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Behind-The-Books Blog

The Forgotten Highlander

Thursday, July 7th, 2011

February 1942. Singapore. Weight: 135lbs. Surrender to Japanese. 900 miles standing in overcrowded cattle truck. 100 miles forced march through jungle. Whipped to move faster. Beatings if you fall behind. Hard labour on the ‘Death Railway’. No shoes. No clothes. Two cups of rice a day. Beatings if you work too slow. Beatings if you show ‘disrespect’. Torture. Confinement to ‘black hole’. Tropical heat. Tropical ulcers. Starvation. Dehydration. Exhaustion. Beriberi. Diphtheria. Dysentery. Malaria. Cholera. Watching comrades go insane. Seeing comrades beheaded. 900 miles standing in overcrowded cattle truck. Hard labour on Singapore docks. Two cups of rice a day. Confined with hundreds into hold of hell ship. No water. No food. Cannibalism. Vampirism. Insanity. Torpedoed by American submarine. Five days adrift on raft. Rescued by Japanese ship. Hard labour camp by Nagasaki. August 1945. A-bomb. Japan surrenders. Weight: 82lbs.

If someone submitted this as the proposal for a novel, it would probably be rejected on the basis that the plot was too far-fetched to be believed – how could anyone hope to survive such an ordeal? How could anyone be subjected to such an ordeal? The answer is, of course, that tens of thousands were thus subjected, and many did not survive. In the 1940s in the jungles of South-East Asia, a ‘forgotten army’ of thousands of Allied POWs, mostly British and Australian, slaved on the ‘Death Railway’, in the construction of which it is estimated one man died for every sleeper laid. Thousands more died in unimaginable conditions in labour camps across the Japanese empire. More died in the hell ships and, when these were torpedoed due to not being properly marked as POW transport, thousands perished in the South China Sea.

Somehow, and quite how beggars greater belief with each passing page, young Gordon Highlander Alistair Urquhart survived, and the above summary are the bare and honest details of his three and half years of captivity, as detailed by him in The Forgotten Highlander (Abacus). It has taken Mr Urquhart over sixty years of fighting nightmares and living with the scars of slavery to find the courage to speak out about his treatment at the hands of the Japanese, and the result is one of the most shocking, horrifying accounts of war and inhumanity I have ever read. It is also, however, a remarkably humble and honest account of apparently impossible survival. As a recent bestseller, you may well already have come across The Forgotten Highlander. If not then I urge you to read it, for, as disturbing and upsetting as it might be, it is one of those books – for the extreme depths of barbarity and the heights of determination it depicts – that must be read.

To find out more and hear Alistair Urquhart talk about his experiences – click here.

Georgina Phipps, Editorial Administrator

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