It is 1:20 in the morning on the 12th of May, 1945. The monsoon has not yet broken over the Irrawaddy Valley. The air is thick and hot, and the jungle on the west bank of the river makes no sound at all. In a trench cut along a narrow jungle path near the village of Taungdaw, three men are listening.
They cannot see anything. They can only hear breathing somewhere out in the black. Then the grenades start landing. The first one drops on the lip of the trench. The smallest of the three men catches it and hurls it back into the darkness. It explodes. A second grenade lands directly inside the trench. He snatches it up and throws it back.
It explodes. A third grenade lands on the parapet. He lunges for it. It goes off in his right hand. His fingers are gone. His arm is shattered at the forearm. Shrapnel tears into his face, his chest, his right leg. He will never see clearly from his right eye again. His two comrades are now too badly wounded to fight, and at least 200 Japanese soldiers are rushing his position.
For the next 4 hours, Rifleman Lachhiman Gurung of the 4th Battalion, 8th Gurkha Rifles, alone, blinded on one side, working the bolt of his Lee-Enfield rifle with his left hand, reloads and fires at point-blank range. Between volleys, he shouts the same words into the dark in Nepali over and over again.
Aayo Gorkhali. The Gurkhas have come. Come and fight a Gurkha. When dawn breaks and his commanding officer reaches the position, he counts 87 Japanese dead in the area around the company. 31 of them are piled in front of the single trench of one man who stands 4 feet and 11 inches tall. In the months that follow, Field Marshal Lord Wavell will pin a small bronze cross onto Lachhiman’s chest at the Red Fort in Delhi.
That cross is the Victoria Cross. And in the ruins of Germany, in the letters soldiers write home from the Italian front and from the prisoner of war camps, a phrase has been circulating in whispers for more than a year. The little men from the mountains, the ones with the curved knives, the ones who walk through a position in silence and are gone before dawn, the ones the Germans have been calling not human.
Tonight we are going to find out where that phrase came from, what earned it, and why 80 years later Britain still owes these men a debt it has barely begun to repay. To understand the fear, you first have to understand the man. The story does not begin in 1939. It begins in 1814 in the foothills of the Himalayas where the East India Company pushed its frontier north and ran directly into the army of the kingdom of Gorkha.
The company expected the usual outcome, a brief campaign, a treaty, a new flag. Instead it lost battles, it lost generals. It lost far more men than anticipated against an enemy armed with a weapon the British soldiers had never seen before and would never entirely forget. After 2 years of fighting that embarrassed the most powerful colonial force in Asia, the Treaty of Sugauli was signed in December 1815 and ratified in March 1816.
And then something happened that has no real parallel in colonial history. Two British officers, working on the frontier, asked their late enemies if they would care to join the British Army. To their astonishment, thousands said yes. The Nasiri Battalion was raised in April 1815 before the war was even officially over.
It would eventually become the first King George V’s Own Gurkha Rifles. A second battalion raised by Lieutenant Frederick Young became the Sirmour Rifle Regiment, later the second King Edward VII’s Own Gurkha Rifles. A third became the third Queen Alexandra’s Own Gurkha Rifles. From the beginning the Gurkhas occupied a position unlike any other soldiers in the British Army.
They came from Nepal, which was never a British colony. They fought under the crown, but they remained subjects of their own king, their own gods, and their own hills. Under the definitions that modern international law would later apply to soldiers fighting for a foreign crown, they come uncomfortably close to the category of mercenary.
They are exempted only because they are formally and permanently incorporated into a state’s armed forces. They are not soldiers of fortune, but they are the only soldiers in the British Army who fight for a crown that is not their own. They come, almost always, from the high central and eastern hills of Nepal, from the districts of Gorkha, Lamjung, Chitwan, and Myagdi, among others.
