What’s this Kwai business all about?   Is there really such a thing as the River Kwai? If so, where is it? Why should it have been particularly important? What’s the particular significance of that bridge? What connection could all this possibly have to the Malay Peninsula?

On the other hand, consider this question: How do you sail around the southern part of Asia? If you first determine that answer, the answers to the other questions start to fall more easily into place.

1295: Marco Polo   How can we start here? Let’s go back to Marco Polo and to his trip to Asia and back in the period 1271-1295 (2009/33). Fortunately, I’ve found a map this time of the Travels of Marco Polo that’s much clearer (and also not in Russian). Remember that, after crossing the Mediterranean and the Middle East, he wanted to go by ship leaving from the Strait of Hormuz (Ormuz on the map), but could find no ship that was seaworthy, so he took his fabled overland route instead to China. But it’s his return route that interests us now, since he finally did manage to go by sea back to (H)Ormuz. Notice how, once leaving China, he hugged the Asian coastline as closely as possible, along what is today Vietnam. He had no reason to go out to the east as far as the large islands of the Philippines or Borneo but headed down to the Strait of Malacca, between the Malay Peninsula and the island of Sumatra (now part of Indonesia). Actually, he camped out on Sumatra for a few months waiting for monsoons to pass before continuing home via India. This route from East Asia (China, but also Japan and Korea) to South Asia (India and beyond), is the shortest route, being closest to the coast. It is also one of the Silk Routes.

2010: Oil Tankers   Let’s move from 1295 to the present. Take a look at a contemporary map of Asia (click to magnify). Follow the route from East Asia to India, noticing first the bulge of Southeast Asia, but then the much more bothersome Malay Peninsula extending so far south, reaching down a remarkable 1100 km (700 mi), approximately, to become the southernmost point on mainland Asia. [For the record, it’s about 300 km (200 mi) wide, but narrows down to 44 km (27 mi) at the Kra Isthmus, which is at about the southernmost point of Burma.] The peninsula then borders on the narrow Strait of Malacca, named after the town of Melaka on its north shore, in Malaysia on the peninsula. The Strait of Malacca is 805 km (500 mi) long, and is one of the most important shipping lanes in the world. It constitutes the main channel between the Pacific and the Indian Ocean and carries ¼ of world’s traded goods in general, and also ¼ of all oil carried by sea. But at the Singapore end it narrows to a width of only 2.8 km (1.7 mi), creating one of the world’s most significant traffic choke points, some others being the Straits of Hormuz and Gibraltar, and the Panama and Suez Canals. In addition, the Strait of Malacca, at a depth of 25 m (82 ft), is not deep enough for the largest ships today, especially oil tankers.

So what are the navigational options here? Let’s leave the Asia map and get a little closer, with this map of the Malay Archipelago region (historically the East Indies). In addition to the Philippines, Malaysia, and some smaller states, the archipelago is primarily Indonesia. But the map also shows the Malay Peninsula, all the way up Burma (now Myanmar) and Thailand. Note particularly for later reference the location of the capitals Rangoon (now Yangon) and Bangkok.

Assuming one does not want to go all the way to the Australian coast (Timor Sea, Strait of Torres) just to go around Asia, what navigational choices does one have? The Philippines, Borneo, or Sulawesi are not the problem. Big as they are, they can easily be sailed around. So it comes down to a chain of Indonesian islands in the southwest that team up insidiously with the Malay Peninsula to form a substantial wall, reaching well toward Australia.

Note the first four of these islands. Two are large, Sumatra and Java, then come a string of small islands with small channels between them, the first being the famous Bali, and the next being Lombok. Where are the gates in this wall if you can’t use the “main gate”, the Strait of Malacca between the peninsula and Sumatra?

Between Sumatra and Java is the Strait of Sunda, which seems a logical choice. However, it is shallow and very difficult to navigate, and it’s not a practical choice at all. But then, of all the channels between the tiny islands, between Bali and Lombok is the Strait of Lombok, which, at a depth of 250 m (820 ft), is not only viable, but is much deeper than the Strait of Malacca. But by now, using this principal alternate choice, we are so far east that we no longer would sail west of Borneo, but through the Sulu Sea in the Philippines and to the east of Borneo, near Sulawesi, to reach the Strait of Lombok. This is how restrictive our navigational choices in this region are, caused by the Malay Peninsula teaming up with this single arc of Indonesian islands.

