It was not until the end of the film that I discovered that this was a real life account of the horrors suffered by the allied POW's building the Burma railroad.<br /><br />No film can ever show how terrible it was, despite the attempt to film in sequence with the actors dieting in order to lose weight as time went on. The actors would have had to do three years manual labor in the jungle heat for 18 hours a day on 1,000 (or less) calorie meatless slop, while suffering dysentery, beri beri, pellagra, tropical ulcers, regular beatings and other cruelty, all the time unaware of what was happening at home or how the war was going. They lived under the constant fear of being killed once they were no longer useful. By the time they were liberated the survivors were walking skeletons.<br /><br />It is a credit to the filmmakers that this relatively low budget movie conveys this terrible period so well and the fo. This should be a "must see" in school history classes.