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

Author: Urquhart, Alistair

Singapore

Published on 14 April 2011 by Little, Brown Book Group (Abacus) in the United Kingdom.

Paperback | 320 pages, Section: 16, b/w photos
197 x 128 x 25 | 302g

Alistair Urquhart was a soldier in the Gordon Highlanders captured by the Japanese in Singapore. He not only survived working on the notorious Bridge on the River Kwai , but he was subsequently taken on one of the Japanese 'hellships' which was torpedoed. Nearly everyone else on board died and Urquhart spent 5 days alone on a raft in the South China Sea before being rescued by a whaling ship. He was taken to Japan and then forced to work in a mine near Nagasaki. Two months later a nuclear bomb dropped just ten miles away . . .

This is the extraordinary story of a young men, conscripted at nineteen and whose father was a Somme Veteran, survived not just one, but three close encounters with death - encounters which killed nearly all his comrades.