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

by Alistair Urquhart

I knew people were dying around me on the railway but I didn’t really want to know. It was too dispiriting. It was difficult to judge the full toll of casualties and by this stage I had become so self-obsessed, in a true mental battle just to get through each day. I had very few friends at Hellfire Pass and most of us were the same. We all worked so hard that, just trying to survive, each person became more and more insular as it became more difficult. It required a superhuman effort to make it to the end of each day. Strangely the less we talked to each other, the more we talked to ourselves. Nearly all of the prisoners talked to themselves and I was no exception. Every morning I would tell myself over and over, ‘Survive this day. Survive this day. Survive this day.’

Occasionally, often with bizarre timing, I would have flashbacks to funny incidents from my childhood. Several men reported the same thing. Suddenly, quite out of the blue, we would be transported back in time, an astonishing and vivid experience. It must have been the mind’s way of coping with the extreme stress.

By this time mental health had become a major issue on the railway. We all suffered from depression. Men were taking their own lives. All along the railway men cut their own throats, put their heads on the railway line and simply walked into the jungle to die.

The decision was made to build our own lunatic asylum to cage these poor souls.

As if all this was not bad enough I started to suffer from kidney stones, brought on by constant dehydration.

Kidney stones tortured me for the next few years as a POW. The pain was so bad that I started to pray, the first time I had ever lent on God’s ear in earnest. Even though I had to attend Bible class with the Boy Scouts, I never believed in a divine entity and was especially sceptical since I was forced to go to the classes. Gradually the more I suffered and the more evils I witnessed, the more I began to believe. I turned to God several times. Often I felt my prayers went unanswered. But I somehow lived through this madness and I think that someone must have been listening.

One day on the railway the Mad Mongrel saw something in my work party that riled him. Before I knew anything was wrong he charged up to me and slammed his rifle butt into my forehead. It knocked me clean off my feet. I was seeing stars but despite being dazed and shaken I got up quickly, to avoid being kicked to a pulp on the ground. I still bear the horseshoe scar, a lifelong gift from the Mad Mongrel.

In moments of adversity I would often think back to my childhood and I remembered going barefoot during the long hot summers we spent down at the Aberdeenshire fishing village of Newtonhill, where I was born.

Reflecting on my happy childhood, my job and my family was a useful tool that I used to get me through some very hard times.

I even castigated myself for getting involved with another prisoner’s problems. Once you got started with sentimentality and grief you were a goner. It was a selfish tactic but I was desperate to survive. I was refusing to let the Japanese win this.

I went to the medical hut for advice. In common with most of the men, tropical ulcers had engulfed my feet, ankles and lower calves. I had avoided the medical hut until that point. It was set aside from the sleeping huts and about the same size as ours. The RAMC officer in charge was Dr Mathieson, a likeable character from Paisley, just outside Glasgow, where he had studied medicine. He had come to Singapore about the same time as me and would later, in much different circumstances, save my life. On this my first encounter with him he would at least save my legs.

I nodded as he went on. ‘It’s easy for these men to give up and when they lose hope the fight just seeps right out of them. On countless occasions I have seen two men with the same symptoms and same physical state, and one will die and one will make it. I can only put that down to sheer willpower.’ I considered this for a moment and looked around the hut. You could tell the men who were dying by the look on their faces. Their gaze was lost before it reached their eyes and no amount of positive attitude and care from Dr Mathieson could change their destiny. It certainly was not the medical staff’s fault – their hands were tied. No, blood was firmly on our captors’ hands. I told myself right then and there that I would not stop fighting.

The maggots, which were about a quarter of an inch long, instinctively knew what to do. They started gnawing away at my skin with the most minuscule of bites. The sensation was of tingling, unearthly yet not altogether unpleasant, until the realisation that maggots were eating your raw flesh came racing back to the forefront of your mind. I can still feel that sensation to this day.

