‘To the Kwai and Back’: Myth, Memory and Memoirs of the ‘Death Railway’ 1942–1943

Abstract

In 1957 David Lean's film, The Bridge on the River Kwai, premiered to wide popular acclaim. Yet among the British survivors of the Burma-Thailand ‘Death’ Railway which it immortalized, the film caused much distress. Widely perceived by remaining prisoners of war (POWs) as a travesty of ‘real’ experience, The Bridge on the River Kwai induced considerable survivor anxiety about the film's endurance as a dominant cultural representation of their incarceration. This article thus examines a corpus of POW memoirs which directly responded to Lean's depiction, investigating the memoirists’ perception of a distinctive ‘myth’ spawned by the film which itself became embedded in published survivor testimony after 1957.

Keywords:

• memoir
• myth
• cultural circuit
• death railway
• River Kwai

Notes on contributor

Frances Houghton is currently completing a PhD in History at Edinburgh University where she is researching remembrance and representation of combat in post-war published military memoirs of Second World War British servicemen.

Correspondence to: The Gatehouse, Malton Road, Keldholme, York, YO62 6NT, UK. Email: [email protected].