For anyone visiting the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery, it is not evident that the graves before them, have been relocated to this site after the end of the war. We discover that, in some cases, burial may not have been as straight forward as we would expect. Sometimes there can be an interesting (if a little macabre) story behind a soldier’s burial and their final resting place. This one such story.

Five kilometres west of Kanchanaburi, is the Chungkai War Cemetery. It is the smallest of the three cemeteries which are the final resting place of those POWs who died while working on the Burma-Thailand Railway. Read the fascinating story of this little known, seldom visited but important part of the Railway story.

Private Harold Martin joined the army in late 1940, he was 23 at the time and left behind a wife and young son. Like so many men of that time, he felt “It was the right thing to do” to fight for his country. In late 1941, he was sent to Singapore as part of the Australian commitment to the British Garrison. On the 15th February 1942, he was amongst the 15,000 Australian soldiers who became prisoners of war (POW’s) of the Japanese in the Fall of Singapore.

By the end of World War 2, over twelve thousand Allied and Dutch POW’s had died while working on the Burma-Thailand Railway with the vast majority of deaths occurring during the construction phase in 1942 and 1943.