They are recruited from four main hill peoples, the Gurungs and Magars in the west, the Rais and Limbus in the east. These are not lowland people. They grow up at altitudes of 3,000 to 8,000 ft on terraced hillsides where the nearest water source may be a 5-hour climb. By the time a hill boy is old enough to stand at the recruiting line, his legs are extraordinary, his lungs are extraordinary, and his relationship to physical hardship is something most soldiers raised in lower countries simply cannot replicate. In 1931, a professor of Sanskrit at the University of London named Sir Ralph Lilley Turner published the preface to his Nepali dictionary. Turner had served as an officer with the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Queen Alexandra’s Own Gurkha Rifles in Palestine during the First World War, where he won the Military Cross. He had watched these men fight and suffer and endure things that broke other soldiers, and he wrote this about them. As I write these last words, my thoughts
return to you who were my comrades, the stubborn and indomitable peasants of Nepal. Once more, I hear the laughter with which you greeted every hardship. Once more, I see you in your bivouacs or about your fires, or on forced march or in the trenches, now shivering with wet and cold, now scorched by a pitiless and burning sun.
Advertisements
Uncomplaining you endure hunger and thirst and wounds, and at the last your unwavering lines disappear into the smoke and wrath of battle. Bravest of the brave, most generous of the generous, never had country more faithful friends than you. Those words are now carved into the plinth of the Gurkha Memorial outside the Ministry of Defense in Whitehall in London.
They were earned over more than a century before anyone wrote them down. Now we need to talk about a piece of steel because the story of the Gurkhas and the fear they produced in their enemies cannot be understood without it. The kukri is a single-edged knife with a forward-curving blade between 16 and 18 inches long overall, weighing between 1 and 2 lb.
Its forward weight gives it the chopping power of a small axe. The inward curve of the blade means that as you draw it across a surface, the cutting edge bites in and pulls the cut deeper. It does not slash, it cleaves. The earliest surviving examples go back centuries. A kukri traditionally attributed to King Dravya Shah of Gorkha, the 16th century founder of the Gorkha Kingdom, is held in the National Museum of Nepal.
For a Nepalese hillman, the kukri is not primarily a weapon. It is a domestic tool used to split wood, prepare food, clear jungle growth, and to perform dozens of daily tasks. Every village house has one. Every boy receives his first kukri at adolescence as a mark of becoming a man. Accounts of Gurkhas using the kukri in close quarters combat exist in verified records from every conflict they have fought in.
In the Second World War, several Victoria Cross actions involved the kukri directly, as we will see. But the weapon’s greatest power was never purely physical. It was psychological. German and Japanese soldiers who had been briefed on the Gurkhas before encountering them began to behave differently at night.
Sentry discipline deteriorated. Men slept badly. A kind of dread settled into the positions facing them. The British military information services did nothing to discourage this. They publicized accounts of Gurkha night raids, of entire positions revisited at dawn with no sign of how entry had been made or how the small men with the curved knives had vanished again.
Some of these accounts were entirely accurate. Some were embellished, but the enemy believed all of them. A weapon that destroys an opponent’s sleep is doing more damage at midnight than at midday. Now the numbers, because the scale of what these men contributed deserves to be stated plainly. When Britain declared war on Germany in September the 1939, Nepal’s Maharaja Juddha Shamsher Rana placed the Nepalese army at the disposal of the British Crown.
He also contributed funds toward fighter aircraft during the Battle of Britain and sent money to the Lord Mayor of London for the relief of bombed families during the Blitz. In 1939, the Brigade of Gurkhas stood at roughly 20,000 men in 10 regiments. By 1945, it had expanded to approximately 43 battalions in the field with around 140,000 men serving in Gurkha regiments drawn from a Nepalese population of perhaps 6 million people.
Counting the Royal Nepalese army battalions deployed in India and other supporting roles, the total Nepali contribution to the British war effort was considerably larger still. They fought in every theater Britain fought in: in the Western Desert against Rommel, including the disaster of Tobruk in 1942, in Tunisia, in Sicily, up the long spine of Italy, in Syria, in Malaya and the catastrophic retreat to Singapore, in Greece, and above all in Burma, where roughly 35,000 Gurkhas served in the campaign. General William Slim would eventually turn from the longest fighting retreat in British military history into the largest single defeat inflicted on the Imperial Japanese Army anywhere in the war. The price they paid was brutal. According to official Brigade of Gurkha records, 7,539 Gurkhas were killed in action or died of wounds. A further 1,441 were posted missing, presumed dead.
