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

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

In common with his father, who had fought as a Gordon Highlander during the Battle of the Somme in the First World War, Mr Urquhart never spoke about his wartime privations for decades afterwards. The pain was too deep, the sadness too profound.

The men survived on a few handfuls of rice a day. Many succumbed to disease - cholera, beriberi, tropical ulcers. Their weight fell to five or six stone. Beatings were routine. The words of the famous Declaration of Arbroath echo across the ages: ‘It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom – for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.” The fall of Singapore was the biggest British military disaster in modern times. At the beginning of 1942, Japanese forces cut a swathe through the Malayan peninsula before sweeping into the strategically important port. Unwilling to risk the massacre of civilians, British commanders flew the white flag and defeat was followed by humiliation. Not only had Singapore been considered impregnable, but the Japanese had been written off as racially inferior types who would be easily crushed. Unsentimentally, he depicts the difficulties of the war-traumatized when trying to reintegrate into civilization. No hero's welcome.

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. An important reason that Alistair Urquhart wanted to write his memoir was that he is dismayed and angry with the Japanese government for denying the atrocities that were committed in WWII. I admit to some bias here but my experience of being with my Japanese wife for nearly 20 years, knowing her parents who are both still alive and who were actually in Nagasaki the day the A-bomb was dropped, and of my wife’s Japanese friends and their families, is that there is indeed an awareness of what happened and great sadness and shame associated with that. True it’s not often talked about and also what students learn in school may not tell all of the grizzly details but I believe this is because of the shame brought about by discussing it. In many ways Japan is a shame based culture and most people prefer not to talk about what happened in WWII simply because it is shameful. Don’t let the silence and the sometimes questionable statements and actions from the Japanese government fool you that ordinary people don’t know what happened or that they deny what happened. Having said this though, I do understand the horror Urquhart experienced made him bitter and angry towards the Japanese. Urquhart wrote this book when he was 90 years old. I don’t know if he had a ghost writer but it is an awfully well written narrative for a novice. The book covers his experience in WWII some seventy years earlier as a young Scotsman. He was drafted at the outset of WWII and assigned to defend Singapore, a British territory, against the Japanese. For the first 18 months his assignment was peaceful but on December 8th, the same day as Pearl Harbor, the Japanese bombs began to fall on Singapore. Within a few short months Singapore was overrun and the Allies surrendered en masse. Urquhart then became a POW and was sent to work on the Bridge on the River Kwai. Here he was a victim of the most horrible brutality at the hands of the Japanese. Alistair Urquhart was among the Gordon Highlanders captured by the Japanese in Singapore during World War II. He not only survived 750 days in the jungle working as a slave on the notorious “death railway” and the bridge on the River Kwai, but he was subsequently taken prisoner on one of the Japanese “hellships” which was later torpedoed, killing nearly everyone on board—but not Urquhart.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.

He, with hundreds of others, was marched through the jungle to a prison camp. Many died from dehydration and exhaustion on the long march.

They came to think of themselves as the forgotten army - the men who endured years of suffering in Japanese Prisoner of War Camps during World War II.