1942: War   After our jump from 1295 to the present, we go backward again in time, but not quite so far, just to 1942, in the midst of the Second World War. More precisely, this is the War in the Pacific, which in my mind has always de-emphasized the area we’re studying. It seems that the Pacific War has always been about islands and oceans, planes and battleships, from Pearl Harbor to Iwo Jima, the Solomon Islands to Midway. One always seems to hear about the eastern and southern flanks of the Pacific War--Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific comes right to mind--and much less about the western flank, which involved not oceans but the Asian mainland. June 1942 is when the Kwai story started, and as luck would have it, the map I found showing the Japanese Limit of Advance is from that very period.

Disregard the confusing blue lines showing subdivisions of the theater of war, but note the pink line, particularly on the western flank. The line doesn’t seem to indicate the Japanese advance within China, but it does show the Japanese occupation of all of Southeast Asia and Indonesia, including Thailand and the Malay Peninsula (we talked earlier about the Japanese advance down to Singapore, with many Westerners waiting at the Raffles). Of particular interest to our story is the advance you can see that took place that summer into Burma (today Myanmar).

We simply need to put together the geographic information we’ve been discussing with this war information in order to explain the Kwai story. In 1942, the Japanese were still in the midst of expansion; in February of that year they even bombed Darwin, on Australia’s north coast. But they particularly needed to send troops and matériel west, first to continue expansion into Burma, and then to prepare from there the planned invasion of India (which never happened). But they were stymied by, as we have seen, the barrier of the Malay Peninsula lining up with the arc of Indonesian islands. There were of course the Strait of Malacca and Strait of Lombok, and perhaps a few other small passages, but those straits were choke points, vulnerable to patrolling submarines, and air attack. The peninsula and arc of islands formed a de facto impenetrable dual barrier the Japanese could not breach. So how to reach Burma, and even moreso, India?

They couldn’t easily breach the dual barrier by ship to the south, so they decided to breach it by land to the north, by building a rail line between Thailand and Burma, the “Burma Railway”, to the NORTH of the Malay Peninsula, and this now brings us to the story of the River Kwai. But without understanding the barrier, one can easily question the significance of some one-track rail line off in the jungle somewhere. The Burma Railway was essentially meant to be the equivalent, and replacement, of the Strait of Malacca.

The Authentic Kwai Story   Recall the locations of Rangoon and Bangkok to the north of the Malay Peninsula on the earlier map. There was a rail system in Thailand, conveniently connected to Malaysia and Singapore. There was also a rail system in Burma, not connected internationally at all. The plan was to connect both systems at their closest point to form a secure supply route, effectively connecting Rangoon with Bangkok, and even Singapore. Because of the horrible forced-labor history involved in its construction, eventually becoming the basis for war crimes prosecutions, the Burma Railway has become known as the Death Railway. It would not be inaccurate to compare it to conditions in Nazi concentration camps in Europe.

Although totals vary, some 60,000 Allied prisoners of war (British, Australian, US, New Zealand, Dutch, others) and some 180,000 Asian forced laborers (Thai, Burmese, Malaysian, others) were forced to live and work under inhuman conditions in the jungle with huge losses of life due to malnutrition, disease, hard labor, harsh discipline, poor diet, exhaustion, and lack of medical care. Local cemeteries today contain graves of some 90,000 Asians and 16,000 Western Allies, mostly British, Australians, Dutch, and Canadians, some moved from temporary graves alongside the rail bed (the US dead were repatriated).

Here’s a map of the route of the Death Railway (click to enlarge; disregard the misspelling of Bangkok). The route had been historic for other reasons, since from the 14C to 18C it had been the traditional route by which Burmese armies repeatedly invaded and attacked Thailand, eventually destroying its traditional capital Ayutthaya, north of Bangkok. This route was via river valleys and over the Three Pagodas Pass (here labeled in German, but on se débrouille--one manages.) This route had been surveyed in the early 20C, but it was decided to be too difficult to build a railroad through.

