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Helen Langridge

Daniel J Carter

Mike Wells

Simon Ratigan

Building Burma's Death Railway: Moving Half the Mountain

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Factual: History

01/04/2014

BBC Four - Building Burma's Death Railway: Moving Half the Mountain

British POWs and their Japanese captors tell the story of one of WWII's worst atrocities.

British POWs and their Japanese captors tell the story of what happened on the 'Death Railway' built to link Thailand to Burma in 1943, one of the worst atrocities of WWII.

The brutal use of British prisoners of war by the Japanese to build a railway linking Thailand to Burma in 1943 was one of the worst atrocities of the Second World War. For the first time in 70 years, British POWs and their Japanese captors, many now in their nineties, open their hearts to tell the story of what really happened on the 'Death Railway'. Alongside the extraordinary experiences and stories of survival told by the British, their Japanese guards tell of different horrors of war, some never disclosed before. 

Exploring how they have survived the terrible memories, this is an often inspiring story that many of these men have waited a long time to tell. What emerges is a warm and emotional journey through the lives of men from different sides reflecting on a terrible event that still haunts them.

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