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

by Alistair Urquhart

I could not explain why I had wanted to come to San Francisco and put myself through a lengthy flight but I had felt it needed to be done. I felt I had to lay some demons to rest, sink them to the depths like the hundreds who lost their lives in that faraway sea. It was a therapeutic process, much like writing this memoir.

I have not allowed my life to be blighted by bitterness. At ninety years of age I have lived a long life and continue to live it to the fullest. I enjoyed a long marriage to my wife and I have been fortunate to have a family and to enjoy their success. I have amazed my doctors, my friends, my family and myself by remaining fit and still enjoying my passion for ballroom dancing. I have found companionship too, with Helen, my dancing partner. We run tea dances together and help and support each other. I keep myself alert by painting and teaching my fellow senior citizens how to use the internet. I am grateful for my present way of life, after all the turmoil that life has thrown at me - and thankful to have retained my sense of humour.

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

The men who had beaten the Kaiser were defeated now - by unemployment. And we were all desperate to avoid their fate.

I always went for the ones that I knew could dance.

It did not sell alcohol but most of us were teenagers or just in our early twenties anyway and we did not care for the stuff.

I shuddered to think of it and was glad that we had moved on from the cruelty of the Middle Ages, or so I thought.

‘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.’

He told us that the girls were known as ‘taxi dancers’. To dance with them you had to buy books of tickets and for each dance the girl must receive one ticket. As I had never experienced anything like this before, I was bemused to say the least. I could not imagine anyone in Aberdeen charging for a dance!

On starvation rations and with no access to medicines of any kind, we lived in camps buried deep in the remote jungle where Red Cross inspectors or representatives of neutral foreign powers could never find us. A whole army of sixty thousand men had vanished into the jungle at the mercy of our Japanese masters.

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.’

Instead we made constant attempts at sabotage. Men whispered orders to impair the construction of the bridge wherever possible. Some charged with making up concrete mixtures deliberately added too much sand or not enough, which would later have disastrous effects. We collected huge numbers of termites and white ants and deposited them into the grooves and joints of load-bearing trunks. Out of sight of the guards I furtively sawed halfway through wooden bolts wherever possible, hoping they would snap whenever any serious weight, like a train, was placed upon them.

These were of classical, jazz and popular music, along with cabaret shows of a professional level. The one I enjoyed most was called ‘Wonderbar’. It included a can-can routine and the prisoners’ favourite drag queen - Bobby Spong.

To see a grown man on the ground crying and howling, begging his tormentors to stop, was very hard to take. Your reaction to the beating meant a lot to the Japanese. If you caved in and showed fear, they would go at you harder. But if you showed that it wasn’t hurting, they gave up. It seems the wrong way round - you’d think they would go easy on you if you were weaker. But the Japanese mind worked in strange ways.

Some of the most appalling episodes of the war occurred on these ships in which men driven crazy by thirst killed fellow prisoners to drink their blood.

To my surprise I felt no animosity whatsoever to this family despite what their countrymen had put me through. The young girl deserved treatment as much as anybody and Dr Mathieson was of the same mind.

I was disturbed by the sight of the devastation but felt no sympathy for the Japanese. Serves them bloody well right, I thought. How else was it going to end?

Dancing was the best rehabilitation I could have asked for, and it was also crucial to my reintegration to society.

As the trials went on it became obvious just how much bunkum all of the bushido code had been. The so-called ‘Way of the Warrior’ precluded capture yet so many of these ring leaders had been captured - the shame that to them had made us so despicable now seemed bearable and certainly preferable to the ordained hara-kiri.

Freddie never came out of the camps.

I was back at work. But life could never get back to normal.

Yet I owed it to myself and to the others who never made it back to make the most of my life.