14,082 were wounded. Total casualties, just over 23,000 men. In return, they earned 2,760 awards for gallantry or distinguished service. Among these were 12 Victoria Crosses awarded for actions during the Second World War, 10 of them to Nepalese Gurkha soldiers, two to British officers serving with Gurkha battalions.
They also earned 333 military medals. The 10 Nepalese men who won the Victoria Cross in that war deserve to be named. Subedar Lalbahadur Thapa, Havildar Gaje Ghale, Rifleman Ganjulama, Rifleman Tulbahadur Pun, Subedar Netrabahadur Thapa, Naik Agansing Rai, Rifleman Sherbahadur Thapa, Rifleman Thaman Gurung, Rifleman Bhanbhakta Gurung, and Rifleman Lachhiman Gurung.
Each of those names belongs to a man who did something that defies comfortable description. Tonight, we will go to the places where several of them did it. But before we do, one more thing needs to be said. Because the Gurkha story is often told as a story about warriors, as if bravery was simply a feature of the landscape, like the altitude of the hills.
It was not. Every man who enlisted made a choice. He left behind a family that depended on him. He traveled, often for the first time, out of the valley where he had grown up to a foreign army under foreign officers to fight in countries whose names he had never heard. Pay was one reason. A Gurkha rifleman’s wage, even modest by British standards, was enough to send remittances home that could keep a hill family fed, repair a roof, pay for a daughter’s wedding.
The hills of Nepal offered subsistence farming on vertical terraces and very little else. The army offered a wage, a profession, and a pension. But pay was not the whole of it. The deeper motive was the one the Nepali word izzat names. It means honor, reputation, the regard of the village.
To be the son who went and came back with the crossed kukris on his sleeve, to be the father whose son followed him into the regiment. Service in the British Gurkhas was and remains a family tradition reaching back in some cases to men who fought alongside British forces at the siege of Delhi in 1857. The Lakimans and the Tul Bahadurs and the Ban Bagtas were not born brave.
They were raised in a culture that treated courage as the baseline expectation of a man and anything less as a mark against his family that no amount of land or money could erase. A coward’s shame did not die with him. It followed his children. It sat over the family name in the village like weather.
The choice to enlist was a choice made inside that understanding, knowing that whatever happened in the mountains of Italy or the jungles of Burma, the family would be watching from the hillside back home. The regimental motto in Nepali translates exactly as this, better to die than to be a coward. That is not a slogan.
It is a standard and it is what the Victoria Cross citations are made of. The first Gurkha to win the Victoria Cross in the Second World War was Subedar Lalbahadur Thapa of the First Battalion, Second King Edward the Seventh’s Own Gurkha Rifles and the Sirmoor Rifles. The action took place on the night of the 5th and 6th of April, 1943, in Tunisia, during the Battle of Wadi Akarit.
The 8th Army had broken through the Mareth Line and was pressing north. Its path was blocked by a series of ridgelines above the Wadi Akarit. One of these, a feature called the Ras ez Zuaï, rose steeply from a narrow gorge in near vertical walls and was defended by machine guns covering every approach. Lalbahadur Thapa led the two remaining sections of his platoon in total darkness up a narrow cleft in the rock face.
The moment the enemy heard them, the cleft became a killing ground. At the first post he reached, he killed two enemy soldiers with his kukri and two more with his revolver. At the crest, he and his riflemen together killed four more and the rest fled. He held the position alone until the rest of his men climbed up behind him.
Two machine gun posts were silenced. The ridge was taken. He was the first, but not the last. Six weeks later, in the Chin Hills of Burma, a Havildar named Gaje Ghale of the 2nd Battalion, 5th Royal Gurkha Rifles, led an assault on a Japanese position called Bashat East Hill over 4 days from the 24th of May, 1943, with a decisive assault on the 25th.
The approach to the hill was in places no more than 5 yd wide, swept by machine guns, mortars, and artillery. Two previous assaults had broken on those slopes. When Ghale’s platoon was stopped on the approach by Japanese fire and a grenade exploded near him, blasting shrapnel into his arm, chest, and leg, he kept moving.
