Allan Massie
Japanese Nightmares
The Forgotten Highlander: My Incredible Story of Survival During the War in the Far East
By Alistair Urquhart
Little, Brown 306pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
Alistair Urquhart was nineteen in 1939, living with his ‘parents, auntie, sister and two brothers in a newly built granite bungalow on the western fringes of Aberdeen’, and working as an apprentice in a firm of plumbers, merchants and electrical wholesalers. Within weeks of the outbreak of war he was called up, and joined his home regiment, the Gordon Highlanders. After a few months he found himself stationed in Singapore, where he was taken prisoner when the city surrendered to the Japanese. This is the story of his survival.
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