The Bridge on the River Kwai by the other prisoners. Julie Summers, in her book "The Colonel of Tamarkan", writes that Boulle, who had been a prisoner of war in Thailand, created the fictional Nicholson character as an amalgam of his memories of collaborating French officers. He strongly denied the claim that the book was anti-British, although many involved in the film itself (including Alec Guinness) felt otherwise. Ernest Gordon, a survivor of the railway construction and POW camps described in the novel/film, stated in a 1962 book, "Through the Valley of the Kwai": "In Pierre Boulle's book "The Bridge over the River Kwai" and the
The Bridge over the River Kwai Japanese Army to build a bridge for the "Death Railway", so named because of the large number of prisoners and conscripts who died during its construction. The novel won France's "Prix Sainte-Beuve" in 1952. The largely fictitious plot is based on the building in 1942 of one of the railway bridges over the Mae Klong river—renamed Khwae Yai in the 1960s—at a place called Tha Ma Kham, five kilometres from the Thai town of Kanchanaburi. According to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission "The notorious Burma-Siam railway, built by Commonwealth, Dutch and American prisoners of war, was a Japanese project driven