The Bridge over the River Kwai
Author | Pierre Boulle |
---|---|
Original title | Le Pont de la rivière Kwaï |
Country | France |
Language | French |
Genre | War novel |
Publisher | Julliard |
Publication date | 1952 |
Published in English | 1954 (Vanguard Press) |
Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
The Bridge over the River Kwai (
Historical context
The largely fictitious plot is based on the building in 1942 of one of the railway bridges over the Mae Klong river—renamed Khwae Yai in the 1960s—at a place called Tha Ma Kham, 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) from the Thai town of Kanchanaburi.
According to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission[1]
"The notorious
Burma (Myanmar). Two labour forces, one based in Siam and the other in Burma worked from opposite ends of the line towards the centre."
Boulle had been a prisoner of the Japanese in Southeast Asia and his story of collaboration was based on his experience with some French officers. However, he chose instead to use British officers in his book.
Plot summary
The story describes the use of prisoners in the
Lt. Colonel Nicholson marches his men into Prisoner of War Camp 16, commanded by Colonel Saito. Saito announces that the prisoners will be required to work on construction of a bridge over the River Kwai so that the railroad connection between Bangkok and Rangoon can be completed. Saito also demands that all men, including officers, will do manual labor. In response to this, Nicholson informs Saito that, under the
Construction of the bridge serves as a symbol of the preservation of professionalism and personal integrity to one prisoner, Colonel Nicholson, a proud perfectionist. Pitted against Colonel Saito, the warden of the Japanese POW camp, Nicholson will nevertheless, out of a distorted sense of duty, aid his enemy. As the Allies, on the outside, race to destroy the bridge, Nicholson must decide which to sacrifice: his patriotism or his pride.
Historicity
The incidents portrayed in the book are mostly fictional, and though it depicts bad conditions and suffering caused by the building of the Burma Railway and its bridges, the reality was appalling. Historically the conditions were much worse.[2] The real senior Allied officer at the bridge was British Lieutenant Colonel Philip Toosey. On a BBC Timewatch programme, a former prisoner at the camp states that it is unlikely that a man like the fictional Nicholson could have risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel; and if he had, he would have been "quietly eliminated" by the other prisoners. Julie Summers, in her book The Colonel of Tamarkan, writes that Pierre Boulle, who had been a prisoner of war in Thailand, created the fictional Nicholson character as an amalgam of his memories of collaborating French officers.[3] Boulle outlined the psychological reasoning which led him to conceive the character of Nicholson in an interview which forms part of the 1969 BBC2 documentary "Return to the River Kwai" made by former POW John Coast. A transcript of the interview and the documentary as a whole can be found in the new edition of John Coast's book "Railroad of Death".[4]
Unlike the fictional Nicholson, Toosey was not a collaborator with the Japanese. Toosey, in fact, delayed building the bridge by obstruction. Whereas Nicholson disapproves of acts of sabotage and other deliberate attempts to delay progress, Toosey encouraged this:
Film adaptation
The novel was made into the 1957 film
The film was relatively faithful to the novel, with two major exceptions. Shears, who is a British commando officer like Warden in the novel, became an American sailor who escapes from the POW camp. Also, in the novel, the bridge is not destroyed: the train plummets into the river from a secondary charge placed by Warden, but Nicholson (never realising "what have I done?") does not fall onto the plunger, and the bridge suffers only minor damage. Boulle nonetheless enjoyed the film version though he disagreed with its climax. [6]
After the film was released, the Thais faced a problem as thousands of tourists came to see the 'bridge over the River Kwai', but no such bridge existed due to Boulle's aforementioned misassumption. As the film and book meant to 'portray' the bridge over the Mae Klong, the Thai authorities officially renamed the river. The Mae Klong is now called the Kwae Yai ('Big Kwae') for several miles north of the confluence with the Kwae Noi ('Little Kwae'), including the section under the bridge.[citation needed]
Parody
In 1962
See also
- Through the Valley of the Kwai, an autobiographical account by Ernest Gordon
References
- ^ Commonwealth War Graves Commission: Kanchanaburi War Cemetery
- ^ links for research, Allied POWs under the Japanese
- ^ ISBN 0-7432-6350-2.
- ISBN 9781905802937.
- ^
Davies, Peter N. (1991). The Man Behind the Bridge. ISBN 0-485-11402-X.
- ^ 1974ref>Joyaux, Georges. The Bridge over the River Kwai: From the Novel to the Movie, Literature/Film Quarterly, published in the Spring of 1974. Retrieved 09-24-2015.
- ^ "The Goon Show Site - Facts and Trivia".[dead link]