The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [0]
An Incredible WWII Story of Survival in the Pacific
Alistair Urquhart
Copyright © 2010 by Alistair Urquhart
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
9781616081522
Printed in the United States of America
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
One - Will Ye No Come Back Again?
Two - Jealousy
Three - Land of Hope and Glory!
Four - Death March
Five - Hellfire Pass
Six - Bridge on the River Kwai
Seven - It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie
Eight - Sentimental Journey
Nine - Back from the Dead
Acknowledgements
Index
Singapore and the Thai-Malay Peninsula, during the Second World War
Introduction
As one of the last survivors of my battalion of the Gordon Highlanders, the majority of whom were either killed or captured by the Japanese Imperial Army in Singapore, I know that I am a lucky man.
I was lucky to survive capture in Singapore and to come out of the jungle alive after 750 days as a slave on the ‘Death Railway’ and the bridge over the river Kwai. Surviving my ordeal in the hellship Kachidoki Maru and, after we were torpedoed, five days adrift alone in the South China Sea, perhaps stretched my luck. So too my close shave with the atomic bomb, when I was struck by the blast of the A-bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
My story may be remarkable but for over sixty years I have remained silent about my sufferings at the hands of the Japanese. So many of us former prisoners of war did, and all for the same reasons. We did not wish to upset our wives and families, and ourselves, with unsettling tales of unimaginable torments. The memories that made us dread the nightmares which came with sleep were just too horrific. And on our liberation we all signed undertakings to the British government that we would not talk about the war crimes we witnessed or reveal what we saw in the atomic wasteland of Nagasaki.
Now I am breaking my silence to bear witness to the systematic torture and murder of tens of thousands of allied prisoners. After the death of my wife, Mary, I wrote down a personal record of everything that had happened to me as a prisoner. It was a distressing experience and at times writing this book has also been painful.
My business with Japan is unfinished, however, and will remain so until the Japanese government fully accepts its guilt and tells its people what was done in their name.
For as well as being a lucky man I am an angry man. We were a forgotten force in Singapore that vanished overnight into the jungles of Burma and Thailand to become a ghost army of starved slave labourers. 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.
It was our great misfortune as young soldiers to be swept into the maelstrom of the now largely forgotten Asian holocaust planned and perpetrated by Japan’s militarist leaders. We were not just prisoners but slaves in Japan’s vast South-East Asian gulag, forced to become a vital part of the Emperor’s war effort.
Millions of Asians died at the hands of the Japanese from 1931 to 1945. Like the allied prisoners, the British, Americans, Australians, Dutch and Canadians, they were starved and