Covered in his own blood, throwing grenades with his unwounded arm, screaming “Ayo Gorkhali!” into the smoke, he drove his platoon into the Japanese positions. The fighting was hand-to-hand. The counterattacks went on for hours. He held the hill. Only when the position was secure did he allow himself to be carried to the aid post.
His Victoria Cross was the first awarded to a Nepalese Gurkha for action against the Japanese. He received it from Field Marshal Lord Wavell at the Red Fort in Delhi in January 1944 before a crowd of 5,000. A year later in the summer of 1944, the war in Asia reached its turning point. The Japanese launched their largest ever land offensive in the attempt to invade India striking toward Imphal and Kohima.
The battles that followed in the heat and the monsoon and the jungle terrain of Manipur were among the most savage of the entire war in any theater. On the 12th of June, 1944, at a village called Ningthoukhong on the Tiddim Road near Imphal, the Japanese broke through with tanks. Rifleman Ganjurama of the 1st Battalion, 7th Gurkha Rifles was the number one on the company’s projector infantry anti-tank team.
He crawled out alone across ground swept by crossfire. Enemy fire broke his left wrist as he moved forward. Two further wounds followed, one in his right hand and one in his leg. He got within 30 yards of the lead Japanese tank and fired. He destroyed it. He fired again and destroyed a second.
Then he crawled forward and threw grenades at the crews as they tried to escape their burning vehicles. He stopped the armor. He was carried from the field unconscious from blood loss. He had won the Military Medal weeks earlier on that same road. He was 19 years old. 11 days later and 200 miles to the north in the monsoon mud of a town called Mogong, the Chindits of 77 Brigade were fighting to recapture the first major town in Burma to be retaken from the Japanese during the 1944 campaign.
The approach to the town’s railway bridge was blocked by a heavily defended position the British called the Red House. On the 23rd of June, 1944, a section of the 3rd Battalion, 6th Gurkha Rifles began the assault. Within seconds, every man in the section was hit. The section commander fell. One other rifleman fell. Only rifleman Tul Bahadur Pun, age 21, was still standing.
He picked up the section’s Bren gun. He fired it from the hip. And he charged the red house alone across roughly 30 yards of waterlogged ground under direct fire through the full weight of the Japanese defense. He reached the building. He killed three Japanese inside. He drove five more out into the open and shot them down.
He captured two light machine guns and their ammunition. Then he turned the captured weapons on the next position and gave covering fire until the rest of his platoon closed up behind him. The bridge fell. Mogaung fell. On that same day, in the same action, Captain Michael Allmand of the 6th Gurkha Rifles also won the Victoria Cross, dying of wounds shortly after.
Two bronze crosses from one battalion on one morning of one battle. Three days later, back at Bishanpur near Imphal, two more Victoria Crosses were earned in 24 hours. On the night of the 25th and 26th of June, Subedar Netrabahadur Thapa was holding an exposed hilltop position called Mortar Bluff with a garrison of 41 men 400 yards from the nearest support.
The Japanese came at him in the dark in greatly superior numbers. He held them off through the night. By dawn, his ammunition was nearly gone and his men were dying around him. Reinforcements came up the slope. He refused to leave. He was killed leading a final counterattack. His body was found with his kukri in hand and a dead Japanese soldier with a cleft skull beside him.
His Victoria Cross was posthumous. The morning of the 26th of June brought Naik Agansing Rai of the same battalion into action at a neighboring feature called Water Picquet. His company was pinned down by a machine gun on Mortar Bluff and a 37-mm gun firing from the jungle. Men were dying in the open. Agansing Rai charged the machine gun post with his section, killing three of the four crew himself.
His men killed the fourth. He then led what remained of his section toward the artillery position. Three men were hit crossing the open ground. He reached the gun and killed three of the five crew, his men the other two. And then before the next position could rally, he advanced alone, a grenade in one hand and a Thompson submachine gun in the other, drove the grenade into the bunker entrance, followed it in, and killed all four occupants in a single burst.
