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

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Life is worth living and no matter what it throws at you it is important to keep your eyes on the prize of the happiness that will come. Even when the Death Railway reduced us to little more than animals, humanity in the shape of our saintly medical officers triumphed over barbarism. He arrived in Aberdeen in November. For years he'd dreamt of being re-united with his family. When, finally, he was, they scarcely recognised each other.

Yet his anger at the fashion in which the poor, beleaguered soldiers in the Far East were, in his view, airbrushed out of history eventually convinced him to open up about everything he had been through in his book.These slightly older men in their thirties and forties seemed to survive in much greater numbers. Surprisingly it was the young men who died first on the railway. Perhaps the older ones were stronger emotionally. Perhaps with families they had more to live for.”

No wonder his experiences during the Second World War in the Far East would have been dismissed as unbelievable by most Hollywood film-makers. 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” 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 …This is the extraordinary story of a young man, conscripted at nineteen and whose father was a Somme Veteran, who survived not just one, but three close encounters with death – encounters which killed nearly all his comrades.The captured allied soldiers from Britain, Scotland, Australia were put to work in building this railway and the treatment and cruelty that befell upon these soldiers fell nothing short of inhumanity. Yet, six years later, he was a skeletal 82 pounds, he had been beaten repeatedly by his captors, had suffered from cholera, malaria, typhus and beriberi, and witnessed the deaths of so many of his colleagues. 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. 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 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.

Urquhart. imprisoned in the Kanyu camps, forced to build the Death Railway, herded on the 'hell ship' Kachidoki Maru, and forced to work in mines around Nagasaki, is in a survival league of his own. The Times [London]The writing style of this is very simplistic, but the content is more graphic and unfiltered than most of the other memoirs I've read. Urquhart describes all the illnesses and tortures with details that other POWs had left out. Other important details were those that Urquhart mentioned on the British government's end; their complete disrespect and mistreatment of their own soldiers after they returned from the camps. Alistair Urquhart seems like he began life as a fairly ordinary sort of man. His CV at 19 certainly reads that way: brought up in a normal family in Aberdeen with a Mum and Dad, siblings and a first job with a local firm. Pretty sporty, likes dancing with girls. It took me a while to become engaged with this memoir. I've read so many personal POW accounts that it's only when I start spotting the differences that I really get interested. Urquhart's account is probably the loneliest I've read. Where Wade's account in Prisoner of the Japanese was extremely clinical, factual, and emotionally distant, he touched on some of the relationships he had with other prisoners and there was a sense of camaraderie with his fellow prisoners. Urquhart had a few people that he engaged with in certain camps, but mostly he was left alone. Alistair did survive and returned home to the highlands of Scotland, but he would never be the same again, physically or mentally. After all his suffering he decided to dedicate his life to helping others, which he has done while living to a ripe old age. Most people had an acquired kind of beauty, they became better looking the longer you knew them and the better you loved them, but Cole had unfairly skipped to the end of the game, all jaggedly handsome and Hollywood-looking. Not needing any love to get there.”