Alistair Urquhart (1919–2016): The Forgotten Highlander

This article uses three labels.

• established: supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources.
• shared: the core fact is sound, but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation.
• traditional: widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

The big events of Urquhart's war are on record. The fall of Singapore, the building of the Burma–Thailand railway, the convoy HI-72 sinkings and the bombing of Nagasaki are documented by governments, war-graves bodies and naval histories. His name, number, regiment and camp in Japan appear on post-war rolls of Far East prisoners, and his death is recorded in obituaries in The Scotsman, the Press and Journal, The Courier and by the BBC.

The weaker evidence lies in the personal detail. Almost everything about what happened to Urquhart himself, from the march into the jungle to the moment of the bomb, comes from one source: his own account. He first wrote a short, in his words "pretty sanitised", family memoir after his wife's death in 1993. A literary agent persuaded him to write the full story around Christmas 2008, and The Forgotten Highlander appeared in 2010. Like most commercial memoirs it was shaped for publication, and the introduction is dated July 2009, when he was nearly ninety. Newspaper articles and obituaries largely repeat the book, so their agreement is not independent confirmation.

This article had only part of the memoir to work from: the introduction, the first chapter and the contents page. The chapters on Singapore, the railway, the ship and Japan were not available. Where the article reports what happened in those years, it relies on interviews and obituaries that summarise the book, and says so. Where these differ from each other or from the records, the differences are set out rather than smoothed over.

Two numbers need particular care. Accounts of how far his camp was from Nagasaki, and of how many men died on the Kachidoki Maru, vary widely. Both are discussed below.

An Aberdeen boyhood

shared Urquhart's birth date and birthplace are both given two ways. The Scotsman's obituary gives 8 September 1919 at Newtonhill, a coastal village south of Aberdeen, and the Press and Journal's funeral notice also names Newtonhill. The Press and Journal's death report gives 8 September but says he was born in Aberdeen, as does the BBC. The FEPOW roll of honour gives 18 September 1919 and "Aberdeenshire". His own memoir says his call-up letter came on 23 September, "just a few days" after his twentieth birthday. That wording fits 18 September better than 8 September, but it is not proof. No birth register entry was consulted for this article.

shared In his memoir Urquhart describes a family that was respectable but short of money. His father, George, was the son of textile mill workers from Forfar. He won a scholarship, became a teacher of English and Latin, and helped found a private commercial college in Aberdeen. Urquhart wrote that a business partner had been quietly taking money from the college for years, and that the family lived in "straitened circumstances" as a result. His mother, Gertrude, came from a more prosperous Aberdeen family. An unmarried aunt lived with them. In 1935 the family moved into a newly built granite bungalow on the western edge of the city.

shared Urquhart's father had served with the Gordon Highlanders in the First World War. Urquhart wrote that he was gassed and shell-shocked on the Somme, was discharged in 1916, and never spoke of it. His mother's brother was killed on the Somme. These details are from the memoir and have not been checked against service records.

established Urquhart went to Robert Gordon's College, Aberdeen, which he left at about fourteen when the family could no longer pay. The Scotsman's obituary, which agrees with the memoir, says he did well there. He then joined Lawson Turnbull & Co., plumbers' merchants and electrical wholesalers, as an office boy. In the memoir he gives his starting wage as five shillings a week. He worked his way up to trainee warehouseman, then worked in the showroom and the electrical department.

shared The memoir's first chapter is mostly about this world: the Boy Scouts, swimming at the Aberdeen sea-water baths, and above all dancing. Urquhart wrote that he had Highland dancing and tap lessons from the age of six, then paid for ballroom lessons out of his wages, and spent his weekends at the Beach Ballroom and the Palais de Danse. Dancing ran through his whole life. He was still dancing, and organising tea dances, in his nineties.