Both features were retaken. The line held. This was what happened in one 24-hour period on one small section of the Burma front involving men of one battalion. But if the Burma campaign produced the greatest concentration of documented Gurkha heroism in the Second World War, Italy was the place that produced the deepest and most lasting fear in the German enemy.
Monte Cassino, a Benedictine monastery founded in the year 529, standing on a 1,000-ft limestone outcrop above the only road north to Rome. The Germans had placed some of their finest soldiers beneath it, the First Fallschirmjäger Division, paratroopers who had already proven themselves among the toughest infantry in the world.
Two previous Allied assaults in January and February of 1944 had been broken on those slopes. The third assault began on the 15th of March 1944 following a massive aerial bombardment that reduced the town below the monastery to rubble. In the confusion of that night, Company C of the First Battalion, Ninth Gurkha Rifles, under Major Drinkall, slipped through a gap in the German line.
By morning, they were dug in on a feature called 0.435, roughly 250 to 300 yd from the monastery walls. The British called it Hangman’s Hill for a wooden scaffolding structure visible on its crest. For 9 days, the 1st Battalion, 9th Gurkha Rifles held Hangman’s Hill against everything the German paratroopers threw at them.
Snipers, mortars, repeated counterattacks, a company strength. They had gone in carrying only what they could hold in their webbing. Airdropped resupply missed them and landed in German positions. They ate dead Germans’ rations. They drank rainwater. They held. On the night of the 24th of March, they were ordered to withdraw.
They came out in darkness carrying their wounded on their comrades’ backs and reached British lines almost without loss. Cassino itself fell on the 18th of May, 1944, to the Polish 2nd Corps after a fourth Allied assault. The Italian campaign continued north through the summer and autumn of 1944, and two more Gurkha Victoria Crosses were earned on those hills.
In September, Rifleman Sher Bahadur Thapa of the 1st Battalion, 9th Gurkha Rifles, the same battalion that had held Hangman’s Hill, single-handedly silenced several German machine gun positions near San Marino before being killed at point-blank range while attempting to carry a wounded comrade to safety.
His Victoria Cross was posthumous. In November, Rifleman Tul Bahadur Gurung of the 1st Battalion, 5th Royal Gurkha Rifles held a burning hilltop position alone near Monte San Bartolo, crossing a bare skyline again and again under direct fire to allow his comrades to withdraw, and was killed doing it.
His Victoria Cross was posthumous, also. These men did not become famous. Their names are not known to the same audience that knows Lachhiman Gurung or Tul Bahadur Pun, but their citations carry the same weight. They died in the same cause with the same standard in mind. In the Commonwealth War Cemetery at Cassino today, Gurkha soldiers lie among the more than 4,000 Commonwealth dead.
Each headstone marked with the crossed kukris of their regiment. The German paratroopers at Cassino were not inexperienced men. They had fought across North Africa, in Sicily, and on every hard defensive position in Italy. And yet the accounts that came out of that division described something consistent about the period when the Gurkhas were on the opposite slopes.
German veterans recalled night patrols in which sentries were found killed silently without any sound of engagement. Officers described a deterioration in sentry discipline and a reluctance to hold exposed forward positions after dark. The phrase Indian troops with the curved knives began appearing in unit level warnings distributed to the forward positions.
These were not men who frightened easily, but the Gurkhas frightened them. The specific phrase not human attributed to German soldiers in several popular histories of the Gurkhas has never been traced to a verifiable primary document. It may have been written. It may be a later condensation of a feeling many men expressed less precisely.
The fear behind it was without question. And there were specific reasons why that fear was rational. Gurkha night infiltration tactics were built on skills developed over decades of service on the Northwest Frontier of India. A Gurkha section could cross difficult terrain in darkness without producing the small metallic sounds, the coughs, the accidental scrapes that gave away other infantry.
They moved as individuals rather than as a line, each man responsible for his own silence. British veterans who served alongside Gurkha units have described a standing precaution that was issued as a written order in certain theaters. If a Gurkha sentry returns from patrol at night, do not challenge him verbally in darkness without first making sure you are wearing your steel helmet.
