into three sections, which were constructed simultaneously from both sides of Thailand and Myanmar. Prisoners of war and labourers in Singapore were transported to Thailand by train: prisoners of war were generally 30 people crammed into an eight-metre-long freight car, and no one could lie down to sleep during the four-day journey, sometimes even without a meal for 40 hours; The treatment of laborers was even worse, often with seventy or eighty people crammed into a cage-like carriage, and many were already dying, before they reached their destination. Prisoners of war and laborers in places like Java and Malaya traveled by water to Thailand or Burma, where they boarded small cabins called "hell ships", which were filled with partitions, less than a meter high between each floor, and could not even stand up to the waist.
From the day the construction of the Thai-Burma Railway began, the Japanese army forced them to work fifteen or sixteen hours a day, without a day off throughout the year, and they did not have any machine help, and the only tools they could use were shovels, shovels and hammers. The rails and sleepers were carried by prisoners of war and laborers, who worked 20 hours a day, which was beyond the limits of human physical capacity.
Even more impressive is the "Hellfire Passage" hidden deep among the peaks and mountains. Built by Australian and British prisoners of war, the railway, although only 600 metres long, was the most difficult part of the construction of the "Death Railway". The valley through which the railway passed was carved by Allied prisoners of war with drills and hammers, and blasted with gunpowder, and was divided into two depths: 8 meters and 25 meters. In order to meet the deadline, Allied prisoners of war and laborers from various Asian countries were forced to work day and night. When night falls, the prisoners of war use torches and oil lamps to split the rocks, and the dim light of the fire and the figures flicker and intertwine, like the ghosts of hell, which is the origin of the "hellfire".
The Thai-Burma Railway passes through a deserted mountainous area with a hot and miasma climate. The Japanese army forced the prisoners of war and laborers to work day and night with bayonets, and as long as they did not comply, they would be beaten with sticks, and sometimes they even beat and abused the prisoners of war for no reason, and endured inhuman abuse, but they could not supply food and drinking water, in order to fill their stomachs, they even ate the wild grass on the roadside, and when they caught mice, they would eat them alive, and the leftover meat and bones of the Japanese soldiers were all delicacies. As a result, various infectious diseases (e.g. cholera, malaria and dysentery) have emerged on the site. A large number of prisoners of war and labourers died on construction sites and roadsides. A whole construction site was littered with corpses, and it was unbearable to see.
The heat, monsoons, torrential rains, mosquito infests, and the spread of disease, combined with intense labor and ruthless corporal punishment, devoured almost all the prisoner of war laborers who built the railway, according to statistics, the mortality rate in the German prisoner of war prison was 1%, the death rate in the Japanese prisoner of war prison was 40%, and the death rate in the Japanese prison on the Thai-Burma Railway was as high as 90%
Some 16,000 Allied prisoners of war and 90,000 Southeast Asian laborers gave their lives to build the railroad. It can be said that there are 38 pairs of white bones under each railroad, from which the name of the Death Railway comes from, because there are too many dead, the Japanese army directly accumulates a truckload of dead/sick people, drags them to the cliff and ravine next to the construction site, and falls into it.
After the completion of the project, most of the prisoners of war were transferred to the Japanese mainland, and these survivors were not only poorly lived, but also subjected to Allied air raids from time to time.
This "Death Railway", along with the Nanjing Massacre and the Bataan Death March, are known as the three major atrocities committed by the Japanese army in the Far East during World War II. After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, the Allies exhumed a large number of corpses on both sides of the railway.
Today's Thai-Burma Railway, the walking path opened up along the "Death Railway", silently tells the world about that tragic memory that cannot be looked back. Of course, this history, which was remembered by everyone, has been erased from the history of Japan.
We must not forget history, remember not to promote hatred, only by remembering history can we not forget the way we came, can we understand that everything is not easy to come by, and remembering history is also to inspire us, do not move forward, and continue to work hard for the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, only when the Chinese nation stands on the top of the East, we will not experience such a tragedy.