Wednesday, September 17, 2008 by The Chief.

From today’s San Francisco Chronicle:

Seeing Pampanito, 64 years after a near death

Carl Nolte, Chronicle Staff Writer

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

To most visitors, the submarine Pampanito is a curiosity, a memorial to another time and place berthed near the restaurants and tourist attractions of San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf.

Alistair Urquhart, an 89-year-old Scot and retired businessman, knows better. Urquhart was nearly killed by the Pampanito. It happened 64 years ago this month, when the sleek, gray submarine torpedoed and sank the Japanese transport ship Kachidoki Maru. He was aboard the ship and barely escaped with his life.

It was one of the tragic incidents of World War II. Unknown to the U.S. Navy sailors aboard the Pampanito, the Japanese ship was carrying more than 900 British prisoners of war, many of them survivors of construction of the “Railway of Death” in Thailand, an experience made famous in the movie, “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”

Three hundred eighty prisoners died as a result of the attack. For five days, Urquhart, covered with fuel oil, starving and nearly dead, drifted in the South China Sea.

Urquhart was one of the lucky ones. On the fifth day, Sept. 17, 1944, he was picked up by a Japanese whaling ship, taken to Japan and- still a prisoner - forced to work in a coal mine.

This week, he stood on the deck of the old submarine to tell his story.

It was one of those strange coincidences. Both Urquhart and the boat that nearly killed him survived the war.

The old man had come to San Francisco from his home in Scotland to see the submarine, drawn by a pull of memory he couldn’t explain. . . .

More: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/09/16/BAGD12UGKD.DTL

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Monday, September 8, 2008 by The Chief.

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