Episode Detail: Bridge on the River Kwai - Secrets of the Dead
Alec Guinness isn't in this “Bridge on the River Kwai”: it's a documentary about how the Thai “death railway” was built and destroyed (by U.S. “smart bombs”) during World War II. The construction, in dense jungle with few resources, took “first-rate engineering,” says engineer Bashar Altabba. It also took some 250,000 slave laborers, many of them Allied POWs, working under brutal conditions. (In one chilling clip, from the 1980s, a Japanese camp commandant proffers a rationalization.)