Called up

established Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939. Urquhart was conscripted into the Gordon Highlanders within weeks. In the memoir he says the letter arrived on 23 September, told him to report to the regimental depot at Bridge of Don four days later, and was addressed to "Mr. Alistair Kynoch Urquhart".

shared His age at call-up is given as nineteen in the publisher's blurb and in the Press and Journal's funeral notice, but as twenty in his own memoir, in The Courier and in a 2010 interview with HistoryNet. On either of the recorded birth dates he was twenty.

shared Urquhart wrote that he was one of twenty men from a squad of twenty-eight picked for an overseas draft after six weeks' training. Heavy snow then kept the draft in a school hall in Aberdeen for three weeks. At the end of November they went by train to Dover, crossed to Cherbourg, and travelled by train to Marseilles, where they boarded the troopship Andes. He wrote that they reached Singapore on 22 December 1939. The Scotsman's obituary has him at Fort Canning, the army headquarters in Singapore, by Christmas 1939, armed with a 1907-pattern rifle. The details of the journey come only from the memoir.

Singapore, 1940–42

established The 2nd Battalion of the Gordon Highlanders had been in Singapore since the 1930s. The Gordon Highlanders Museum describes the battalion's story from 1934 to 1945 as one of peacetime garrison duty, the battle for Singapore, and captivity on the Thai–Burma railway and in Formosa, Borneo and Japan.

shared For about two years Urquhart's war was quiet. A 2010 Scotsman interview says he spent the time competing in ballroom dancing contests and teaching local people to dance. The memoir's second chapter is titled "Jealousy", but its text was not available for this article.

established Japan invaded Malaya in December 1941. The campaign for Malaya and Singapore lasted about seventy days. On 15 February 1942 Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival met General Yamashita at the Ford factory at Bukit Timah and agreed to an unconditional surrender. About 80,000 soldiers became prisoners.

shared Urquhart was in the signal room when the Japanese attacked, according to the 2010 Scotsman interview. Several reports, starting with a BBC article in 2010, say he became a prisoner "without firing a shot". This phrase describes his own experience. It should not be read as a comment on the battalion, which fought in the battle for the island.

shared Urquhart told HistoryNet in 2010 that the Japanese killed about 300 people at Alexandra Hospital two days before they reached Fort Canning, and that the prisoners were marched to Changi past Chinese heads on poles. The Scotsman's 2010 interview links the heads to the Sook Ching massacre of Chinese civilians and gives a figure of 50,000 killed. Estimates of the Sook Ching death toll vary widely, and that figure should be treated as one estimate among several. The Scotsman's obituary says the prisoners were marched 18 miles to Selarang Barracks on the Changi peninsula.

The Burma–Thailand railway

established Japan built the Burma–Thailand railway to supply its army in Burma by land. According to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, work began in June 1942. The line was 424 km long, and the two sections met near Konkoita towards the end of October 1943. About 13,000 prisoners of war died and were buried along the railway. An estimated 80,000 to 100,000 Asian civilians also died, many of them forced labourers from Malaya and the Dutch East Indies or people conscripted in Siam and Burma.

shared Other sources give other figures. The Scotsman's obituary gives 258 miles, about 180,000 Asian workers of whom about half died, and more than 13,000 of 60,000 Allied prisoners dead. Its 2010 interview gave 16,000 prisoners and 100,000 Asian labourers. The CWGC figures are used in this article.

shared Urquhart's journey to the railway is told in two versions. All accounts agree that prisoners were taken from Singapore by train in closed rice or cattle trucks for five days, with little food or water. The Scotsman's obituary says they then marched about 30 miles to Konyu camp on the River Kwai, taking six days. The Courier, the Press and Journal and the 2010 Scotsman interview say the march was about 100 miles. HistoryNet reports that he was in the first draft of 600 men sent to Thailand.

established Hellfire Pass is the name prisoners gave to the Konyu cutting, the deepest and longest rock cutting on the railway. It is about 75 metres long and 25 metres deep, and lies about 150 km from the start of the line at Nong Pladuk. Work on the Konyu section began in November 1942. During the "Speedo" period from April to August 1943 the Japanese engineers demanded faster progress. Shifts ran to 15 or 18 hours, and men were beaten when progress seemed slow. Most of the rock was cut by hand, one man holding a steel drill while another struck it with a hammer, and the holes were then charged with explosive. The name came from the sight of the work at night, lit by oil lamps and bamboo fires.

shared The Scotsman's obituary says Urquhart worked at Hellfire Pass for seven months. It also reports that he and others tried to sabotage bridge work by sawing wooden bolts partly through and putting termites into load-bearing timbers. Such stories are common in prisoners' memoirs and are impossible to verify.