The Gurkha sentry identifies friend from foe in the dark by feeling for the brim of the helmet before he acts. Without the brim, he acts. It was not a joke. The targeting of officers and senior non-commissioned officers in night raids was also not random. Japanese and German after-action reports from multiple theaters show the same pattern repeatedly.
Ordinary soldiers found alive in positions where their leaders had been killed silently. A unit that wakes up with its commanding officer dead and no sound of engagement during the night does not recover as quickly as one that loses the same man in a firefight. And then there was the closing assault.
The moment when the Gurkha section, having closed to within yards of a position in silence, would rise and charge, kukris drawn, screaming “Ayo Gorkhali!” into the face of whatever was waiting for them. By 1944, that battle cry alone, heard in the dark by a Japanese unit that recognized it, was producing results that even the most skeptical staff officer could not dismiss.
History has seen this response in many places. The Romans described the charge of the Gauls as a fura, a kind of possession that no tactical doctrine could account for. The Persians reported to Xerxes after Thermopylae that the Spartans they faced were not men but demons, beings who combed their long hair before dying.
The Germans of 1914 reported to Berlin that the rate of aimed fire from the British Expeditionary Force at Mons was impossible for human beings working bolt action rifles. It could only, they concluded, be machine guns. It was not. It was trained men keeping their nerve, firing 15 aimed rounds a minute from a rifle that looked to the enemy like a machine gun because trained men in terrible danger make it look like one.
Every army in history has encountered opponents who do not behave the way fear dictates they should. And every army has reached for the same vocabulary in response. What made the Gurkhas different from most recipients of this particular fear is that the documented record supports it. The actions in the Victoria Cross citations are not legends or tradition.
They were signed by commanding officers, corroborated by witnesses, published in the London Gazette, and the bodies were counted. Now we come to the action that, among those who have studied the Gurkhas most carefully, is perhaps the most extraordinary single engagement of the entire war. On the 5th of March, 1945, in the Arakan coastal campaign, the 3rd Battalion of the 2nd King Edward the 7th’s own Gurkha Rifles was ordered to recapture a hill called Snowdon East, near the village of Tamandu. The position had been taken and then lost to a Japanese counterattack. Rifleman Bhanbhagta Gurung was 23 years old. He had already served on the first Chindit expedition in 1943 and had been reduced in rank from corporal to rifleman after an incident in which a confused officer sent him to hold the wrong hill, a decision later determined not to have been his fault. He had never been restored to his former rank. His section advanced up the slope
towards Snowdon East and was immediately stopped by a Japanese sniper firing from concealment in a tree 75 yd away. From the prone position, with fire coming from multiple directions, no one in the section could locate the sniper well enough to engage him. Bhanbhagta stood up fully, exposed to everything aimed at his position, located the sniper, and shot him out of the tree single rifle round.
Then he lay back down. The section advanced again. 20 yd from the objective, automatic fire from a line of Japanese foxholes stopped them completely and men began to fall. Bhanbhagta got up without waiting for any order and ran alone at the first foxhole, threw in two grenades, and killed both occupants.
He moved to the second foxhole and killed its occupant with his bayonet. He cleared a third and a fourth the same way. During this single-handed clearance of four consecutive positions, a reinforced machine gun bunker at the northern end of the hill had been firing continuously at him and missing. That bunker was preventing two platoons from advancing.
Pun Bhagta sprinted across open ground toward it and jumped onto its roof. He had no grenades left. He had two smoke grenades of the type designated number 77. He pulled the pins and dropped both of them through the bunker’s firing slit. Two Japanese soldiers ran out of the bunker entrance blinded by smoke.
He killed them both with his kukri. He went into the bunker. A third Japanese gunner was still inside, still at the weapon. Pun Bhagta killed him and captured the light machine gun. He then organized the surviving members of his section into the captured bunker and held it against the counterattack.
Pun Bhagta Gurung left the army in January 1946, restored to the honorary rank of Havildar, to look after his widowed mother and his young family in their hill village in Nepal. His descendants later served in the same regiment. Asked in later life what he had been thinking in the moments before he climbed onto the roof of that bunker, he is reported to have said that it was his job, nothing more. It was his job.