You can see on the map where the Burmese railroad already existed, and from where construction started on that side. On the Thai side, the railroad had already existed to Kanchanaburi, a city that had been founded centuries ago as a frontier post to counter the threat of Burmese invasion. It contains today the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery.

Note that Kanchanaburi is on the Mae Klong river. Rail construction started in Kanchanaburi and went upstream four kilometers, where the railway turned right and crossed the Mae Klong on what has now become on of the most famous bridges in the world, the bridge on the River “Kwai”. (Next to this steel and concrete bridge, a temporary wooden bridge was also built that no longer exists.) Note the tributary of the Mae Klong that comes down from Three Pagodas Pass and enters the Mae Klong just south of the bridge. This tributary is called the Khwae Noi, and the railway proceeded up its north bank over the pass. The entire length of the Death Railway was 415 km (258 mi). The workers were driven to complete it in just 16 months, in October 1943, and the railway was put to use in the latter years of the war.

Finally, during three raids, two by the RAF and one by the USAF in the spring of 1945, both the temporary and permanent bridges were bombed and put out of commission. After the war, the wooden bridge was gone, but Japanese reparations were used to repair the two center spans of the permanent “Kwai” Bridge. Not having been there yet, I’m surprised at how small it is, you see the size of the people on it. The rounded spans are all original while the two squared ones are the postwar rebuilt ones.

The bridge is still there, but how about the railway? Given its incredible history, it’s even more incredible that so much of it is gone. The part of the pass was dismantled for “strategic purposes”, says one source. Apparently the British removed 3.9 km of track, the explanation being that it was poorly constructed and not commercially viable. Thailand did rebuild a good stretch beyond the bridge, some 130 km (80 mi), about 1/3 of the length of the original railway, to Nam Tok. Beyond that, the tracks were removed and the roadbed is now a hiking trail. However, there is still talk of rebuilding the railway, though no solid plans.

The Fictional Kwai Story   In the above discussion, the reader will have surely noticed that we’ve purposely been blithely ignoring the 900-pound gorilla sitting in the middle of the living room. (The famous bridge crosses WHAT river? What happened to the Kwai?!!!) We shall continue ignoring this gorilla for a while, since the entire business about the name (Ahem! A language issue) is one of the most interesting factors in the Kwai Story. Therefore, I’ll continue to refer to the history, the novel, and the film for the time being as variations of the Kwai Story.

A Frenchman named Pierre Boulle (1912-1994), writing exclusively in French, was famous for two novels. The second one he wrote in 1963, which he called La Planète des singes. Singe is the French word for monkey, and the novel was translated under the title Planet of the Apes. But about a decade EARLIER, Boulle had already published his Kwai Story, whose exact title we’ll discuss later. It appeared in French in 1952, rather close to the end of the war, and in English in 1954.

A few years later, in 1957, David Lean made the film version of Boulle’s Kwai Story under a slightly different name, which we’ll also discuss later. Like all blockbuster novels (Oz, Bounty, Gone With the Wind, Apes, more), the Kwai novel’s fame, too, was superseded by the film version.

Both the novel and film were pure fiction, yet based on the events of the Death Railway. It has been claimed, however, and I’m sure rightly so, that both the novel and film were totally unrealistic as to the actual horrific camp conditions and the treatment of the prisoners at the time. Both concentrated, rather than on the difficult construction of the railway itself up along the cliffsides of the valley to the west, on the construction--and destruction--of the bridge leading to the valley.

Boulle had served in French Indochina, and was a prisoner in Thailand, although he never visited the Kwai region. Based on a composite of collaborating French officers he’d known in Indochina, he concentrated the drama on the character of Lt Col Nicholson, obsessed with leading his men, a proud perfectionist with a distorted sense of duty. The story concentrates on the bridge, and Nicholson wants to get the bridge properly built, even though doing so is aiding the enemy. The climactic scene is less dramatic in the novel, where the bridge is only damaged in an explosion. In the film there is an attempt to blow up the bridge which looks as though it might fail, and ironically, Nicholson is shot and he himself falls on the plunger that causes the explosion. To add to the drama, the bridge explodes just as a Japanese troop train is crossing it. This is good drama, but not history.

