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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.
No wonder his experiences during the Second World War in the Far East would have been dismissed as unbelievable by most Hollywood film-makers. He decided, right from the outset of the venture, that he would not gloss over any aspect of the campaign, not even the incompetence and complacency of some Allied commanders that sparked the fall of Singapore in the first place. Alistair is a Scot from Aberdeen, drafted with the Gordon Highlanders in the Second World War. Following a deployment to Singapore, he is captured, alongside thousands of other men, by the Japanese army. From then on, six years of horrible treatment ensue. Made to work on the Death Railway between Thailand and Burma, he was beaten and tortured more times than one can count. The diseases he suffered from are painful to just hear of, let alone imagine what he's been through. The reason he wrote this book about his experiences is anger. On one hand, the British government made the few survivors sign slips that they hadn't been mistreated by the Japanese army, even though they had endured slave labour for years. They only recognized their ordeal in 2000 and gave them 10.000 pounds compensation. On the other hand, Japan practically erased this episode from its history, much like they did with the Rape of Nanking, and even though they prosecuted some of the war criminals, the entire subject is basically taboo.
The construction of the Death Railway was one of the greatest war crimes of the twentieth century. It was said that one man died for every sleeper laid. Certainly over sixteen thousand of us British, Australian, Dutch, American and Canadian prisoners died on the railway – murdered by the ambitions of the Japanese Imperial Army to complete the lifeline to their forces in Burma by December 1943. Up to a hundred thousand native slaves, Thais, Indians, Malayans and Tamils also died in atrocious circumstances. Even Japanese engineers” Mr Urquhart had tremendous respect for his compatriot, which made a reunion at one of the book events all the more evocative and poignant.
Forgotten Highlander* chronicles the forced march from Singapore to Thailand and the horrors its Scottish author experienced for 750 days: slave labor, starvation, pestilence, disease, sadistic torture and murder. An early vivid example describes how Japanese soldiers would rush through a hospital bayoneting patients right on the operating table. But even that can't compare for the worst to come. More to the point, I know why soldiers, home from war, seldom tell their families about their exploits in more than general terms. We who survive must go on in the names of those who fall, but if we dwell too much on the vivid details of what we've witnessed of man's inhumanity to man, we simply can't go on. perseverance is impossible if we don't permit ourselves to hope.”
Alistair Urquhart seems like he began life as a fairly ordinary sort of man. His CV at 19 certainly reads that way: brought up in a normal family in Aberdeen with a Mum and Dad, siblings and a first job with a local firm. Pretty sporty, likes dancing with girls.
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