Horrors of the Death Railway

9th March 1944: Leo Rawlings, an artist amongst the POWs working on the Burma-Thailand railway, risks his life to record the conditions they endure

POWs working on one of the bridges on the Burma-Thailand ‘Death Railway’.

As the Japanese began their last offensive in northern Burma and into India, further south, the building of the Burma-Thailand railway was nearing completion. More men would die in this last push as they were forced into even greater labours to lay the track. The Japanese urgently wanted the railway to support their invasion army.

While Rawlings was immobile in a ‘convalescent’ camp, he made numerous sketches on scrap paper, which he immediately buried under his bed.

Suffering from a huge open 'jungle sore' that had eaten two inches into his left foot, Leo Rawlings had been transferred into a convalescent camp. Men in this camp were spared the hard labour but very little else of the horrors of the 'Death Railway'. In addition to injuries, everyone was suffering from malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies. These easily treatable conditions caused terrible diseases like Beri-Beri, which often led to death.

Rawlings was fortunate to survive a serious ulcer on his foot, many others did not.

Rawlings¹ was doing his best to record it all. An artist before the war, he risked his life to make what sketches he could of the conditions men lived under:

It was now Spring of 1944. and the Railway was moving ahead with all the speed our masters could get out of us. ‘Speedo’ - the order of yesterday was now the order of tomorrow, only more so.