Alistair Urquhart: Called the Luckiest Man of WW2

Survived 2 Prison Camps, disease, shipwreck, Atomic Bombing

Some men are hard to kill: enter Alistair Urquhart, stage left. After the capture of Singapore by the Japanese, Alistair was sent to Thailand as a slave to work on the railroad from Burma. Thousands of Allied soldiers died on this endeavor but Urquhart, surviving this, was sent to Japan on a prison ship where there was no light, sanitation, and nearly always standing room only. The conditions were horrifying enough, when the ship was torpedoed by an American sub and sank with all aboard. Urquhart managed to escape the ship and clung to a life raft for days at sea, alone. Picked up by a Japanese fishing boat, he was transferred to a prison camp just outside Nagasaki near the end of the war. He was working at the camp, when he was knocked over by a huge blast of wind from the atomic bomb dropped by a B-29 Superfortress. This heralded the end of the war for him and a few days later he was released.

He died in 2016 age 97, a man of Valor and pure will to survive. Valor is in you. Set it free.