For every mile of the 415-kilometer railway linking Ban Pong in Thailand to Thanbyuzayat in Burma, nearly 400 people died building it. This episode strips away the Hollywood lore of The Bridge on the River Kwai to examine the historical reality of the Death Railway, built between 1942 and 1943 through the mountainous jungle of the Tenasserim Hills after the Battle of Midway turned Japan's sea supply route to Burma into a shooting gallery for Allied submarines. The Japanese army revived an 1885 British survey that had deemed the route impossible and set a completion deadline of December 1943.

With no heavy machinery, the project cannibalized rail lines in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies and substituted muscle for machines. Over 61,000 Allied prisoners of war were forced to work, but the episode focuses on the more than 180,000 Southeast Asi ...