The real story behind the movie Bridge on the River Kwai
With a badly whistled Colonel Bogey March waning, Al Borthwick flipped through the pages of an emerald green photo album.
“There he is, Uncle Roy — the man who bombed the Bridge on the River Kwai,” he said proudly. “That’s the reconnaissance photo taken after they did it. “I knew him from when I was a little boy. He was an inspiration.”
“But he didn’t talk much about the war,” added Roy’s son, Steve. “He and his friends from then didn’t talk about getting shot up or shot down. They talked about the good times, the camaraderie.”
All the veterans of the First World War are gone. John Babcock was the last Canadian to go, at 109, on Feb. 18, 2010.
Most of those from the so-called Greatest Generation, like Roy, have followed; the number of those remaining in their 80s and 90s dwindles daily.
More than a million Canadians and Newfoundlanders battled Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo — the original Axis of Evil.
This year there were only 50,300 left, average age 92, and 7,700 Korean War vets, average age 85 — 12,700 in B.C., according to Veterans Affairs.
“Fewer and fewer left,” the 73-year-old Al murmured. “None should be forgotten.”
He put together the album to memorialize RCAF Flight Lieutenant Roy McIntosh Borthwick, the former Kerrisdale kid who played rugby for Magee High School, a.k.a. Uncle Roy.
More and more, as their voices are stilled, it’s their families who tend the memory of those who served.
“Dad joined the air force,” Steve explained. “His older brother Jim joined the Navy. Their parents were both orphans born in Scotland who came to Vancouver, so we don’t know the family history on his side. On my mom’s side, her dad was English and fought in the First World War. Her uncle was General Sir Charles Loewen, who grew up in Vancouver ... He went the furthest in the family.”
Commissioned as a second lieutenant at the close of the First World War, General Loewen rose to Aide-de-Camp General to the Queen before retiring in 1959, He died Aug. 17, 1986.
Roy’s career was not quite as glorious, but it was no less storied.
After pilot training, he was posted to Bombay and flew hundreds of sorties — the attack on the Japanese supply line through what is now Myanmar the most famous, though Hollywood didn’t get it right.
The destruction of the bridge in David Lean’s 1957 Academy Award-winning movie was wrong historically, because it was based on a fictional account with some real references to add verisimilitude.
The Burma Railway bridge just north of Kanchanaburi blown up in June 1945, for instance, crossed the Mae Klong (renamed the Khwae Yai) River, not the Kwai.
And it was not dynamite, as in the film’s denouement, that took out the two spans, but Canadian Liberator bombers making a dangerous low-level run through hellfire, one flown by 24-year-old Borthwick — awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross for gallantry.
“Dad was shot down once,” Steve said. “He was lucky. He was able to land on a rice paddy and a British equivalent of a PT boat came racing out and the crew all got onto the boat and away they went.”
“This is the Pegasus bomber,” Al said, pointing at the old blackand-white photographs. “Look at the age of the mechanics.” He turned the page.
“This letter, from a fellow in New Zealand, who was on the river in a PoW camp … thanking my uncle for dropping the bomb and missing him.”
After returning to Vancouver, Roy married and became the marketing manager of the once iconic local grocery chain — the B & K Economy Stores — founded by his dad and partner Oliver Killick.
“He later moved out on his own with a partner,” Steve said. Roy died in 2007 at 87.
His wife, a tomboy who hated her given name June — she called herself Lari (pronounced Larry, perhaps from her love of the lariat), died in January 2014, leaving Steve and brother Jim.
Now retired, Steve worked for City of Coquitlam in the recreation department, Jim was an entrepreneur.
“We remember dad as a guy we lived with, you know?” Steve said.
“He lived in today’s world not the past world. Will we do anything special Nov. 11?”
He paused.
“No!” he exclaimed with a laugh. “We remember him every day not just once a year.”
“They’ve given us what we have today,” Al said.
“They sacrificed a lot. Roy’s best friend was shot down and killed on his first tour into Germany. We have a record in our cottage of their last week together. My uncle’s friend wrote his name on a beam, Mead Sinclair, April 1939. That was their last time together. Wherever we are, we stop at 11 o’clock and spend a few minutes. We always have a toast to my Uncle Roy and Mead Sinclair.”
Lest we forget.