The POW who survived Nagasaki
Alistair Urquhart 1919-2016
Alistair Urquhart became a bestselling author seven years ago, when, at the age of 90, he published a harrowing account of his extraordinary three-and-a-halfyear ordeal as a prisoner of war in Japan. A Gordon Highlander captured during the fall of Singapore in 1942, he survived the infamous Death Railway; two death marches; confinement on a “hell ship” torpedoed by the US navy; and, finally, the atom bomb. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed up to 250,000 people, but Urquhart believed it had saved his life, by preventing a massacre of Allied Pows due to take place three days later.
The son of a teacher, Alistair Urquhart was born in Aberdeenshire in 1920. He excelled at school, academically and at sport, but had to leave aged 14, to find work. In 1939, aged 19, he enlisted in the Gordon Highlanders. Sent to Singapore, he had only been there for a few weeks when he was captured, along with some 80,000 Allied troops, by the Imperial Japanese Army, and force-marched to the Selarang Barracks, on the Changi Peninsula, where up to 50,000 Pows were held in buildings designed for 4,000.
Seven months later, he was selected to go “up country”, and was crammed, with 30 other men, into an 18ft-long rail freight container for the five-day journey to Thailand. On arrival, around 600 sick, starving and vermin-infested prisoners were then force-marched almost 100 miles through dense jungle, until they finally reached a clearing. This was their camp: their first task was to build their own huts. Then they were put to work on a stretch of the 260-mile Burma-siam railway, said The Daily Telegraph – hacking through thick forest, gouging into rock and building bridges in some of the most inhospitable conditions on Earth, on starvation rations. Urquhart worked on, and tried to sabotage, the bridge on the River Kwai; but the film, he said, offered a very sanitised version of what the men endured in real life. Dysentery, cholera, beriberi and malaria were rife; beatings were routine, and savage. There was no whistling of the Colonel Bogey March; nor did the men wear uniforms: they were “naked, barefoot slaves”. Around 13,000 Pows (and many more local labourers) died building the railway. Urquhart credited a Scottish camp doctor with his survival: Dr Mathieson nursed him back to health after he’d emerged, delirious and near dead, from seven days in a bamboo punishment cage; and when cuts on his feet became dangerously infected, Mathieson saved his legs, using maggots to eat the rotting flesh.
After nearly two years, Urquhart was sent back to Singapore, to be transported in a “hell ship” to Japan. Nothing, he said, had prepared him for the conditions in the overcrowded hold. It was standing room only, and there were no lavatories. Some Pows suffocated; others lost their minds in the fetid heat. After six days, his ship was torpedoed by the US navy. Washed overboard when the hold flooded, he swam through burning oil to reach a raft. He then spent five days adrift in the ocean, before being picked up by a Japanese whaler. By the time he reached Japan, he barely knew his own name. Sent to work in a coal mine, he would have died had he not been reunited with Mathieson, who had him moved to the camp hospital. On 9 August 1945, Urquhart was working in the garden there when he saw a lone US plane flying low in the sky; moments later, a hot gust of wind blew him off his feet. He didn’t know it, said The Herald (Glasgow), but this was the “warm breath of Fat Boy”, the atom bomb the US had just dropped on nearby Nagasaki. A few days later, he was liberated.
His parents had presumed him dead, and when he got home, they didn’t recognise the skeletal figure that greeted them. He suffered from nightmares for the rest of his life, and declined to discuss his experiences for decades. Then, in 2009, he wrote his memoir, The Forgotten Highlander, to “bear witness” to the atrocities in Japan. Aged 91, he embarked on a long round of interviews, talks and book signings. He had many moving meetings with relatives of Pows who had not returned; and at an event in Glasgow, two women waited patiently in line, before introducing themselves as the widow and daughter of Dr Mathieson.