life character of Lieutenant Colonel Philip Toosey. One  of a number of Allied POWs, Toosey was in charge of his men from  late 1942 through May 1943 when they were ordered to build two Kwai  River bridges in Burma (one of steel, one of wood), to help move  Japanese supplies and troops from Bangkok to Rangoon. In reality,  the actual bridge took 8 months to build (rather than two months),  and they were actually used for two years, and were only destroyed  two years after their construction 