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

Product Information

By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Near by spectacular Dunottar Castle towered above sheer cliffs, jutting out defiantly into the grey waters of the North Sea. My expectations were slightly let down by the book cover that promised to reveal something new and sensational whereas the stories have been told before. Urquhart's account is one of the more compelling, all the more so because he waited for more than 60 years to tell this harrowing, anecdote-rich story. There was no respite from misery even after he had departed the detested concentration camps that had claimed the lives of so many of his confreres.

As for the Gordon Highlanders, the regiment has long since disappeared but its reputation lives on – and not just for its fighting but also its writing. As a 20 year old he’s drafted into the British army and spends almost his entire war in the hands of cruel Japanese and Korean soldiers as he’s forced to build a railroad in the Malaysian jungle along with other UK and Australian soldiers.

Forced into manual labor as a POW, he survived 750 days in the jungle working as a slave on the notorious "Death Railway" and building the Bridge on the River Kwai. Close Icon An icon used to represent where to interact to collapse or dismiss a component Comment An icon of a speech bubble. Certainly over sixteen thousand of us British, Australian, Dutch, American and Canadian prisoners died on the railway – murdered by the ambitions of the Japanese Imperial Army to complete the lifeline to their forces in Burma by December 1943. One of the particularly difficult things to hear was that when he was released, the British Government asked him to sign papers saying that he would not discuss his experiences.

If this were a work of fiction, you'd have a hard time suspending disbelief that the protagonist could survive so much. It was the first time alcohol had passed my lips and it tasted so awful that I could not imagine how anyone could actually enjoy the taste.

He described himself signing a name that would not identify him, only in this case if he were to be like his comrades who signed 'Mickey Mouse' in Selarang, he would surely blow his own cover. Unsentimentally, he depicts the difficulties of the war-traumatized when trying to reintegrate into civilization.