The Forgotten Highlander: My Incredible Story of Survival During the War in the Far East

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That was traumatic enough, but Mr Urquhart didn’t just spend two years as a slave labourer while helping to build the Death Railway in Burma and the bridge over the river Kwai, which was later turned into a famous film he regarded as “sanitised”.

I have just finished reading this book. Any words I write will not do justice to this book or his suffering. I read the book with horror, sadness and rage. Forgotten Highlander* chronicles the forced march from Singapore to Thailand and the horrors its Scottish author experienced for 750 days: slave labor, starvation, pestilence, disease, sadistic torture and murder. An early vivid example describes how Japanese soldiers would rush through a hospital bayoneting patients right on the operating table. But even that can't compare for the worst to come. The writing itself is lucid and engaging and the narrative flows fairly well despite a big gap during 1941 which you miss unless you read carefully. These stylistic points aren't really the point but it does make an easy read. During the Cold War those of us who survived became an embarrassment to the British and American governments, which turned a blind eye to Japanese war crimes in their desire to forge alliances against China and Russia.

Alistair Urquhart was a soldier in the Gordon Highlanders captured by the Japanese in Singapore. He not only survived working on the notorious Bridge on the River Kwai , but he was subsequently taken on one of the Japanese ‘hellships’ which was torpedoed. Nearly everyone else on board died and Urquhart spent 5 days alone on a raft in the South China Sea before being rescued by a whaling ship. He was taken to Japan and then forced to work in a mine near Nagasaki. Two months later a nuclear bomb dropped just ten miles away . . .

When he left Scotland, at 20, he had been a fit and healthy man with an athletic gait, weighing in at 135 pounds. massacre at the Alexandra military hospital. Three hundred and twenty-three patients, doctors and nurses were systematically murdered in the shadow of the Red Cross that was meant to protect them. The invaders actually bayoneted some of the patients on the operating table. When I read” He ended up in a camp in mainland Japan. He was there when the war ended. But his prison camp was a few miles from the city of Nagasaki.The strain would have broken anybody. Eventually, it was too much for him and he was allowed to tend to the vegetable gardens of the Japanese army. Trials and tribulations didn’t dispirit him But yes, he was on the outskirts of the city when it was obliterated by the Allied deployment of a second atomic bomb on August 9 1945, just three days after the onset of the nuclear age had caused unprecedented devastation to Hiroshima. This is a remarkable story of survival of a young man from Scotland from the hands of the Japanese during the second world war. enough to make us keep our heads down. It was a long first day and if I had realised then that it was just the first of 750 days I would spend as a slave in the jungle, I would have broken down and cried like a baby. After another” Mr Urquhart had tremendous respect for his compatriot, which made a reunion at one of the book events all the more evocative and poignant.