Mr Urquhart had tremendous respect for his compatriot, which made a reunion at one of the book events all the more evocative and poignant. Be warned this is not an easy book to read. The pain and suffering of Urquhart and fellow prisoners is gruesome at times. In appalling conditions, virtually all of them experienced tropical ulcers, dysentery, persistent diarrhoea, beriberi as well as broken bones and limbs as a result of the savage beatings from the Japanese (and Korean) guards. They ended up like walking skeletons and it’s hard to fathom how any of them made it through.

Life is worth living and no matter what it throws at you it is important to keep your eyes on the prize of the happiness that will come. Even when the Death Railway reduced us to little more than animals, humanity in the shape of our saintly medical officers triumphed over barbarism. Yet his anger at the fashion in which the poor, beleaguered soldiers in the Far East were, in his view, airbrushed out of history eventually convinced him to open up about everything he had been through in his book. Urquhart. imprisoned in the Kanyu camps, forced to build the Death Railway, herded on the 'hell ship' Kachidoki Maru, and forced to work in mines around Nagasaki, is in a survival league of his own. The Times [London] These slightly older men in their thirties and forties seemed to survive in much greater numbers. Surprisingly it was the young men who died first on the railway. Perhaps the older ones were stronger emotionally. Perhaps with families they had more to live for.”Mr Urquhart’s travails seemed never-ending in the latter stages of the war. There was no respite from misery even after he had departed the detested concentration camps that had claimed the lives of so many of his confreres. I was part of Britain’s greatest-ever military disaster – just like some 120,000 others of us who were captured in the Battle of Malaya. stars. An amazing story of survival. Remarkable too that this book was published in 2010, when Alistair Urquhart was in his 90th year. His memory still vivid and alive enough to recount his experiences, he has left us with an incredible memoir detailing the horrific treatment he received at the hands of the Japanese. From the introduction…… a b c Seeing Pampanito, 64 years after a near death. Carl Nolte, 17 September 2008. San Francisco Chronicle Now I feel no sense of guilt about using the bomb. The Japanese broke all the rules of the Geneva Convention and their no surrender ethic would have resulted in many more POW and civilian deaths for months or 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 Alistair Urquhart’s extraordinary, moving, and inspirational tale of survival against the odds. 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.

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Across the South China Sea in Hong Kong it was anything but a perfect day. After a seventeen-day siege the British surrendered to the Japanese. Hours earlier Japanese troops had entered the city and celebrated Christmas in their own special way – by torturing and massacring sixty wounded patients and doctors in St Stephen’s College Hospital.” of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars The Forgotten Highlander: My Incredible Story of Survival During the War in the Far East by Alistair Urquhart From Changi, Urquhart was sent north to work as a slave labourer on the notorious Burma Road railway where conditions were even worse. His life narrowed down to a round of pain and deprivation. Food was in short supply, beatings were regular, illness afflicted even the strongest and death was ever present. In that hellhole, which included a stint working on the bridge on the river Kwai, where conditions were so unlike the film of the same name as to make comparisons laughable, Urquhart found strength and resolution from his inner self. The writing itself is lucid and engaging and the narrative flows fairly well despite a big gap during 1941 which you miss unless you read carefully. These stylistic points aren't really the point but it does make an easy read.

Bernard Bastable!” Miss Thistle shouted, finally. “I love you too! I want to make you my frog prince! Never in all my years have I seen a man with such magnificent, froglike charisma! You are a treasure! Kiss me now!” 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” It answers a lot of questions our family had, and I'm sure for those of you with personal interests it'll do the same.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.” 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 building of the bridge on the river Kwai took a terrible toll on us and the depiction of our sufferings in the film of the same name was a very, very sanitised version of events.” And yet, as he surveyed his memories – in his 90s – this brave, indomitable fellow was still able to reach the conclusion: “Life is worth living and no matter what it throws at you, it is important to keep your eyes on the prize of the happiness that will come. Germany has atoned. Young Germans know of their nation's dreadful crimes. But young Japanese are taught nothing of their nation's guilt.