Then disaster struck. One night I awoke with dysentery calling. Holding my aching stomach I raced to the latrines in the dark but on the way back to my hut a Korean guard stopped me. He had come out of the darkness and caught me by surprise. He yammered in my face. I had no idea what he was on about. At first I thought he was admonishing me for failing to salute him but I had never noticed the bugger. He was still talking frantically and pointing down at my midriff. To my horror I realised he was becoming frisky. ‘Jiggy, jiggy,’ he was saying, trying to grab me. ‘No!’ I shouted at him. ‘Jiggy. You me, jiggy.’ I told him ‘No’ again, firmly. He carried on trying to grab me so without hesitating I kicked him as hard as I could, barefooted, square between his legs. He collapsed, groaning in agony.

This is when he gets brutally tortured, and stuck in a cage for weeks. Most men didn’t make it out alive

And so it went on hour after endless hour. It was relentless. My bashed eyes had now closed and my face felt swollen as blood seeped from my head, body and feet. My body burned in the unforgiving sun and the only water I got was sloshed from the bucket as they revived me after I collapsed from heat exhaustion. I prayed that it would end, prayed for a bullet through the brain. But no, they continued to play out their game of torture like a cat with a mouse.

I had counted six or seven bowls of rice by the time they allowed me out. As I crawled out of the dark cell and back to my hut, I deemed myself lucky to have spent such a short period in the black hole. I had been in for a week and it could easily have been a month. To me it felt like a century.

I could have lain there for days or weeks. It was hard to be certain. A Japanese doctor visited the camp and inspected me. Eventually the medical officers persuaded him, along with the Black Prince, that I was of no further use. My days working on the railway were over, at least while in the condition I was. Permission came through for me to be sent down river to the mass hospital camp at Chungkai.

I was so devastated that I thought I may as well be dead. Having led such a full, active and sporting life, losing my legs was worse than going blind for me. I had real fears that I would never walk again and so depression set in. I could not see a glimmer of light at the end of tunnel – only blackness.

From an early age I had relished a challenge and I hated being beaten.

Meanwhile the medical orderlies told Freddie in no uncertain terms – which were often the only terms he fully responded to – not to interfere with my rehab. But after Freddie’s arrival on the scene I approached my physical exercises with a renewed vigour. Through sheer hard toil I slowly started to make headway. Day by day my movement returned. I lifted all of the weights attached to my foot and progressed to the parallel bars. Once I could struggle from one end to the other with help from my arms, they gave me a pair of crutches. After a few weeks on them I graduated to just one crutch and eventually was walking unaided, albeit with a pronounced rolling, John Wayne-like gait.

I also hoped that I was improving my stock and the wood-collecting duties would prevent me from being sent back to the railway. The thought of returning sent shudders down my spine and I tried not to dwell on it. But of course I was right. One day the dreadful news came – I was being sent back to work. An officer found me in the hut and said, ‘Collect your things. You leave in the morning.’ ‘Where to?’ I asked, already knowing the answer. ‘Who knows? May God be with you.’

And surely nothing could be worse than the diseaseridden camps of the Death Railway. Hellfire Pass and the bridge over the river Kwai with all of their horrors were behind us now. Or so we thought . . .

After all I had been through I had decided to stay apart from everyone else and focus totally on survival. I lived a day at a time in my own little world, a private cocoon, and adopted the position of self-sufficient loner. To survive each day required maximum concentration and alertness. It also meant that you had to conserve every possible ounce of energy. If someone spoke to me, I replied but there was no memorable sense of community. I was so damned tired all of the time that it was an effort to do anything but survive. Self-preservation had become the name of the game for me.

Yet every time your dignity really hurt more than the pain. It was the fact that you couldn’t fight back that really hurt. If someone is hitting you and you can’t fight back . . . it’s just the worst. It broke your spirit as much as your bones. They would beat you right down to primate level very quickly.

Then one day while working on the docks we were suddenly herded on to a large ship. None of us were given any prior warning, not even our officers. We were soon to find out why. On 4 September 1944, nine hundred British POWs were rushed up the gangway of the Kachidoki Maru, a ten-thousand-tonne cargo vessel that had been named the President Harrison before it was captured from the Americans.

Once inside and the hold crammed full, the Japanese battened down the hatches, plunging us into a terrifying black pit. At that moment the most fearful clamour went up as claustrophobia and panic gripped the men. Many feared they were doomed and began screaming and shouting. Yet a strange tranquillity overcame me. I felt resigned and just thought, This is it. I thought that we would never get out alive and would never see home again. You felt resigned to accept this as your last. I could only think that they were taking us out to sea to sink the ship and drown us all. Our captors were capable of it. I had seen that they were capable of anything.

