Many romusha were utilized all along the Singapore to BanPong rail link as servants to the Japanese. This is in addition to those who labored and died on the Kra Isthmus and Thai-Burma Railway and the Mergui Road project.
By 1945, the tide of the combat in Burma was turning against the IJA. Some of the Allied POWs were moved from the camps at Kanchanaburi to other parts of Thailand. They were most often involved in the construction of airstrips that would be used by fighter planes to cover the planned withdrawal of troops.
Meanwhile the TBR and the original rail line to Singapore were coming under increasing frequent air attacks. The IJA HQ decided that they would need another route — a backdoor exit. It was determined that they would build a road (not a railway) from the town of Mergui across the Kra Isthmus to Prachuap KiriKan in Thailand, a distance of some 200 kilometers. In addition to sending dozens of POWs from Kanchanaburi, the IJA imported perhaps an addition 100,000 romusha, mainly Tamils from Malaya.
Overall, conditions on this project were not too severe. The work only took a few weeks and supplies were carried by rail to Prachuap KiriKan so the effects of the prolonged labor and malnutrition seen on the TBR did not manifest themselves. A major problem, however, was malaria. Most of the POW-TBR survivors who died there died from that infection. Generally speaking, they had spent enough time at the ThaMaKam camps to have recovered from the most debilitating effects of the their TBR time. We can only speculate as to why AFL-TBR survivors were not sent south; we have no indication that they were. Perhaps this was due to the lingering effects of their time on the TBR that an entirely new group of workers were used.
It is thought that once this evacuation route was completed, the AFL survivors were relocated to the second camp near where the Government House is today. This is the site where in 1990, hundreds of skeletons were unearthed from a sugarcane field. [See Section 4].