The Forgotten Highlander: An Incredible WWII Story of Survival in the Pacific
Alistair Urquhart
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 1616084073
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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. He spent five days adrift on a raft in the South China Sea before being rescued by a Japanese whaling ship. He was then taken to Japan and forced to work in a mine near Nagasaki. Two months later he was struck by the blast from the atomic bomb—dropped just ten miles away. In late August 1945, now a barely-living skeleton, he was freed by the American Navy and was able to bathe for the first time in three and a half years.
This is the extraordinary story of a young man, conscripted at nineteen, who survived not just one but three separate encounters with death—encounters which killed nearly all his comrades. Silent for over fifty years, this is Urquhart’s extraordinary, moving, and inspirational tale as an ex-POW.
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India, where both boys were born. On leaving the Army he moved the family to Singapore where he took over warden duties at Changi jail, the purpose-built prison constructed by the British. He stayed on at his post in Singapore and was subsequently captured by the Japanese. The boys’ mother and sisters successfully escaped from the besieged island on one of the last ships out and returned to the family’s original home in Brentwood, Essex. Like Jim young John never said a word either. He was an
distinguished themselves with heroic but increasingly ineffective resistance. The Japanese were ‘distinguishing’ themselves too, and there were alarming reports of barbaric massacres of civilians and allied prisoners. In Penang the occupying Japanese promptly massacred seven hundred local Chinese, beheading and bayoneting them. The fighting was getting closer to Singapore all the time. So were the atrocities. On 22 January 1942, after fierce fighting at the village of Parit Sulong in Johore,
to the hut and collapsed, my whole body aching with pain. Hands, feet, back, arms, legs were all so sore, especially my back and legs. Eventually out of sheer exhaustion I fell asleep. But when I woke it didn’t feel like I had slept at all. I was incredibly lethargic and the pain had increased overnight. I was expecting a long sleep to rejuvenate me, to help me through the next day, which I had envisaged as bringing just the same amount of torture, if not worse. But I felt horrific and that is
loving son, Alistair XXX. Denis Southgate, who preferred to be called ‘Tiny’, even though he was larger than me, asked what I was writing. I told him but he just shrugged. ‘You should write home too,’ I said. ‘Your parents would be thrilled to hear from you.’ ‘I don’t think so,’ the twenty-two-year-old marine replied, sounding defeated. ‘Nonsense man. Here.’ I shoved a pen and paper in his lap. I sat beside him on the camp bed. ‘I’ll help you.’ Maybe camp life had broken him or maybe he
fight Napoleon’s armies during the French Revolutionary Wars. The first recruitment campaign was assisted by the Duchess of Gordon, who was said to have offered a kiss as an incentive to join her husband’s regiment. Winston Churchill described the Gordons, who helped expand the British Empire with service on the frontiers of India, Afghanistan, Egypt, Sudan and South Africa, as ‘the finest regiment that ever was’. The Gordons were famous in and around Aberdeen and were always at the forefront of