In 1997, the film was selected for preservation in the US Library of Congress National Film registry. It had won seven Oscars, for Best Film, Director (David Lean), Actor (Alec Guinness), Writing (Adaption), Music, Editing, Cinematography. There is an interesting background story about the writing.

The first screenwriter was Carl Foreman, who was replaced by Michael Wilson, but both had to work in secret, since both had been put on the Hollywood blacklist. The author of the novel, Boulle, who had had nothing to do with writing the screenplay, and who couldn’t have, since he didn’t speak English, was given screen credit, and received the Oscar. His Oscar speech is one of the most memorable on record, not only because it was completely in French, but because it was the shortest. He simply walked up to the microphone and said “Merci”. It’s amusing to think of the irony behind that. Even if he’d given a real speech, since he didn’t write the screenplay, what could he have said?

Fortunately, in later years, cooler heads prevailed, and in 1984, both Foreman and Wilson were awarded Oscars as well, but unfortunately, posthumously in both cases. New releases of the film list all three, Foreman, Wilson, and Boulle, as screenwriters.

Life Follows Art   Now let’s get down to the unusual situation about naming things in the Kwai region. What about the names of the rivers? Why were the novel and film named slightly differently? How is the present situation a perfect example of life following art?

First let’s clarify the spelling of the name in question. The transliteration from the Thai alphabet is Kwae (also Khwae). The international spelling is Kwai, but Boulle’s French version uses a dieresis over the I: Kwaï. To simplify matters, let’s just consider Kwae to be the local spelling and Kwai the international spelling, used only locally where international visitors congregate.

As we’ve said, the main river in front of Kanchanaburi over which the bridge in question was built is the Mae Klong, and the tributary across the way, up whose valley the railway goes is the Khwae Noi. Boulle had been a POW in Thailand, but never visited this region, and was not entirely clear on the naming. One could also imagine he never expected the success of his little novel, to say nothing of what the film did to magnify the success of his story. He named his novel Le Pont de la Rivière Kwaï.

I’ve read comments that it was his fault that the naming was off, but I don’t agree. The most accurate translation by far into English of his title would be The River Kwai Bridge, which is in no way misleading. After all, the bridge does lead TO something that has Kwae in its name, so HIS title is not inaccurate.

Inaccurate, however, was the English translation of the novel’s name as The Bridge Over the River Kwai, since the bridge is actually over the River Mae Klong.

Apparently, the filmmakers recognized the problem, and tried to fix it, which is why the title of the film varies from the title of the novel. The film is The Bridge on the River Kwai. Using “on” rather than “over” at least implies just a bit more that the bridge is “near” something with Kwae in its name.

But consider the situation of the contemporary Thai locals. The history alone would attract a number of visitors, the book would attract quite a bit more, and the film makes the Kwai region a must-see for visitors. But what to do about a bridge that doesn’t cross anything named Kwai?

You rename the river, of course.

You might want to refer to the map of the railway to follow what local authorities did. Remember that the Mae Klong comes down from the mountains and goes to the sea, and the Kwae Noi, up whose valley the railway runs, joins it from the west. As it turns out, “kwae” does actually mean “tributary”, which makes quite a bit of sense, and the name Kwae Noi appropriately means “Little Tributary”. So the authorities created the following fiction in 1960. SOUTH of where the tributary enters, down past Kanchanaburi and on to the sea, the Mae Klong retains the name it’s always had. But NORTH of where the tributary enters, up under the bridge and on to the river’s source, the Mae Klong has been renamed the Kwai Yai, which means--that’s right--“Big Tributary”. So now we have the fiction of two tributaries joining to form a new river, and more importantly, the bridge crosses the Kwae Yai and the rail line goes up the Kwae Noi valley, so we have an abundance of the name. Of course, there’s still no river with the one-word name Kwai or Kwae, but that’s being picky, right?