Nineteen of the fifty-six hellships were sunk by submarines and aircraft and a total of 22,000 allied prisoners died during agonising voyages to the slave camps in Japan and Taiwan.

I never thought anything could ever match the terror of the railway. Being in the hold was worse. At least while slaving on the railway you could move. And you had fresh air.

The smell inside the hold was indescribable, a repugnant stench. An overpowering mixture of excrement, urine, vomit, sweaty bodies, weeping ulcers and rotting flesh clogged the atmosphere. There was no way we could get any fresh air. Even when the Japanese opened the hatches it didn’t really help that much – you were still breathing in what was already there.

Six days out of Singapore I wondered how much more I could take. Then in the distance came a muffled explosion. Right on cue we had sailed into the trap set by the American submariners, who were determined to sink as many of the vessels they believed to be carrying oil and rubber as they could.

As the Kachidoki Maru steamed into the crosshairs of Pampanito’s periscope, Summers gave the fateful order to fire. Four minutes later we suddenly felt a tremendous blast and an explosion tore through the hold. The whole structure shuddered and water flooded in from above. I knew then as the water crashed on top of me that my worst fears had been realised. We had been hit and I knew that the torpedo had struck very close to us. It was in fact the first of two torpedoes that would send the hellship to the bottom within fifteen minutes.

Water rushed into the hold straight away with incredible pressure. It pushed me up as the ship continued to tip over. The hatches became parallel with the sea now and by some miracle the water washed me out of the hatch, and I floundered into a stream or strong current that rushed me out into the sea. It all seemed to happen at once. I popped out of the ship like a cork out of a champagne bottle.

Those of us who could swim were the only ones who had a chance. I knew from my Boy Scout training that I had to swim away to avoid getting pulled down by the suction. I swam for my life, as hard as I could, away from the waves created by the pull of the ship going down. I put my head down and powered with desperate overarm strokes, dodging debris as I went, all the time gulping down oil. It was like drinking fire and burned all the way down, doing irreparable damage to my vocal chords.

But this was a strange freedom and as the situation worsened the song changed and the poignant words of the great hymn ‘Abide with Me’ drifted across the South China Sea. It was very moving and I still cannot bear to hear that hymn in church.

Suddenly the thought of sharks came into my mind. I knew that I must have suffered some cuts on the way out and that sharks were attracted to the scent of blood – I had to get out of the water as soon as I could. My prayers were answered when a single-man raft came floating past.

Castaway and dreaming of home I was shocked to suddenly hear a shout from behind me. ‘You will be picked up soon!’ a voice called out. My spirits soared at the thought of a companion to share the ordeal but my joy was short-lived. I turned around full of expectation only to be confronted by a Japanese officer in a one-man raft similar to mine. Immediately I thought, Right! Here we go. I couldn’t see if he still had his sword or not but prepared myself for a fight.

He was using a proper paddle to come towards me. I steeled myself but he stopped five yards or so away and shouted, ‘Here’, as he threw me a tin. Despite my oily hands I managed to catch it. The Japanese officer then paddled off without saying anything more and it was the last I saw of him. The top on the tin was sealed and waterproof. I clawed at it frantically, eager to know what was inside. It seemed to take for ever. When I finally managed to prise the top off my heart sank. The tin contained chocolates, something we could have only dreamed of in the last two years but a death sentence for me now, dehydrated and adrift in the tropical ocean. I would have loved to have devoured those chocolates but I knew that afterwards they would have sent me mad with thirst. Eating them may have even killed me because I had eaten nothing like that for such a long time. Immediately I threw the tin and its lid in the water. I watched it sink and realised I probably should have discarded the chocolates but kept the tin to catch any rain water. It was a cruel moment.

