The Forgotten Highlander: My Incredible Story of Survival During the War in the Far East

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At the destination, he survived 750 days working as a slave laborer on the infamous Burma Railway, aka the Death Railway, a project that caused thousands of POW deaths. For the rest of his life Freddie would phone me every night, no matter what was happening in either of our lives. He also gains a practical insight as to "why" Great Britain (and to the larger extent the USA) sort of wanted to push these attrocities aside and act almost as if they didn't occur.

A dramatic memoir with a lot of information and insight into the situation of the soldiers in the Far East. It is a real, unfiltered account of the sufferings faced during the second world war in the far east. This is free download The Forgotten Highlander: My Incredible Story of Survival During the War in the Far East by Alistair Urquhart complete book soft copy.I have read so much about the cruelty of the German Nazi regime and the communists of other eras but the cruelty of the then government and army of the imperial japan comes second to NOTHING. Alistair Urquhart endured the brutality of a PoW camp, the horror of being held captive on a vessel that was torpedoed by his own side and was shipped to Nagasaki just weeks before an atomic bomb reduced the city to rubble.

In the 1957 film Bridge on the River Kwei the men whistle Colonel Bogie and the officers valiantly defy their Japanese guards. Alistair Urquhart could be anyone's grandfather and has recorded a very moving account of his internment including moments of bravery and cowardice. Do you think it's possible to survive having malaria, dysentery, beri-beri and tropical infected skin ulcers all at the same time while being worked to death during WW2 in a Japanese prison camp building a railroad in Burma? He not only survived 750 days in the jungle working as a slave on the notorious death railway and the bridge on the river Kwai but he was also taken prisoner on one of the Japanese Hell ships which was torpedoed resulting in nearly everyone on board, but Urquhart liked to tell the tale and his book is a remarkable telling of his journey. This complex attitude of the POWs, even if just that of the author, would have added much to the richness of the book.Today, thanks to the work of charities like Combat Stress, we know more about the effects of post-traumatic stress syndrome, but in Urquhart's day veterans were just supposed to get on with their lives. Young Alistair was enjoying his army enlistment in Singapore until the Japanese army broke through and conquered the "impregnable" colony. Peace took him on a long journey home through the US, but happiness was elusive and as the narrative folds in upon itself, Urquhart's final chapters describe the torment he faced on demobilisation.

Private soldiers were treated with the same casual contempt the British settlers reserved for the Malays and Chinese, and provided you were white and well-connected social life still went with a swing. Before reaching Japan however their prisoner ship, the Kachidoki Maru, was torpedoed and sunk by the American fleet. Two months later a nuclear bomb dropped just ten miles away …This is the extraordinary story of a young man, conscripted at nineteen and whose father was a Somme Veteran, who survived not just one, but three close encounters with death – encounters which killed nearly all his comrades.

It would have been easy for Urquhart to slip into self pity while telling his story but he doesn’t, he doesn’t need to, the facts are horrible enough.