The Speedo

The Speedo was the intensification of forced labor on the Death Railway: a regime that removed rest days, raised quotas, extended shifts, and drove prisoners from work into sickness and exhaustion. It transformed an already harsh undertaking into a system in which the railway’s demand for progress overruled the men’s need to recover. Dorrigo Evans’s appeal to Major Nakamura after thirty-seven consecutive days of work makes the conflict plain: he argued that rest would preserve the prisoners, while Nakamura treated their deaths as compatible with the railway’s purpose.

Setting and Purpose

The prisoners first encountered the railway plan in Siam in early 1943. A line of surveyors’ pegs, placed by Imperial Japanese Army engineers, marked a proposed route running 415 kilometres from north of Bangkok toward Burma. At that point, the railway remained a plan supported by limited technical preparations and determined orders. The prisoners’ first task was to clear a kilometre of giant teak trees along the route, using blunt axes and rotten hemp rope.

The project arose from Japan’s worsening military position. The Allies were supplying the Chinese Nationalist Army through Burma, while American control of the seas made maritime transport more difficult. Japanese leaders sought a land route to supply their forces in Burma and support their wider ambitions, but Japan lacked the money, machinery, and time to build the railway by ordinary means. The Japanese Empire’s faith in victory and in the Emperor’s will helped sustain the project; the availability of hundreds of thousands of coerced laborers made its construction possible. Of 22,000 Australian prisoners of war, 9,000 were sent to work on the railway.

How the Regime Worked

The Speedo began as the season changed. Leaves spread over the sky, food dwindled, and the monsoon arrived. The regime meant that there were no longer rest days. Work quotas rose repeatedly, shifts grew longer, and prisoners were increasingly ordered to work two shifts, by day and by night. The division between the fit and the sick became less meaningful, replaced by distinctions among the sick, the very sick, and the dying. The schedule did not merely ask for more labor; it reduced the time and strength available to recover from it.

The pressure for output belonged to a larger engineering and command system. Even after a major railway cutting was half-completed, the Railway Command Group ordered it enlarged by a third to address gradient problems in the next section. The change required another 3,000 cubic metres of rock to be cut and removed. Nakamura lacked adequate tools: prisoners broke rock by hand with hammers and chisels, and there was insufficient coke to sharpen the chisels when they became blunt. The railway’s technical requirements thus became additional demands on laborers already working under the Speedo.

Consequences in the Camp

As the regime continued, the prisoners cleared jungle, broke rock, moved earth, and carried sleepers and rails. Their work was organized around the railway, while inadequate food and prolonged shifts wore down their capacity to endure it. Deaths accumulated, and the camp hospital filled with men too ill to work. The Speedo’s effect was therefore not limited to a change in timetable: it helped turn the distinction between labor and survival into a narrowing margin.

When Colonel Rexroth died of dysentery, Dorrigo Evans assumed command. He imposed a levy on officers’ pay to buy food and drugs for the sick, and pressed the officers to work. His responsibilities included maintaining the men’s collective survival in conditions that increasingly made such care difficult. The prisoners called him Colonel to his face and the Big Fella elsewhere. The contrast between the public figure they needed and the man he believed himself to be adds another consequence of the regime: its burdens extended beyond physical labor to the responsibility placed on those trying to lead and protect the prisoners.

Dorrigo’s Appeal to Nakamura

After the Speedo had continued for thirty-seven days without stopping, Dorrigo raised the issue with Major Nakamura. He framed the request in terms Nakamura might accept, arguing that rest would help conserve the men and make the railway easier to build. Dorrigo expected anger or punishment, but Nakamura laughed and replied through Lieutenant Fukuhara that the prisoners were fortunate to redeem their honor by dying for the Emperor. The exchange exposed the distance between Dorrigo’s appeal to the men’s practical value and Nakamura’s willingness to regard their deaths as part of the project’s cost.

Dorrigo’s attempt was an act of advocacy, but the exchange records no agreement to halt the schedule. The episode shows how the Speedo operated not only through quotas and shifts but through a command structure in which a request for recovery could be answered by an appeal to imperial duty. Even the argument that rest would improve production did not dislodge the premise that completion mattered more than the lives of the prisoners.

Scale and Legacy

The Speedo forms part of the wider history of forced labor on the Death Railway, but the railway’s losses cannot be reduced to a single reliable total. Allied prisoners were only a fraction of the labor force: alongside roughly 60,000 Allied prisoners were about a quarter of a million Tamil, Chinese, Javanese, Malayan, Thai, and Burmese laborers, or possibly more. Estimates of deaths among these Asian laborers range from 50,000 to 200,000, and no agreed total exists. One in three of the Australians sent to the railway would die.

The completed railway was opened to traffic in October 1943, but its military purpose disappeared with Japan’s defeat. After the war it was abandoned, dismantled, and pulled up for sale; the surviving route gradually broke down and was reclaimed by vegetation. In the book’s account, the Speedo belongs to an enterprise that demanded bodies and labor for an imperial objective, then left uncertain numbers of dead and an incomplete record of their names. The later display of locomotive C 5631 at Yasukuni Shrine does not name the people who died building the railway. Against that public silence, the narrative’s attention to the labor regime preserves the connection between the railway’s apparent progress and the human cost that made it possible.