Customer Reviews

River Kwai Railway

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Reading this book is a chore, as the author has almost no ability to write a compelling account of one of the most ambitious and brutal totalitarian undertakings of modern times. However, most of the raw statistics and data from the Burma-Siam Railroad are so interesting that even he cannot get in the way of this incredible story.

I think part of the problem lies in the fact that Clifford is a military historian and suffers from an all too frequent "laundry list" approach to ennumerating different battalions and minutiae that were relocated, shipped out, etc. The book literally drags for pages at a time while the narrative simply stalls.

Another annoyance is the author's painfuly obvious pro-UK and somewhat veiled anti-American tone; in the first chapter he takes some jabs at the yanks without giving them credit for much of anything in the Asian theater. It's the old argument that the only reason the Americans were able to do anything at all was because of our industrial capacity. That argument is insulting and been proven erroneous many times over -- and besides which, if that were the case than how do you explain Vietnam? But the Brits frequently have this problem and are known the world over for their elitism and pomposity.

This book tells the true account of the building of the 'Death Railway' through Burma and present-day Thailand in which thousands of Allied POW's died at the hands of the Japanese. Told from many perspectives, including the many native laborers who worked and died alongside the British, Dutch, and American prisoners of war. I recommend this book to all students of history.

Although one of my favorite movies of all time is "Bridge on the River Kwai," I knew that much of the details were fiction. That's why I purchased this book, hoping to learn -- as promised -- the real story behind the Burma-Siam railroad.

However, the book's prose is so bland and uninspiring that it manages to make an otherwise interesting story boring. There is little narrative here, the paragraphs are large and clunky and the comma-free punctuation will annoy readers.

That said, if you have a deep interest in and knowledge of the Pacific Theater in World War II, you might find this book more approachable.