1) The Burma-Siam Railway
During the second world war the Japanese were particularly harsh to their captives, having no qualms about working them to death and executing anyone who stepped out of line.
The Burma-Siam railway was built by Japan to support its soldiers during the Burma Campaign in 1943, and at that time Japan was holding tens of thousands of Allied prisoners. Just over 60,000 Allied prisoners and around 250,000 labourers were forced to spend all day digging and moving heavy objects, and on nothing more than a single small bowl of plain rice per day.
This led to the deaths of 12,000 of the Allied prisoners of war, and almost 100,000 of the forced labourers making it one of the deadliest construction jobs of all time.
2) The great wall of China
In the year of 221 BC the Emperor Qin Shi Huang ordered the construction of the Great wall of China. The wall was built with the idea of keeping the raiding Mongol factions out of China by building a wall long enough to span the entire country, the only problem was that China is enormous and there weren’t enough people to complete such a project.
Everyone in the country was a possible worker, and the wall had everyone from the Emperors owns soldiers to forced local peasants building it. Eventually the wall was finished at a cost of almost 400,000 lives, many of which were buried within the wall itself.
3) The great Pyramid of Giza
This one is mostly a guess, as no one has any idea exactly how they were built. One thing is well known about ancient Egypt and that’s how much they liked to use slaves. On the assumption that the pyramid was built using methods possible to humans, its safe to say that the death toll will most likely be in the thousands.
4) The Panama Canal
This project was started in 1880 by the French who intended to build a route to cut out the huge distance it takes to travel by ship round the coast of South America. This first attempt lasted for ten years until it was forced to end due to money problems, and the 22,000 deaths caused by it so far were starting to be difficult to explain.
The project was started again in 1904 by the US and saw it completed in 1914, but at a cost of around 6,000 lives under the management of the Americans. The reason so many people died during construction was mostly down to disease, as there was no such thing as anti-biotics at that time and health care consisted of being put in a tent with a load of other sick people in tropical heat.
5)The White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal
In 1931 a project was started to connect the White sea with the Baltic sea, and what better way to do this than to force prisoners to dig until they died. Over the space of 2 years hundreds of thousands of people were forced to work in freezing condition with next to no food.
Most of the deaths occurred from starvation, disease and getting shot by an angry Russian prison guard. There were no official records of the numbers used to build the canal, as countries generally don’t keep records of how many people they worked to death as it makes them look bad, but a generally agreed on estimate puts the number around 100,000 people.
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