Badly burned by the sun, my tongue swollen, gripped by a maddening thirst, effectively blind and completely hairless, I fell into a trance-like state. I was on the very edge of death. At some point on that fifth day there came a lot of shouting around me. I was lifted into a small boat and then on to a Japanese whaling ship. I must have been left on deck but from there on I have no real recollection. I don’t know what the Japanese on board that ship did for me. As far as I was concerned they just left me alone but they must have at least given me some water. I was as close to death as I had ever been.

The effects of the exposure I suffered during my ordeal in the South China Sea had led to a complete collapse in my health. At the camp on Hainan I hovered at death’s door, drifting in and out of awareness, but out of it for most of the time. Eventually on 18 September I was stretchered on to another hellship and lowered into the hold. As our ship made a dash for the Japanese mainland, dodging prowling American submarines, I lay blissfully unaware of the grim conditions in the bowels of the vessel.

We were lucky to escape being sunk for a second time and it was nothing short of miraculous that only five men died in the holds during the voyage. Unknown to me I was lucky and had a guardian angel – Dr Mathieson was tending to me.

A Japanese officer told us that we were in a place called Omuta and that our camp was designated Fukuoka Camp 25. It was a few miles from a seaport that owed much of its modern prosperity to the efforts of an Aberdeen merchant called Thomas Glover. He had opened Japan’s first coal mines and developed the country’s first dry-dock in the city. Its only other claim to fame was as the setting of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. That seaport was called Nagasaki.

After a couple of days at the coalmine I went to the hospital hut to sign off sick. In the long room were half a dozen beds filled with acute dysentery and malaria sufferers. A doctor saw me enter and walked down the centre aisle. As he approached I thought I recognised his strut and ruddy complexion. When he got closer I could not believe my eyes. ‘Doctor Mathieson, I presume.’

‘You’ll never be able to eat what you used to,’ he said. ‘Your stomach has shrunk so much that you’ll have to be very careful. Anything too substantial, eaten too quickly, could kill you.’ It would prove life-saving advice.

During this time I acquired so much patience, understanding and caring that I began to feel better about myself even though I was skin and bone. My eyebrows started to sprout, as did some fuzzy clumps of hair. I had thoughts of training as a doctor if I ever got back to Scotland. I thought I was capable enough and I had decided that I really wanted to help others. One night in my hut I made a silent vow to spend the rest of my life bettering the lot of others.

Big PoD!!

The ninth of August 1945 began like any other boring day in captivity.

On an air-base thousands of miles away in the Mariana Islands a young US Air Force officer, Captain Charles Sweeney, aged just twenty-five like myself, was beginning a day that would be anything but normal. He and his youthful crew had already undergone a briefing and enjoyed the traditional early morning breakfast before any bombing mission. The chaplain’s prayer had been a little bit more emotional than usual and the escort for Bockscar, his B-29 bomber, carried press men and photographers.

But the initial target for Sweeney and his twenty-fouryear-old co-pilot, First Lieutenant Charles Albury, was not Nagasaki but Kokura, the port city where we had landed in the hellship from Hainan. The young pilots made three passes on Kokura but found it clouded over and were unable to comply with orders to drop the bomb visually if possible. Running low on fuel and fearing they might have to ditch Fat Man in the sea, Sweeney and Albury turned their attention towards nearby Nagasaki. It was covered with cloud too. But suddenly from thirty thousand feet up Bockscar’s twenty-seven-year-old veteran bomb-aimer Kermit Beahan caught a glimpse of the Nagasaki stadium and pressed the button that released the bomb.

I was taking as much care as possible to avoid being splashed with the revolting contents of the cans as I moved up and down the drills of tomato plants behind the huts. The job always made me gag but was lighter work than the mines and furnaces. Halfway up a drill there came a tremendous clap of thunder from the direction of Nagasaki. I didn’t think too much of it and had just finished watering the plants when a sudden gust of very hot air like a giant hairdryer blasted into me. It knocked my shrunken frame sideways and I had to use my bamboo ladle to prevent myself from falling over completely.

Starved of news in the camp, our imaginations were nothing if not fevered. But none of us could have dreamed up what had happened at Nagasaki. The strange gust that had knocked me over was the hot breath of Fat Man, a nuclear weapon with even more destructive power than its cousin Little Boy. Unknown to us we had entered the atomic age.

Great water footnote here!