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No wonder enemies just turn and run! Felling four foes with one bullet. Slicing off heads with a swing of a knife. As they mark 200 years as our most awesome warriors, a new book reveals why you should NEVER cross a Gurkha
It was May 1945, and British Empire Forces had the Japanese in retreat. But the men knew their epic struggle was not yet over. Their battalion, 4/8th Gurkhas, had been ordered to cut off the formidable 54th Japanese Division as they headed south.
And the retreating Japanese were far from beaten. They fought more fanatically than ever, mounting suicide attacks, and remained merciless to those they captured: British, Indian and Gurkha soldiers had been found crucified on trees, or tied up and bayoneted to death.
Now, positioned at a valley through which the Japanese would have to pass, the Gurkhas dug in and waited. The rifleman, Lachhiman Gurung, and his comrades checked their ammunition pouches and felt for their kukris, their traditional Nepalese curved knives. All was quiet save a few murmured prayers.
Then, at 1.20am, the silence was shattered by a rattle of bullets and a hail of grenades. The Japanese assault had begun.
Lachhiman was in the advance position of the forward-most company. If this post fell, the company behind them and then the whole valley would fall. Knowing this, the Japanese concentrated their fire on his position, determined to knock it out.
Grenades hammered down. One hit the lip of the trench. Before it could explode, Lachhiman grabbed it and hurled it back at the enemy. Then another fell. Again, he snatched it up and threw it back. A third grenade fell just in front of the trench.
He tried to throw it back once more — but this time it exploded in his hand, blowing off his fingers, shattering his right arm and severely wounding him in the face, body and right leg. His two comrades, badly wounded, lay helpless in the trench.
The enemy, sensing victory, surged screaming up the slope. It seemed impossible that the forward post would not be overrun, and with it the entire company.
But then, to the astonishment of those in nearby trenches, a small figure — Lachhiman was less than 5ft tall — stood up, blood cascading from his wounds. Using his left hand he continuously loaded and fired his rifle at the enemy, just feet away.
Wave after wave of fanatical Japanese attacks were repulsed as the tiny rifleman fired continuously at point-blank range, giving not an inch of ground. For four hours he fought on, his magnificent example inspiring those around him to stand firm, despite the overwhelming odds.
For three days and two nights the fighting raged as the company held fast, though many of their number lay wounded, stomachs laid open, limbs blown off. Finally, with the help of air strikes, the Japanese were driven back. The battle was won.
Nearly 300 Japanese corpses lay on the battlefield, 31 of them in front of Lachhiman’s position. The battalion had lost ten men.
For his outstanding bravery that day Lachhiman was awarded a Victoria Cross. His commanding officer, who wrote his citation, was Lieutenant Colonel (later General) Walter Walker, my grandfather.
My other grandfather, Ralph Venning, also served with the Gurkhas during World War II, and a generation later so did my father, Richard.
Seventy years on from that day, the country from which Lachhiman and his fellow Gurkhas were recruited, Nepal, lies devastated by earthquakes that have killed more than 8,000 people.
Poignantly, this tragedy has occurred in the very year that marks the bicentenary of an extraordinary relationship between Britain and Nepal.
For 200 years, the British have recruited soldiers from Nepal’s hills to serve in the Army.
They have fought side by side with the British in the deserts of Afghanistan and Iraq, the jungles of South-East Asia, both World Wars, the Falklands and beyond.
A fascinating new history of the Gurkhas by Major General Craig Lawrence, who has served with them for 30 years, recounts these two centuries of loyal and courageous service.
And next Tuesday, a pageant at the Royal Hospital Chelsea will commemorate this alliance that sprang, ironically, from war.
For it was in 1814 that Nepalese troops invaded British India. The British sent a large army to repel them but, despite their superior weaponry, simply could not defeat the fearless, skilful soldiers from the mountains of Nepal.
They were so impressed by their stamina and professionalism that, after the conflict ended in stalemate, the British asked if the Gurkhas — named after the area of Gorkha from which many of them came — would serve in the Indian army.
The Gurkhas, equally impressed by the calibre of the British officers, agreed, and so the first Gurkha regiments were formed in 1815.
They fought with the British on India’s borders; in the Indian Mutiny of 1857; and in the Second Afghan War, when British India invaded Afghanistan in the late 19th century.
There they helped to defeat the Afghans at the Battle of Kandahar and at Peiwar Kotal, where most of the Afghans’ shots went over the heads of the diminutive Gurkhas as they charged up the hill towards their foe.
Few sights can be more terrifying to an enemy than that of Gurkhas charging, kukris raised, yelling their battle cry of ‘Ayo Gurkhali!’ — ‘The Gurkhas are coming!’
Famously, in 1982, Argentine soldiers defending Mount William in the Falklands heard that the Gurkhas were coming and promptly surrendered to the nearest British regiment rather than face them in battle.
‘It is better to die than to be a coward,’ is the Gurkha motto. Time and time again, Gurkhas have been inspired by those stirring words, laying down their lives for their comrades, risking death to charge the enemy, turn the course of a battle and honour their oath of loyalty to Britain.
Their courage has been recognised by the many bravery awards earned by officers and men of the Brigade of Gurkhas, including 26 Victoria Crosses, 13 of them by Nepalese Gurkhas, 13 by British Gurkha officers.