shared Urquhart said he had worked for about 750 days on the railway. That is the figure in his introduction and in Publishers Weekly's review. The 2010 Scotsman interview gave 700 days at up to 18 hours a day. The Press and Journal's 2010s profile says two years. The difference is small, but the exact figure is his own estimate.

shared Urquhart named a Japanese officer, Lieutenant Usuki, whom the prisoners called the "Black Prince". According to The Scotsman's obituary and its 2010 interview, after Urquhart rejected a guard's sexual advance, Usuki made him hold a heavy weight over his head for 24 hours, and then put him for seven days in a "black hole" cage. HistoryNet's 2010 interview gives the officer's full name as Lieutenant Kishio Usuki, names a sergeant the prisoners called "Doctor Death" and a Korean guard they called "the Mad Mongrel", and reports Urquhart as saying that the British executed Usuki and the Korean guard in 1946. This article has not checked the war-crimes trial records.

shared Urquhart said he had malaria, dysentery, beriberi and, during the monsoon, cholera. He told The Scotsman that he was put in an isolation "death tent" for cholera cases and was the only man to leave it alive. He also said that, on a doctor's advice, he cleaned tropical ulcers with maggots taken from the latrines, and that the wounds healed. His sole survival of the cholera tent rests on his word alone.

shared After about six months of treatment in a hospital camp, Urquhart was sent back to Singapore, to the River Valley Road camp in the city, according to The Scotsman's obituary. In 1944 the Japanese moved fit survivors of the railway back to Singapore to be shipped to Japan as labour.

shared The sixth chapter of Urquhart's memoir is titled "Bridge on the River Kwai", and the 2010 Scotsman interview reports that his squad worked on "the bridge". He criticised David Lean's 1957 film, saying, "My book is what happened." The railway had many bridges, and which one or ones he worked on is not clear from the sources available.

The Kachidoki Maru

established The Kachidoki Maru was an American-built liner, the former President Harrison, which Japan had captured. In September 1944 she and the Rakuyo Maru joined convoy HI-72 at Singapore for Japan. The ships carried about 2,200 Australian and British prisoners, all survivors of the railway. The Kachidoki Maru carried about 900, all British. The Rakuyo Maru carried 1,317 or 1,318 British and Australian prisoners. Neither ship carried Red Cross markings.

shared The convoy's sailing date is given as 4 September 1944 by the Kachidoki Maru roll of honour and as 6 September 1944 by the Australian War Memorial.

established On 12 September 1944 a group of American submarines attacked the convoy in the South China Sea. USS Sealion sank the Rakuyo Maru, and USS Pampanito, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Paul Summers, sank the Kachidoki Maru. The Kachidoki Maru roll of honour says the Pampanito fired three torpedoes at about 22.40, from about 3,700 yards, and that two hit, one at the stern and one amidships. The ship flooded from the stern. The roll records that all the prisoners who survived had jumped within ten minutes of the hits. The BBC reported that the Americans did not know what the ships were carrying.

shared The death toll on the Kachidoki Maru is uncertain. The Australian War Memorial gives 400 prisoners lost from the ship, alongside 1,159 from the Rakuyo Maru. A Wikipedia account of the ship gives 431 prisoners killed, with about 520 British prisoners picked up by Japanese ships. Publishers Weekly's review of the memoir gives 244 dead, and The Scotsman's obituary says more than 240 men died. The lower figure seems to come from the book. It may count only the men killed in the sinking itself, and not those who died later in the water. The higher figures are those of the war memorial and naval histories.

established The Japanese escorts rescued their own people first. The US Naval Institute's Naval History records that Japanese escorts at first took only Japanese and Korean personnel from the Rakuyo Maru's survivors. On 15 September the Pampanito came back to the area and found British and Australian survivors from the Rakuyo Maru on rafts. With other submarines, she rescued about 150 men and took them to Saipan. Survivors picked up by the Japanese were taken to Hainan Island and then to Japan on the Kibitsu Maru.

shared Urquhart's own story of the sinking comes from his book and interviews. He said he was in the hold, got out through the open hatch as the ship went down, swallowed oil, and "popped up like a champagne cork" in water thick with fuel from a tanker sunk earlier in the attack (The Courier; The Scotsman, 2010). He reached a small raft and drifted alone for five days in the South China Sea, without water, until a Japanese whaling ship picked him up. He was blinded by oil and badly burned by the sun. The Scotsman reports that he was then landed on Hainan, where the prisoners were paraded naked through a village in the rain, and that he reached Japan on another ship eleven days later.

shared One detail of the timing is unresolved. A convoy history published by an Australian unit association records that the Kibitsu Maru left Yulin, on Hainan, on 16 September with about 520 Kachidoki Maru prisoners. A man picked up after five days at sea would have been rescued around 17 September. Urquhart may have travelled to Japan on a different ship. The sources opened do not say.

