The Bridge on the River Kwai (novel)

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The Bridge over the River Kwai (French:Le Pont de la Rivière Kwai) is a novel by Pierre Boulle, published in 1952, that won France's "Prix Ste Beuve." It is a fictional story but it is based upon the real plight of Allied prisoners of war during World War II forced to build the 258-mile Death Railway by Japanese forces.

The story is based on the building in 1943 of one of the railway bridges over the Kwai Yai at a place called Tamarkan five kilometres from the Thai town of Kanchanaburi. This was part of a project to link existing Thai and Burmese railway lines to create a route from Bangkok, Thailand to Rangoon, Burma (now Myanmar) to support the Japanese occupation of Burma. About a hundred thousand conscripted Asian labourers and 16,000 prisoners of war died on the whole project. Boulle had been a prisoner of the Japanese in South East Asia and his story of collaboration was based on his experience of some French officers, but chose instead to implicate British officers in his book.

The novel was made into an equally fictional film by David Lean in 1957: The Bridge on the River Kwai.