And so we return to where we began. Lachhiman Gurung, Taungdaw, the 12th of May, 1945. 4 hours alone in a trench on a jungle path, one hand gone, one eye fading, at least 200 soldiers in the dark, 31 of them dead in front of one position by the time the light came up. On the 27th of July, 1945, his citation appeared in the London Gazette.
On the 19th of December, 1945, at the Red Fort in Delhi, Field Marshal Lord Wavell pinned the Victoria Cross to his chest. His father, a man of 74 who had never seen a city, was carried for 11 days from his hill village in Nepal so that he could be there to watch. Lachhiman returned home to a small plot of land, a handful of buffaloes, a wife, and eventually five children.
He said when asked in later years how he had endured those four hours in the dark with one hand and the weight of 200 men against him that he had felt certain he was going to die anyway, and had decided he might as well die standing on his feet. He moved to Hounslow in London in 2008.
He died there on the 12th of December 2010, aged 92. But the story of where he spent the decades between his investiture and his arrival in Britain is the story that perhaps matters most. Because Lachhiman Gurung and Tul Bahadur Pun and Bhanubhakta Gurung and the hundreds of thousands of men who served beside them did not come home from the Second World War to the country they had fought for.
They came home to Nepal. They came home to their villages, and for 50 years the British government treated them as a separate and lesser category of veteran. Until 2009, Gurkhas who retired before 1997 had no right to settle in the United Kingdom. Their pensions were set at a fraction of those paid to British soldiers of equivalent rank.
In practical terms, this meant that Tul Bahadur Pun, the man who had charged the Red House at Mogong alone with a Bren gun in 1944, was living in his final years at 4,000 ft in the hills of western Nepal in a house without electricity or running water, collecting a British pension of around 132 pounds a month.
He died on the 20th of April 2011 at his home in Nepal, aged 88. That is how Britain treated a Victoria Cross holder in the first decade of the 21st century. The campaign to change this began quietly with a Liberal Democrat counselor in Folkestone named Peter Carroll, who in 2003 was approached by a Gurkha veteran facing deportation after more than 20 years of service.
Carol began to organize. By 2008, the campaign had acquired the public face that would finally force a political decision. That face belonged to the actress Joanna Lumley, whose father, Major James Lumley, had served for 30 years in the 6th Gurkha Rifles, fought as a Chindit in Burma, and had been at Mogong in 1944 as second in command of the 3rd Battalion, 6th Gurkha Rifles, the same battalion as Tul Bahadur Pun on the same day.
On the 30th of September, 2008, the High Court ruled that the government’s policy on pre-1997 Gurkha veterans was unlawful. The government published new criteria that would have allowed fewer than 100 Gurkhas to qualify. The campaign went back to Parliament. On the 29th of April, 2009, the House of Commons passed a Liberal Democrat motion, granting all Gurkha veterans the right to settle in Britain.
The first opposition motion to defeat the Brown government on a substantive issue during that Parliament. On the 21st of May, 2009, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith announced in the Commons that all Gurkha veterans with at least four years of service would be allowed to settle in the United Kingdom. It had taken 64 years after the end of the war for Britain to grant these men the right to live in the country they had defended.
The Brigade of Gurkhas continues to serve. The Royal Gurkha Rifles are the current infantry formation, deployed over the past two decades in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Balkans, Mali, and the Baltic. Selection in Nepal draws around 25,000 candidates each year for a few hundred places.
To be considered, a candidate must carry 25 kg in a traditional doko basket, supported by a tumpline across his forehead, uphill over a course of roughly 5 km in under 48 minutes. The ones who pass are, as they have always been, something apart. The Indian Army maintains seven Gurkha regiments comprising approximately 39 battalions.
The Sultan of Brunei keeps a Gurkha reserve unit. The Singapore Police Force maintains a Gurkha contingent as its specialist counter-terrorism force. The name and the reputation have spread far beyond the crown that first recruited these men two centuries ago. The last surviving holder of the Victoria Cross won in a Gurkha regiment was Captain Rambahadur Limbu of the 2nd Battalion, 10th Princess Mary’s Own Gurkha Rifles, who won his cross in Borneo on the 21st of November 1965 fighting during the Indonesian Confrontation.
