THE FORGOTTEN HIGHLANDER
Alistair Urquhart
Little, Brown, $39.99, pbk
Reviewed by Oliver Riddell.
Alistair Urquhart was a young Scottish conscript posted to Malaya and Singapore in 1940.
What he found there was everything that has been reported of it.
The complacency and snobbery of the colonial administration and armed services led directly to the debacle.
He spent the next three and a-half years as a prisoner of the Japanese.
First he laboured on the infamous Burma Railway and then in Japan itself.
In between, his "hell ship" carrier was torpedoed by an American submarine and for days he clung to the wreckage.
His time on the railway included work on the bridge over the River Kwai.
What he and tens of thousands of others had to endure beggars belief.
There are no words to describe the systematic sadism, brutality, torture and fiendish methods of murder.
Perhaps surprisingly, Urquhart does not seem to loathe the ordinary Japanese and Korean prison guards.
His loathing is reserved for the officers, pouring scorn on the way of Bushido, which allowed Japan to despise those soldiers who surrendered in defeat, but who then surrendered themselves when defeated rather than commit suicide.
The depth of his feeling for their hypocrisy crawls on every line.
Once in Japan, he worked near Nagasaki and felt the blast from the A-bomb.
Later, the American liberators drove him though the streets of Nagasaki, thus exposing him to lethal radiation.
It added to his subsequent health problems.
It is well known that those who survived the Japanese prisoner of war camps would never talk about them.
Urquhart waited until his 90s before being convinced that it was his duty to record what he had experienced.
That he lived so long is quite extraordinary, and is a tribute to his mental fortitude and physical resilience.
On his return to Scotland he suffered recurrent nightmares for the rest of his life.
In fact, he refused to sleep with his wife for fear that he would choke her during a nightmare. (They managed to have two children anyway and, after her severe stroke, he nursed her for 12 years.) It was his lifelong hobby - his devotion to ballroom dancing - which got him through.
He never forgave the Japanese officers, or the Allied governments that prosecuted so few of them for war crimes.
He also never forgave successive Japanese governments for refusing to face up to the crimes committed in the name of Imperial Japan, or for an education system which still denies young Japanese knowledge of their history.
• Oliver Riddell is a Wellington writer.