Fukuoka 25-B and the Nagasaki bomb

established A roll of Allied prisoners held in Japan lists "Urquart, Allister Kynoch", Corporal 2883851, Gordon Highlanders, from Aberdeen, aged 25, as a survivor of Fukuoka camp 25-B at Omuta. Roger Mansell's research archive on prisoner camps in Japan describes Fukuoka 25-B as a camp at Shinkai-machi, Omuta, on the Ariake Sea in Fukuoka prefecture. It opened in late September 1944 with 289 men, all survivors of the Kachidoki Maru and Rakuyo Maru. About 100 more men came later from another camp. The prisoners were slave labourers at a carbide plant run by Denki Kagaku Kogyo, now Denka. The camp held 390 prisoners in all, 388 British and 2 American. Four died, all British, in October 1944, from the effects of the sinking, exposure and malnutrition. One of them was Private Henry Elder of the Gordon Highlanders.

shared Accounts of Urquhart's work in Japan differ. Obituaries in The Scotsman, the Press and Journal and The Courier, and his publisher's blurb, say he worked in a coal mine, sometimes described as an open-cast mine. A Press and Journal profile says he did forced labour in a shipyard on 14- to 15-hour shifts and later tended army vegetable gardens. The Scotsman's obituary and HistoryNet both say that a Scottish doctor of the Royal Army Medical Corps, Dr Mathieson, persuaded the Japanese to move him into the camp hospital as an orderly, and credit the doctor with saving his life. Mansell's page records the arrival of a British medical officer at Fukuoka 25-B in June 1945. The camp's main employer was a chemical works, not a mine, but the sources opened do not say what every prisoner did.

shared The distance from Nagasaki is the largest open question in the story. The BBC, The Scotsman's obituary and the UK paperback's blurb all say his camp was about ten miles from Nagasaki. HistoryNet says "a few miles". Omuta, where the camp roll places him, is about 60 km (nearly 40 miles) from the hypocentre in a straight line, across the Ariake Sea and the Shimabara peninsula. The sources opened do not explain the difference. He may have been moved to a work site nearer the city that the rolls do not show. The ten-mile figure may also have come from the writing of the book. This article does not settle the point.

established At 11.02 a.m. on 9 August 1945 the American B-29 Bockscar dropped a plutonium bomb, "Fat Man", on Nagasaki. Its intended aiming point was near the harbour, but it exploded over the Urakami valley, north-west of the city centre, after the crew found a gap in the cloud. About 40,000 people were killed at once, and at least 30,000 more died of injuries and radiation by the end of 1945. Korean forced labourers were in the city and were left out of the earliest casualty counts. Alexander McKay, Thomas Blake Glover's biographer, notes that the bomb's ostensible target was the Mitsubishi shipyards that Glover had done much to develop.

shared Urquhart said that he was outdoors when the bomb fell. He saw a single plane, which "droned over and away", and then a blast of hot air knocked him off his feet or, as he told the BBC, blew him across a pathway. HistoryNet's 2010 interview describes a thunderclap and a gale-force wind from the direction of Nagasaki. Blast and heat fall off sharply with distance, so his account fits the shorter distance he gave more easily than the camp roll's location. The sources opened do not record what was felt at Omuta.

shared Urquhart said he had seen the destruction of Nagasaki after the surrender, when American forces brought prisoners through the city. In his introduction he wrote that on liberation the prisoners signed undertakings not to talk about the war crimes they had seen or what they saw in "the atomic wasteland of Nagasaki". He also wrote that, in his seventies, he developed a cancer that his doctors thought might be linked to radiation exposure at Nagasaki. These are his statements. They are not supported by any record seen for this article.

shared Urquhart told the BBC that a Japanese army directive ordered all prisoners to be killed on 12 August if American forces landed in Japan, and that the bomb saved him. Many Far East prisoners believed such an order existed, and the fear was real. This article has not traced an order with that date covering his camp. It reports his belief as his own.

established Japan's government accepted the Allied terms on 14 August 1945. Emperor Hirohito's broadcast followed on 15 August, and the surrender was signed on 2 September. Mansell's record for Fukuoka 25-B says the prisoners were told the war was over on 17 August, that an announcement was made on 21 August, that the first food drops came on 28 August, that British and American flags were raised on 4 September, and that the prisoners left by train on 16 September.

