Forced to dig his own grave, then kneel as a Japanese sadist raised a sword to behead him. The lion-hearted uncle who taught Chris Hoy to NEVER give up

Inspiration: Andy Coogan, in 1941, displayed many heroic traits that his great nephew Chris Hoy may have inherited

Under the blazing sun, Andy Coogan — his body emaciated by dysentery, malnutrition, years of crushing slave labour and the beatings administered by vicious guards — scratched away at the jungle floor, digging a grave for his dead mate, Speedy, one of hundreds who succumbed to Japanese brutality in the work camp where they were held as British prisoners-of-war.
Out of respect — a scant commodity in that Pacific hell-hole — he dug deep to bury his friend out of the reach of scavenging animals, deeper than the sadistic Lieutenant Suzuki in charge of the detail had demanded.
The Japanese officer, furious at being disobeyed, screamed at him to stop but Coogan — skeletal and dressed in nothing more than a loincloth — ploughed on until Speedy was decently buried.
As he finished and put down his spade, Suzuki eyed him coldly. ‘Dig another grave,’ he then ordered, ‘for yourself. Tomorrow you die.’
It was a threat the terrified Coogan had no doubt would be carried out as he spent a sleepless night, ticking down his last hours on earth. He had suffered every form of physical abuse as a prisoner of the Japanese since the fall of Singapore in February 1942.
He had been starved and beaten to a pulp, seen comrades used as bayonet practice, heard the swish of canes and samurai swords, witnessed heads lopped from shoulders, felt the victor’s heel on his own neck and escaped by the skin of his teeth for three-and-a-half terrible years.
But now it seemed his endurance and his courage would be to no avail. The end had come. He was doomed.
Come the morning, however, there was another dead POW to dispose of from the over-crowded, fly-blown, rat-infested huts. Coogan buried the fresh corpse, and Suzuki told him again. ‘Dig another grave, for tomorrow you die.’
The same happened the next day, and the one after that. The mental torture continued for days, until Suzuki tired of the game.
Coogan survived. But seven decades later, aged 95, those terrible experiences still haunt him — as they also haunt, and inspire, a celebrated member of his family.
For Andy Coogan is the great-uncle of Olympic superman and six-time gold medallist Chris Hoy, Britain’s greatest Olympian, whose sporting pre-eminence was underlined on the cycling track at London 2012 just days ago.

Hoy is a sporting legend but he would be the first to admit that, for guts, endurance and strength of body and mind, his Uncle Andy is in a different league. The word ‘hero’ has been sprinkled with casual abandon during the Olympics. In someone like Coogan, we are reminded of its true meaning.
No wonder that Hoy nominated his uncle to carry the Olympic flame when it passed through Scotland in June on its journey to London. He did so, in white tracksuit, clutching his mobility frame and waving to the crowds.
It was fitting, not least because Coogan had been an athlete with international potential in his youth, a middle-distance runner who challenged the best in Britain before the war ended his promising career.

Golden boy: Britain's Chris Hoy celebrates after the track cycling men's keirin finals at London 2012 - his great Uncle is his inspiration

His story — told in his own words in a new book — is as remarkable as any that I, as a historian of World War II, have ever encountered.
Even without the Hoy connection, it would command our respect. That it inspired his gold-medal-winning  great-nephew to take on the world and beat it, simply adds to its impact.
Coogan began life with virtually nothing, one of seven children born to Irish parents growing up in the slums of the Gorbals in Glasgow between the wars. There he learned the resourcefulness and survival instincts that would save his life years later.
He was a Billy Whizz of a kid, always on the go, scrounging, selling on, running errands, making sixpence here, a shilling there. The day he showed he could outrun the fastest local policeman, he was invited to take up athletics as a serious pastime and joined the Maryhill Harriers, one of Scotland’s oldest athletics clubs and a breeding ground for champions.
He was good. In one race, he came close to beating the holder of the world record for the mile, Sydney Wooderson, in front of 90,000 people at Ibrox Stadium. ‘I allowed myself to dream of running in the Olympics,’ Coogan, a painter and decorator, recalled.

