SIAM-BURMA RAILWAY MEMORIAL
Staffordshire’s National Memorial Arboretum is home to original structures directly linked to one of modern history’s most barbaric abuses.
Irecently walked along a stretch of the Siam-Burma R ailway and each step took me over two wooden sleepers – there were 25 in all.
The spring sun was pleasant, I wasn't dripping with sweat or having to constantly drink from a canteen as the POWs who had built the railway nearly 80 years before had to. I wasn't wearing a bush hat or shorts, but why would I have to? I wasn’t in Siam – now Thailand – or Burma. I was just outside Alrewas, off the A38 between Lichfield and Burton Upon Trent. That’s the location of the National Memorial Arboretum, which opened in 2001, with a new Remembrance Centre added in 2016.
I first learned about the Siam-Burma Railway from Nevil Shute’s novel A Town Like Alice, which was required reading at school. While some of my friends found it a boring love story, I devoured every word, and while it is a work of fiction, its facts about the war in the Far East held true.
The 25 sleepers I walked alongside hold significance. A grim statistic is that a life was lost for each sleeper laid. If that is not sobering en…