All this name-changing happened because of the novel and film, and if that isn’t an example of Life Follows Art, I don’t know what would be.

The Music   There’s an additional naming matter regarding the film, and it deals with the music. It can be considered a trick question, since it’s a situation where people who know MORE about the subject are more likely to get the answer wrong. So here’s the question: precisely what music in the film won Malcolm Arnold his 1957 Oscar?

Those who are more informed on the subject will say it’s the Colonel Bogey March, and, although that’s a very good answer that does fit in to this discussion, I’m afraid they’ll be wrong.

The Colonel Bogey March, about which we’ll have more to say, is indeed the most famous music in the film and is music the soldiers whistle, completely a cappella, in that famous marching scene. But Malcolm Arnold didn’t write that. What he DID write was the River Kwai March. While the soldiers are whistling, after a while, orchestral music appears from off-screen and blends in with the whistling. It’s played in counterpoint with the Bogey march, and the two together played contrapuntally constitute the Theme from the Bridge on the River Kwai, which is what won the Oscar for Best Score. In addition, while the Bogey march appears just in this whistling scene, the Kwai march is repeated several times during the film, including during the finale. Here, directly from the film, is the famous scene of the Theme from the Bridge on the River Kwai.

[While that’s the authentic rendition from the film, here’s the well-known one recorded by Mitch Miller, which I find more pleasant to listen to. It has a lot more brass, and no visuals to distract from the music: Mitch Miller’s Bogey/Kwai Marches.]

The Colonel Bogey March   Now let’s discuss the music a bit further. We’ll put aside the blended theme, and also the River Kwai March, leaving the most famous element to discuss, the Colonel Bogey March.

The very popular Colonel Bogey March is not as old as one might think. It was written in 1914 by Frederick Ricketts, who was a British lieutenant and military bandmaster in Plymouth. At that time, officers were not encouraged to have outside professional lives, so he published his music under the pseudonym Kenneth Alford, which was made up of his eldest son’s given name and his mother’s maiden name.

The march is based on a couple of golfing “in” jokes, one dealing with its name and the other with its music. As to the name, if par denotes the number of strokes an experienced golfer should need on a given hole, the term bogey has come to mean one stroke over par. Since bogey therefore means coming close but just missing, it takes on a secondary meaning of “annoyance” or “nuisance”. Adding a military title to the word is not literal, but pure irony. Just as you might joke that a fearful person is “Admiral Chicken”, or that someone facing financial ruin was “Captain Bankruptcy”, a golfer striving to make, and not overshoot, par wants to avoid that annoying “Colonel Bogey”.

Yet it goes beyond that. Apparently there was an eccentric golfer on a course in Inverness, Scotland, where Ricketts played, a golfing military man that was actually referred to by the nickname Colonel Bogey, most likely behind his back, since his idiosyncrasies tended to annoy. And this individual leads us to the musical “in” joke related to golfing that’s associated with this march.

While it’s customary to shout “fore” when you think your ball might hit someone ahead of you, this eccentric individual, who really was a Colonel, preferred instead to whistle a certain two-note descending phrase as a warning. And it’s this musical phrase that this “Colonel Bogey” used that Ricketts begins every line of the melody with, making each line stand out just like a headline on a newspaper does. Perhaps the pause after the pair of notes is also meaningful, signifying the pause between the musical replacement of “fore” and the actual golf stroke. Beyond that, with a bit of imagination in the first two lines, the entirety of each line might possibly be considered to imitate a golf swing, culminating on a triple bounce along the fairway:

The march was immediately tremendously popular, and its sheet music became a million-seller; it was also recorded many times.

The “Lyrics”   The catchy melody and the pause after that initial pair of notes in each line made the popular Bogey march irresistible to the formation of humorous, and usually insulting, bawdy verses. The best known by far, was something I’d always assumed was an independent oddity that had nothing whatsoever to do with the march itself, its history, or with the film. As I’ve researched this piece, I see that I was quite mistaken, as many readers might also be, since these virtual “lyrics” fit in very precisely to the Kwai story and the film. We are talking of course, of “Hitler Has Only Got One Ball”.