He died on the 21st of April 2023 in Kathmandu, aged 83. He had kept his Victoria Cross in a small box in his bedroom and took it out on occasions of ceremony. He said that it belonged not to him alone, but to every Gurkha soldier who had ever served. There is a question worth sitting with before we close.
What does it mean to say that someone is not human? When German soldiers in Italy or Japanese soldiers in Burma used that phrase or phrases very like it about the men from the hills of Nepal who came at them in the dark with curved knives and did not stop when they should have stopped, what were they actually saying? They were not describing monsters.
They knew they were facing men. Small men, younger than most of them, fed from the same basic human biology of hunger and exhaustion and pain. They had seen enough of them dead to know that. What they were describing was the absence of something they had counted on.
The moment when a rational man stops advancing, when the weight of incoming fire and the cost of moving forward becomes too high, when self-preservation does what it is supposed to do. That moment in battle is both universal and fragile. It is what tactics are built around. It is what artillery suppression and machine gun fire and defensive depth are all designed to produce.
You do not need to kill every attacker. You only need to convince enough of them that advancing will cost more than stopping. The Gurkhas in engagement after engagement failed to be convinced. Not because they could not feel fear, not because the mathematics of casualties and terrain did not apply to them, but because they had decided in a way that was cultural and familial and utterly deliberate that there was something worth more than survival.
Not glory, not abstract patriotism, but izzat, the honor of the family, the reputation that outlasts the man. When you understand that, the German whisper in the Italian night makes a different kind of sense. They were not saying these men have no feelings. They were saying these men have feelings we cannot use against them.
We have no lever. The thing we rely on, the thing every army in every war relies on, does not work here. Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw, who was gravely wounded fighting the Japanese in Burma in 1942 and earned an immediate Military Cross on the battlefield, is famously quoted as having said this, “If a man says he is not afraid of dying, he is either lying or he is a Gurkha.
” He knew what he was talking about. The Gurkha Memorial stands today outside the Ministry of Defense in Whitehall. The statue, cast in bronze, shows a Gurkha rifleman in the uniform of the Second World War. On its plinth are the words of Sir Ralph Turner, “Bravest of the brave, most generous of the generous, never had country more faithful friends than you.
7,539 of those friends never went home. 14,000 more came home carrying wounds. The rest came home to their villages, to their terraced hillsides, to the buffaloes and the rice paddies, and the families that had waited for them and spent decades collecting a fraction of what their service had been worth to a country that had not yet decided they were entitled to live in it.
Britain’s debt to the Gurkhas is not a matter of sentiment. It is a matter of record. Of the hours spent in the dark at Taungdau and Mogong and Wadiakarit and Hangman’s Hill. Of 31 Japanese dead in front of one trench held by one man who decided before the grenades ever started landing that dying on his feet was acceptable and stopping was not.
The Gurkha Welfare Trust today supports thousands of elderly veterans and widows still living in Nepal. The campaign for full pension equality between pre- and post-1997 veterans has not yet ended. In the summer of 2021, Gurkha veterans held a hunger strike outside Downing Street to demand pension parity.
The government acknowledged their service, offered some concessions, and the gap in pension rights remains. Justice in 2026 is still not complete. The story of the Gurkhas is not a story about warriors who felt no fear. It is a story about what human beings can decide about themselves before a battle begins and what that decision costs and what it is worth and who pays for it in the end.
That is why the Germans said what they said. That is why, eight decades later, the small bronze cross pinned to the chests of 10 Nepalese hillmen between 1943 and 1945 still matters. And that is why, when a Gurkha veteran walks past you on Remembrance Sunday in Whitehall, the appropriate response is not admiration at a comfortable distance.
It is recognition of a specific and unfinished obligation. The Gurkhas were not human. They were the most precisely, deliberately, uncompromisingly human soldiers in the war. Ayo Gorkhali. The Gurkhas have come.
