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

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When war broke out in 1939 he was then asked to join up and duly did so. His unit was transferred to Singapore. So far, so mundane. Alistair Urquhart, then a 22-year-old Gordon Highlander from Aberdeen, became a prisoner of war without firing a shot. I knew that people were dying around me on the railway, but I didn’t really want to know. It was all too dispiriting. On the one hand, he asked: “How does one describe the feelings of a person who has been through something like we had, something no one could ever have envisaged?

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” 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.The building of the bridge on the river Kwai took a terrible toll on us and the depiction of our sufferings in the film of the same name was a very, very sanitised version of events.” stars. An amazing story of survival. Remarkable too that this book was published in 2010, when Alistair Urquhart was in his 90th year. His memory still vivid and alive enough to recount his experiences, he has left us with an incredible memoir detailing the horrific treatment he received at the hands of the Japanese. From the introduction…… Young Alistair was enjoying his army enlistment in Singapore until the Japanese army broke through and conquered the "impregnable" colony. This is the extraordinary story of a young men, conscripted at nineteen and whose father was a Somme Veteran, survived not just one, but three close encounters with death – encounters which killed nearly all his comrades. Urquhart was born in Aberdeen in 1919. He was conscripted into the British Army in 1939, at the age of 19, and served with the Gordon Highlanders stationed at Fort Canning in Singapore. [2] [3] He was taken prisoner when the Japanese invaded the island during the Battle of Singapore, which lasted from December 1941 to February 1942. He was sent to work on the Burma Railway, [4] built by the Empire of Japan to support its forces in the Burma campaign and referred to as "Death Railway" because of the tens of thousands of forced labourers who died during its construction. While working on the railway Urquhart suffered malnutrition, cholera and torture at the hands of his captors. [3]

I won't spoil the story except to say that the small amount of anger that he shows towards his so-called superiors both during the war and afterwards seems to entirely understate the extent of his suffering. I can't imagine being so sanguine in his position. Remember, while it always seems darkest before the dawn, perseverance pays off and the good times will return.”

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Mr Urquhart’s travails seemed never-ending in the latter stages of the war. 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.

Whereas many men took solace in each other's company or survived by playing the system, Urquhart retreated into a dream world of music and songs. Before being called up he had enjoyed dancing and popular ballroom tunes populated his imagination. Often he was too weak to sing, but within his head he crooned the hits of earlier years when happiness was a foxtrot and a pretty girl in his arms. 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.”He declared: “Remember, that while it is always darkest before the dawn, perseverance pays off and the good times will return.” the motto of the ancient Urquharts was curiously unwarlike for a Highland clan and its admonition to ‘Speak well, mean well, do well’ could have been written specially for us. My”

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. 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. In the 1957 film Bridge on the River Kwei the men whistle Colonel Bogie and the officers valiantly defy their Japanese guards. 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.

a b c d e f 'You never forget the horror of it'. Gillian Bowditch, 21 February 2010. The Sunday Times (subscription required) Yet even he admitted that a truly accurate portrayal of what befell these unfortunate PoWs would have been too much for anybody to bear, let alone a generation that had been spared the privations of global conflict. I knew people were dying around me on the railway but I didn't really want to know. It was too dispiriting. It was difficult to judge the full toll of casualties and by this stage I had become so self-obsessed, in a true mental battle just to get through each day. I had very few friends at Hellfire Pass and most of us were the same. We all worked so hard that, just trying to survive, each person became more and more insular as it became more difficult. It required a superhuman effort to make it to the end of each day.” 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 . . .

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