There are numerous variations of these four lines, and the reader might know it slightly differently. As a matter of fact, the original version had the names in the first two lines reversed, but all later versions start out similar to this, which is the best known and most common variant:

There’s a lot to say about this, not the least how to read it right. We’ve discussed in the past the sound Ö, and described it as a Kiss-E (E as in ca.FE), in other words, E with a pucker. We’ve also said that Ö has an older spelling of OE, which can be used as an alternate spelling. Historic names such as Goethe are never respelled as, say Göte, even though that’s how it’s pronounced. Still, the alternate spelling of your Bösendorfer piano is Boesendorfer. Therefore, the names of the two infamous individuals Göring and Göbbels are alternately spelled Goering and Goebbels, pronounced as accurately as possible. However, that doesn’t always happen, and particularly not in this parody. It becomes clear that Goebbels has to be pronounced here as “Go Balls” in order to rhyme with “no balls”, and similarly with Goering sounding like “Go Ring”.

The next obvious point to raise is whether it’s true “what they said about Hitler”. It’s possible that it’s true, since he was said to have had a groin injury during the Battle of the Somme in 1916. There was an alleged Soviet autopsy of his remains after the war, after which it was stated that pathologists found no evidence of a left testicle, but many consider this to be propaganda and not authoritative, given that the body had been almost completely burned. So the answer remains inconclusive. Göbbels’ six children, however, belie the last line.

As I said, and as I recently discovered to my surprise, these unexpressed “lyrics” were not at all accidental, nor casually used in the film, and they were the reason that the Bogey march, and not some other march, was used. Most audiences of the film, but particularly British ones, would be fully aware that the soldiers were whistling THAT particular march specifically because of THOSE lyrics. The soldiers were musically thumbing their noses against the Japanese in charge of the camp via the subtext of these unspoken, anti-Axis lyrics, making the use of the Bogey march tour de force for more than one reason.

But there’s more to it than that. The Bogey march was actually used by the prisoners in the camp. I found a rather lengthy clip on YouTube that included a British survivor of the Death Railway who chuckled as he recalled the Japanese being pleased by the music while not understanding the culturally-based joke of it all.

The lyrics existed and are preserved in the “oral tradition”, but they didn’t just appear on their own. They are widely attributed to Edward “Toby” O’Brien, a journalist and public relations expert who spearheaded British counter-propaganda efforts in the face of Nazi propaganda. They appeared, therefore, specifically as a propaganda song in about August 1939, just as the war was about to break out, and would have been only three years old in 1942 during the Kwai events.

There is interesting conjecture about the background of the lyrics. One theory is that British intelligence discovered the anatomical truth, and assuming Hitler was sensitive about the subject, O’Brien wrote the lyrics to try to drive Hitler further up the wall than he already was. On the other hand, the relationship between the song and reality could have just been an amusing coincidence--if it was true at all.

A further comment has to be made about how society has changed during the 20C, especially after the Sixties. We are today a much more open society that discusses anatomy, and often sex, with impunity. Yet when the lyrics were written, they were considered rude, even “vulgar”; it was a “dirty ditty”. That sentiment continued through the period when the film was made in 1957, and it was still out of the question to actually use the lyrics in the film, with the expectation that audiences would know, anyway. There’s no doubt in my mind that, if the film were made today, the lyrics would be included, on the basis that the prison guards wouldn’t have understood them anyway. It is also ironic that the most famous version of the Colonel Bogey March is the whistled version, given that it all goes back to an originally whistled pair of notes.

Finally, we should hear the Colonel Bogey March played orchestrally, not whistled, and not blended with anything else. I looked for a British rendition on YouTube, but I found only an audio version. Curiously, I found a German version being performed on the Pariser Platz before the Brandenburg Gate, but it was short and incomplete. I was then pleased to find a Dutch version, appropriate since there were Dutch prisoners involved as well. Here is a marching band version of the Colonel Bogey March.