Determined: Andy Coogan, despite his frailty, carried the Olympic flame in his home town in Scotland

But the outbreak of war changed everything. He was called up, and in 1941 Private Coogan of the Lanarkshire Yeomanry found himself heading in a troopship to the Far East.
He was a signaller in the jungles of northern Malaya when the Japanese invaded and began carving their way down the peninsula. Here he first heard the blood-curdling cries of ‘Banzai!’ and tasted action in hand-to-hand fighting.
The British retreated southwards for six weeks, fighting all the way. After walking 70 miles in the last five days, he managed to make it to the ‘safety’ of the island of Singapore, only for the British forces — cut off and with no air defences — to surrender in what Churchill described as the worst disaster in our history.
Along with 100,000 other Allied soldiers, Coogan was squeezed behind barbed wire in a tiny corner of the island known as Changi.
Conditions were terrible from the start — not just from the rampant disease, over-flowing latrines and lack of food apart from maggot-filled rice, but from the humiliation of proud men as the Japanese, contemptuous of their prisoners, tried to break their spirit.
Coogan, a devout Catholic, was forced at gunpoint to trade punches with an Irish priest he knew and respected, as a punishment for forgetting to bow to the Japanese flag on the bonnet of a staff car. It was slug it out for the amusement of the guards or die where they stood.
A more wretched existence did not seem possible, but there was worse to come after the prisoners at Changi were selected for work parties. Many were shipped off to jungle camps on the Thailand-Burma border to build the notorious Death railway. Coogan escaped this for what was arguably a worse fate — three weeks packed like sick and dying sardines into the battened-down hold of a stinking cattle ship for transportation across the war-torn Pacific.
‘The hold swarmed with biting bluebottles, rats and cockroaches. In the darkness, it was as if we were entombed in a floating black hole of Calcutta.’
In boats like this, 20,000 prisoners died, many driven mad by thirst and starvation. ‘From time to time, the Japanese would open the hatches and amuse themselves by urinating on us.
‘When they lowered down water, men would fight each other to get a drink. Decent men were reduced to animals.’
But things were even worse at their destination — the island of Formosa, off the mainland of China. Here they were marched up into the mountains, slapped and clubbed along the way, shivering in freezing rain, to a copper mine where they were put to work.

Legend: Sir Chris Hoy - a true British sporting hero

The terror was constant. ‘Men counted how often they were beaten in a day — the record was nine times. A guard we called the Beast pounced on me one day and with his rifle butt smashed my glasses and my toes.
‘As I cried out in pain, I lost control of my weakened bowels — and he just laughed as he continued to strike my legs and thighs. I went down and he kicked my face, breaking my nose and knocking out my front teeth.
‘I lay there at the mercy of this maniac and I hoped he would kill me. Eventually he let me go and I limped away, a sobbing, bloodied mess.’
Coogan came close to death as dysentery gripped his enfeebled body, ‘tearing at my guts and stripping out my stomach lining in agonising cramps’. In the camp hospital, he lay on a platform drifting in and out of consciousness. The voice of his friend, the Catholic priest, kept him from giving in, taking him back to his running days. ‘Come on, Andy! A lap to go!’
Somehow — with that same determination his nephew seems to have inherited — he pulled himself back from the brink and lived on, each horrific day at a time.
His struggle was of a magnitude almost impossible to comprehend. The work was crippling: 12-hour shifts below ground in darkness and stifling heat, digging rocks, accompanied by vicious beatings.
He went blind for a fortnight from vitamin deficiency. He was buried alive when the roof caved in and was dragged out just in time. Men were dying all around him. He remembered his triumphs on the running track and willed himself on.

