Hellfire Pass - Poppy remembrance day

Kanchanaburi - The Hellfire Pass Interpretive Centre and Memorial Walking Trail was built and is maintained by the Australian Government. Opened 25 April 1998 and refurbished and rededicated on 12 December 2018, it's dedicated to the allied prisoners of war and Asian labourers who suffered and died at Hellfire Pass and elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region during World War II.  

Poppy remembrance day

More than 60,000 Allied prisoners worked on the railway.  In 1946, the Allied War graves registration unit concluded that approximately 12,500 lost their lives, includes some 6300 British, 2800 Australia, 2500 Dutch and tens of thousands of Romusha (paid conscripted labourer).

Entrance to Hellfire pass

Hellfire Pass was 'lost' in the jungle for many years after 1945 and was rediscovered only in the 1980s. After World War II, most of the Burma-Thailand railway was dismantled.   The name 'Hellfire Pass' came from the appalling working conditions at the around this site.

Pathway down to the Hellfire pass

The Thais kept a 130km section of the railway operating in the south, but the rest of the railway, including Hellfire Pass (Konyu Cutting), disappeared beneath agricultural land, jungle and a major reservoir near the border with Myanmar (formerly Burma).  

Relics' of the railway, such as sleepers and rails were collected, and stairs were built down the steep slope from the road.

However, in the 1980s, Australian ex-prisoners started to return to Thailand. Like many veterans, they felt the need, as they grew older, to revisit the sites where they had felt such intense experiences 40 years earlier.

'Although it was not easy to locate, they found Hellfire Pass, full of tangled undergrowth.

Burma - Thailand railway for those that died building this railway