In this Globe Trekker Special, Ian Wright, Megan McCormick, Matt Young and Zay Harding travel across the Pacific, visiting key Second World War locations in some of the world’s remotest and most beautiful places. Zay Harding, Bridge Over The River Kwai, Thailand Our journey starts at Pearl Harbour, Hawaii. Megan McCormick attends the Remembrance Day ceremony held each year to honour those who died in the surprise Japanese attack on the United States Pacific fleet on December 7th, 1941. Within 6 months of Pearl Harbour the Japanese conquered a vast empire across the Pacific and Southeast Asia, and decided they needed to build a new railway line from Thailand to supply their troops in Burma on the front line of their expanding empire. Visiting the famous Bridge Over the River Kwai in Kanchanaburi, Thailand, Zay Harding travels along the line which came to be known as the ‘Death Railway’, as a result of the 12,000 Allied Prisoners of War, and more than 80,000 Asian labourers, who were worked to death building the railway for the Japanese. In July 1942 the Japanese attacked Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, from the north, overland along the rugged and mountainous Kokoda Trail. Matt Young treks through remote Papuan jungle in the footsteps of the Australian troops as they retreated from the Japanese advance, and sees many relics of the battle that have survived undisturbed until today. WW2 Wreck Diving, Chuuk, Micronesia By the end of 1943, the tide of the war in the Pacific turned, as a result of the United States increasingly superior air and seapower, putting the Japanese onto the defensive. Zay Harding travels to the spectacular volcano-surrounded harbour of Rabaul, in New Britain, Papua New Guinea, home to a massive wartime Japanese naval base which was heavily bombed towards the end of the war. He dives in the harbour, exploring the wreck of a Japanese Zero Fighter Plane discovered just a few months ago. One thousand miles north o