Family man: Sir Chris Hoy celebrating his gold medal with his wife Sarra after he won the Team Sprint Final at the Velodrome

After a year of this, Coogan, still clinging on, was dispatched to a different camp to clear stones from the land around a sugar-cane factory. Life here was marginally better — until he crossed Lieutenant Suzuki and was put through the torture of digging his own grave.
Surviving that was miracle enough, but then Coogan dared to defy the Japanese officer again, hurling a basket at the man’s head in anger.
Suzuki sent for the camp commandant, the notoriously cruel Lieutenant Tamaki. ‘He strode towards me, his face creased with hatred and contempt, and ordered me to my knees. “Oh Christ! This is it,” I thought, as I sank to the parched Formosan soil. I felt warm water run down the inside of my legs.
‘Tamaki towered above me, drew his sword and held it aloft in the tropical sun. “Say goodbye to your friends,” he said.
‘My comrades were shouting out for mercy but my mind was back with my mother and father and my brothers and sister on the streets of Glasgow. I was sure I was going to die.
‘Then I felt a stunning blow on my head and I blacked out. For some reason he had hit me with the flat of his sword. My head was bursting but somehow I had survived another close encounter with death.’
By now, the war was nearing its end. American planes were seen overhead and the prisoners waved and cheered in expectation of deliverance. The ordeal was almost over for Andy — but not quite.
There was another journey in a ship’s hold during which, for some trivial infringement, he was tied naked to the mast as the vessel ploughed through heavy seas in freezing weather. He wept with pain and his 7st body shook uncontrollably before the ship brought him to a port by the name of . . . Nagasaki.

The nightmares were terrible. I would wake to find myself soaked in sweat 

In a coal mine 30 miles from the city he was once again put to slavery below ground. There were more beatings, more deaths of comrades, but also chances to use his ingenuity — his Gorbals street training — to steal food, however great the risk.
Rumour was rife that they were digging their own graves, driving a tunnel into the rock in which they would be buried alive. He thought it unbearable that ‘we could have survived so much only to be slaughtered on the eve of liberation’, but the threat was all too real.
And then, out of the blue, came salvation. ‘I emerged from the mine one day and saw great clouds in the sky to the south.’ Though Coogan did not know until much later, the second US atom bomb had just obliterated Nagasaki.
The war was over. Japan surrendered. After three-and-a-half years in unspeakable hell, he could go home.
It was a human wreck who returned to Glasgow. At the railway station, his mother did not recognise him. ‘It’s me, Maw,’ he said softly to her. ‘Oh Andrew, what have they done to you?’ she cried.
What they had done would never leave him. ‘The nightmares were terrible. I would wake to find myself soaked in sweat.’ His brothers recall him sitting bolt upright in bed shouting, ‘You bastards! I’m coming back for you, Tamaki and Suzuki.’
‘Even in my 90s,’ he writes, ‘my sleep is disturbed by the brutal faces of those two men.’
Nor would his shattered body ever reach the athletic heights of his pre-war running days. Instead he devoted his love for the sport to coaching others and the establishment of an athletics club in his adopted town of Carnoustie.
But — perhaps most extraordinarily of all — he has found the strength to forgive, if not those individuals who still haunt his dreams, then the Japanese people.
When in his 80s, he was caddying at the local golf links, he found himself carrying the clubs of the Japanese ambassador. Here was his chance to speak his mind about all he had endured, to get the justifiable hatred off his chest, to return some of the contempt dished out to him.
He stayed silent, out of natural dignity and principle. ‘Bitterness and hatred are self-destructive,’ explains this gentle and humble man — to the admiration of his great-nephew.
‘He has seen such horrendous things, yet he isn’t negative or bitter,’ says Hoy, who, aged eight, with tape recorder in hand, ‘interviewed’ his great-uncle for a school project and sat goggle-eyed with amazement as the stories of quiet heroism and endurance unfolded.
Andy Coogan is an object lesson to us all. When it comes to handing out gold medals for an indomitable life well lived, then Andy surely deserves an Olympian rostrum all of his own.