The Forgotten Highlander: An Incredible WWII Story of Survival in the Pacific

by Alistair Urquhart

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. Remember, while it always seems darkest before the dawn, perseverance pays off and the good times will return.

‘Invaders are always organised,’

Even Japanese engineers estimated that the railway would take five years to complete. The Japanese Imperial Army would prove them wrong, however. It had a secret weapon: slave labour. In just sixteen months a railway linking Bangkok with the Burmese rice bowl and its vital oil fields would be completed at a terrible human cost. The single-track narrow-gauge line, just over a metre wide, allowed rice and raw materials to be looted from Burma and Japanese reinforcements to be sent from Thailand for the planned invasion of India.

How does one describe the feelings of a person who has been through something like we had, something no one could ever have envisaged? They could never comprehend the depths of man’s inhumanity to man or the awfulness of an existence that consisted of surviving one day at a time.