Home

shared Urquhart weighed less than six stone when he was freed, according to The Scotsman. He was taken to San Francisco and then home to Aberdeen. Publishers Weekly's summary of the book says he passed through several military hospitals. His family had feared he was dead, as none of the cards he sent from the camps had arrived.

established In early 1946 he was passed A1 fit by a medical board so that he could be demobilised, and as a result he got no disability pension. The Scotsman records that in 2010, after he was invited to Balmoral by the Prince of Wales, a visit from the Service Personnel and Veterans Agency led to an assessment of 60 per cent disability and a war pension of £92.82 a week.

established Urquhart went back to his old job at Lawson Turnbull, which had been kept open for him, as the managing director had promised in 1939. He married Mary Milne in 1946. He later worked for the Manchester Slate Company until 1963, then for Stewart Robertson, plumbers' merchants in Dundee, where he was managing director when he retired in 1981. He lived in Broughty Ferry for the rest of his life. He nursed Mary for the last twelve years of her life. She died in 1993.

shared He said he could not settle after the war, and he did not talk about it. He told The Scotsman in 2010 that his wife "never asked and I never told". In his introduction he wrote that his nightmares were so bad in the early years that he slept in a chair for fear of hurting his wife, that repeated beatings had broken his nose so often that he needed surgery to breathe through it, and that he had been treated for many years by the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. A BBC report at the time of the memoir's publication made the same point: many survivors of the camps never spoke of them.

Recognition and the payment of 2000

established On 7 November 2000 the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence, Dr Lewis Moonie, told the House of Commons that the government would make a single ex gratia payment of £10,000 to each surviving British prisoner of the Japanese, or to their widow or widower. He said that of 50,016 British service personnel reported captured by the Japanese, 12,433 died or were killed in captivity, about one in four.

shared Urquhart thought the payment came late and from the wrong source. In his introduction he called the sum paltry and objected that the British taxpayer, not the Japanese government, had paid it. That view was widely held among former prisoners. It is a view, not a fact about the scheme.

shared The FEPOW Family tribute site says that Aberdeen gave him an Outstanding Bravery Award in 2007. The award is recorded there in a tribute poem. No official record of it was opened for this article.

Writing The Forgotten Highlander

established The Forgotten Highlander: My Incredible Story of Survival During the War in the Far East was published by Little, Brown in April 2010, priced £18.99, and reached the non-fiction bestseller lists. Abacus published the paperback in 2011. Skyhorse published an American edition in October 2010 under the subtitle My Unbelievable True Story of Survival. The Press and Journal reports that the book was launched at the Gordon Highlanders Museum in Aberdeen. The Scotsman reported in 2010 that DreamWorks had asked his agent about film rights. No film had been made by the time of his death.

shared The book is credited to Urquhart alone on the publisher pages opened for this article. Like many memoirs of its kind it was written with help, and the acknowledgements, which were not available, are where any co-writer would be named. The introduction is signed "Alistair Urquhart, Broughty Ferry, Dundee, July 2009". The Press and Journal's profile says he wrote it at 92 in 2011. That is wrong: he was ninety when it came out in 2010.

shared The book is angry, and openly so. "For as well as being a lucky man I am an angry man," he wrote in the introduction. He accused the Japanese state of systematic cruelty to prisoners and Asian civilians, and successive Japanese governments of failing to teach the history of the war. He also accused British and American governments of overlooking Japanese war crimes during the Cold War. These are his judgements. Japanese governments have made formal apologies, most notably Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama's statement of 15 August 1995, which expressed "deep remorse" and a "heartfelt apology" for the damage done by Japan's colonial rule and aggression. Later prime ministers repeated it for nearly two decades. Many former prisoners, Urquhart among them, did not find such statements enough.

shared The book is also hopeful. He wrote that he had not allowed his life to be "blighted by bitterness", and that the devotion of the doctors on the railway had taught him to care for others. The motto he took from the war was "There is no such word as 'can't'." In his later years he visited schools to talk about the Far East war, taught older people to use the internet, painted, and ran tea dances with his dancing partner.

