A haphazard chronicle of my inevitable misadventures during a year in Vietnam and points east.

p.s. I'll be pitifully grateful if you send me email during my exile: TravelerKaty@hotmail.com

October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 February 2006 March 2006 May 2006

 
More Kanchanaburi, Thailand

One of the more interesting and disturbing things to do in Kanchanaburi is visit war museums. It's a small town, but there's no shortage of these -- I went to two of the four. Both featured the same basic informatin and identical photos, paintings, drawings and clippings, but the Kanchanaburi WWI Museum made and extra-special effort with life-sized diorama displays of starving and injured men, POW's under torture, and the aftermath of the prisoners getting bombed off the bridge by Allied planes. Nice.

Apart from these grisly displays, the most interesting offering was the parade of WWII notables -- statues of the 10 men deemed most critical to the war, along with some decidedly offbeat descriptions of each painted on the wall behind them. Sadly, FDR did not make the cut, though Harry Truman did, described as "a nice, simple, modest man who was full of wisdom and ideas." Perhaps understandably, given their lack of direct interest in the European theater, Roosevelt's spot was ably held by Albert Einstein, who received sole credit for the invention of the atomic bomb. The Thais apparently have no revisionist qualms about the morality of bombing Japan -- according to the version at the Kanchanaburi WWII Museum, "The first atomic bomb weighing only 1400kg was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan on August 7, 1945. Almost the entire city was destroyed in a jiffy." McArthur also came in for high praise, though his brief bio spent more space discussing the fact that he married a woman 40 years his junior than on any war-related exploits.

All in all, it was a much more entertaining museum than I expected, though I must admit a bit of alarm to have read that "up to now no one knows if Hitler is really dead". Do you?

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren


posted by Katy at 8:19 PM