l shall not enter into the statistics or technical data or the final death toll of the various countries involved; these have been extensively quoted in numerous publications, only to state that the railway was 415km long and built from scratch in just 16 months. (A previous assessment, carried out by British Engineers was 5 years.). The total labor force consisted of about 68,000 Allied POWs and 200,000 Asian laborers. The combined death toll was around 96,000, of which 18,000 were Allied POWs. Consider for just a moment how these human beings died, where they died and, above all, why they died."

In the movie 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 12,000 prisoners of war died on the whole project. Although the suffering caused by the building of the Burma Railway and its bridges is true, the incidents in the film are mostly fictional. The real senior Allied officer at the bridge was Lieutenant Colonel Philip Toosey.