The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [97]
I was disturbed by the sight of the devastation but felt no sympathy for the Japanese. Serves them bloody well right, I thought. How else was it going to end?
After forty-five minutes or so we arrived at Nagasaki harbour. While the quayside still showed the effects of the bomb, with blackened patches and blasted buildings, it had been somewhat patched up. A gigantic US Navy aircraft carrier, the USS Cape Gloucester, stretched the entire length of the docks, blocking out the sun. I had never seen anything like it. In its vast shadow the Americans had engineered some makeshift open-roofed showers with partitions. I was given a bar of pink soap and ushered to a space. I undressed and stood straight under the jets of bracing water. Despite the chill it was the finest shower I had ever had and my first proper wash in three and a half years.
I scrubbed frantically, working up the thickest lather possible, rubbing it into all my forgotten nooks and crannies. I had been filthy for so long and the grime was so engrained that very little dirt actually came off. But on the inside it had extremely therapeutic powers. Ignoring the soldiers telling me to hurry up I savoured every moment, just letting the water bounce off my head and neck.
After half an hour they practically dragged me from the showers to be fumigated and de-loused before being placed on the scales. When I left Aberdeen I had weighed a healthy 135lbs but here in Nagasaki on the steel-yard scales – very accurate contraptions similar to those I had used at the plumbers’ merchants – I was reduced to a skeletal 82lbs.
New arrivals, men from the vast industrial gulag the Japanese had created in Fukuoka, flooded the quayside and lengthened the queues for showers. Sadly at this final hurdle some men did not make it and died on that quay. This distressed the Americans immensely and they were shocked by the matter-of-fact way that the other prisoners accepted the deaths of their mates. We had seen so much, too much.
As I stepped into my tan boiler suit issued by the Americans, I was pleased to have arrived early. A marine band from the Cape Gloucester started playing ‘Anchors Aweigh’ on the quayside.
Men went bananas, bursting into song and dance, waving their arms in the air to ‘The Two O’Clock Jump’. With sailors giving me a helping hand my spindly legs struggled up the rickety gangplank to the hangar deck, where row upon row of camp beds had been arranged. There must have been hundreds of them and I took the first space available and sat down. Streams of men poured in, some nervous and wary, others delirious with happiness, while some were just plain delirious. The chap beside me, Denis Southgate, was from Cornwall and a survivor from HMS Prince of Wales, which had been sunk by Japanese bombers off the coast of Malaya at the outbreak of the war. We got chatting. He had also been at Fukuoka Camp 25 but we had never met.
All of our spirits lifted later that first balmy night when music was played over the tannoy system. The first tune, a new one to me, was ‘Sentimental Journey’ by Glenn Miller. It remains to this day my favourite song. We were allowed up on the main deck in batches. It was a terrific evening, no clouds in the sky, as another Glenn Miller song, ‘Moonlight Serenade’, blared out scratchily from the speakers.
As we sailed out of Nagasaki I looked back at the devastation the militarist rulers of Japan had brought on their country. Surveying that atomic wasteland to the big-band sounds of Glenn Miller was the defining moment of my life.
Nine
Back from the Dead
That night on board the USS Cape Gloucester I slept peacefully for the first time in years. It was the only time since our capture three and a half years earlier that I had gone to bed without the terrible sleep-depriving companion of fear.
The next morning I went to the galley for breakfast. When