The Pampanito, 2008

established USS Pampanito is now a museum ship at Pier 45, Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco. In September 2008, aged 89, Urquhart travelled there for a remembrance ceremony. In his memoir he wrote that he stood in the control room from which Summers had tracked the Kachidoki Maru, and in the forward torpedo room. He described the visit as a way to lay demons to rest, much like writing the book.

shared Urquhart wrote that the ceremony on 14 September 2008 was exactly sixty-four years to the day after the sinking. The sinking was on 12 September 1944. He also wrote that five torpedoes were fired at his ship. The Kachidoki Maru roll of honour gives three torpedoes and two hits. The ship's records are preferred here.

Death and memory

established Urquhart lived independently until he was 96 and moved into a care home in Dundee in February 2016. He died there on Friday 7 October 2016, aged 97. His funeral was held at Dundee Crematorium. He was survived by a son and a daughter.

shared He is often described as one of the last surviving Gordon Highlanders captured at Singapore, and in some reports as "the luckiest man" of the Second World War. The first is plausible but cannot be checked. The second is a description, not a fact. What can be said is that he survived three events that each killed a large share of the men around him: the railway, the sinking of a hell ship and the war's last year in Japan.

• The Kachidoki Maru was built in the United States as the liner President Harrison, captured by Japan, and sunk by an American submarine with British prisoners aboard.
• The submarine that sank Urquhart's ship, USS Pampanito, is a museum at Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco. He visited it at the age of 89.
• His camp in Japan, Fukuoka 25-B, was opened for survivors of the two ships sunk in convoy HI-72. One of its four dead was a fellow Gordon Highlander, Private Henry Elder.
• He spent his first two years in Singapore dancing, and was still running tea dances in Broughty Ferry in his nineties.
• He was passed fit in 1946 so that he could leave the army, and so got no war pension until 2010, when he was 90.
• The UK government's 2000 ex gratia payment to Far East prisoners was £10,000 each, paid by Britain, not Japan.
• His father served with the Gordon Highlanders on the Somme a generation earlier.
• The British and American editions of his memoir have different subtitles: "My Incredible Story of Survival During the War in the Far East" and "My Unbelievable True Story of Survival".

• Disputed: His camp was ten miles from Nagasaki. This figure comes from his book, his publishers and his obituaries. The post-war camp roll places him at Fukuoka 25-B in Omuta, about 60 km (nearly 40 miles) from the city in a straight line. The difference has not been explained.
• Disputed: He worked in a coal mine near Nagasaki. Obituaries say a coal mine, one profile says a shipyard, and two accounts say he worked as a hospital orderly. The camp where the roll places him supplied labour to a carbide works.
• Disputed: 244 prisoners died on the Kachidoki Maru. This figure appears in reviews of his memoir. The Australian War Memorial gives 400 prisoners lost from the ship, and another account gives 431.
• Myth: The Americans knowingly attacked ships full of prisoners. The ships were unmarked, and the submarine crews learned there were prisoners aboard only when they found survivors in the water days later.
• Disputed: He was 19 when he was called up. His publisher's blurb and one obituary say 19. His own memoir, and both recorded birth dates, make him 20.
• Disputed: He was born on 8 September 1919 in Aberdeen. Obituaries give 8 September, and the FEPOW roll gives 18 September. His birthplace is given as Newtonhill in some reports and Aberdeen in others.
• Disputed: The memoir was written when he was 92, in 2011. It was published in April 2010, when he was 90. The paperback followed in 2011.
• Disputed: The bomb saved him from a planned massacre. This was his firm belief, and many prisoners shared the fear. No order with the date he gave, covering his camp, has been traced for this article.
• Myth: Japan has never apologised for the war. Japanese prime ministers issued formal apologies from 1995, starting with Tomiichi Murayama. Urquhart and many other former prisoners considered them inadequate, which is a different point.