As recently as 2010, Acting Sergeant Dipprasad Pun was awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross, second only to a VC, for single-handedly repelling a Taliban assault in Afghanistan, felling one fighter by hitting him with a machine-gun tripod when he ran out of ammunition.
Prince Harry, who served alongside Gurkhas during his 2007 to 2008 tour in Afghanistan, said there was ‘no safer place’ than by the side of a Gurkha — and is himself an honorary Gurkha.
It was not until 1911 that Nepalese Gurkhas were eligible for the Victoria Cross, however. Four years later, in World War I, two Gurkhas were awarded VCs, one for staying a whole day and night with a wounded British soldier.
Though wounded himself, he carried the man to safety under heavy fire, returning for two other wounded soldiers. Miraculously, he survived.
The cheerful stoicism of the Gurkhas in the mud and misery of the trenches deeply impressed those around them. ‘We Gurkhas are like brothers with the British,’ said one soldier.
Two decades later, Gurkhas once more came to Britain’s aid, serving in almost every theatre of World War II, from Burma to North Africa, Greece and Italy.
There were 23,000 casualties among the 137,000 who served, a heavy toll for a country whose population was just six million.
One night in Tunisia in 1943, a Gurkha battalion was ordered to take a hill held by the Germans which was thought by many to be impregnable.
Creeping silently forward, they were nearly upon the enemy when a German sentry cried out. A kukri silenced him but the Germans had already opened up with shattering machine-gun fire.
At the head of his platoon, Gurkha Lalbahadur Thapa ran forward through a curtain of bullets, cutting down the enemy with his kukri. Even as those around him gasped and fell, Lalbahadur urged his men on until they reached the machine guns.
There he killed two of the crew with his revolver, four more with his kukri, demolishing this vital point of the enemy’s defence — the key to the whole battle, which was eventually won by the Allies.
In 1944 at Monte Cassino, the notoriously bloody battle in Italy where Allied troops tried to dislodge German paratroopers from an almost unassailable position, Rifleman Sherbahadur Thapa won a posthumous VC for charging several German machine gun posts with his Bren gun, wiping them out.
After running out of ammunition, he then dashed through mortars and machine-gun fire to rescue two wounded men, before falling himself, riddled with bullets.
Whenever ammunition runs low, or fighting is at close quarters, the Gurkhas’ battle-sharpened kukris are unsheathed.
Used in Nepal as everyday farming tools, in battle they become fearsome instruments of death, separating heads from bodies with lethal efficiency.
In Burma in 1945, one young rifleman, Bhanbhagta Gurung, exposed himself to huge danger to kill a Japanese sniper who had kept his section pinned down.
As the section advanced under heavy fire, he dashed forward alone and attacked one enemy foxhole after another, hurling grenades, stabbing with his bayonet.
Then, under a relentless rain of machine-gun bullets from a bunker, he rushed towards it and, having used his last explosive hand grenade, flung in smoke grenades. Two Japanese emerged. With a few slices of his kukri, he felled them.
But still the machine gun kept firing. So with breathtaking audacity he leaped into the bunker and fell upon the gunner.
With no room to use either kukri or bayonet, he bashed the man’s brains out on a rock.
Then, with three other Gurkhas, he held the bunker and repelled the enemy advance. He, too, was awarded a VC. But medals were not the only rewards.
One Gurkha awarded a Military Medal for felling ten Japanese with ten bullets in an ambush took part in a victory parade in 1947 in England. Later he proudly recalled meeting the Royal Family: ‘I shook hands with the King and Queen and their daughters the Princesses. Happy! Very Good. That made all our wartime trouble worthwhile.’
He also rather coyly suggested the British women in that grey, post-war world found a certain attraction in the dashingly courageous young foreign heroes.
‘I knew no English, but seven or eight of the men who did were taken away by the English memsahibs [women] and never came back [that night]. The memsahibs loved us and one Gurkha had a queue of ten of them waiting for him.’
In the Sixties, the Gurkhas transferred their jungle-fighting skills to Borneo, where they fought to repel an Indonesian invasion.
It was in Borneo that a 16-year-old Gurkha earned the first of two Military Medals with some highly accurate firing. He was hiding behind a tree when four enemy came in sight. He sprang out and fired a round.
‘All fell,’ he later recounted. ‘I went up to inspect the bodies and saw that my one bullet had killed three of them, the first man was shot in the stomach, the second in the chest and the third in the head.’
The fourth man had fallen too, wounded. He was taken prisoner. As the young Gurkha put it, modestly: ‘It was my lucky day.’
What is it that makes these men from the Himalayan hills such formidable soldiers, not merely brave but resourceful, hardy and loyal?
Some Gurkhas profess a fatalism that allows them to face death without fear: ‘I have to die one day. Why not die now?’ said one, explaining why he did not flinch as bullets zinged around his head.
Though small in stature, their stamina and strength are extraordinary. Those who are recruited into The Royal Gurkha Rifles face the most arduous military selection test in the world to whittle 8,000 applicants down to 230 recruits.
Its finale is the doko, a run up more than three miles of vertiginous hillside, in which they must carry 55lb of rocks on their backs in less than 48 minutes.
Even more prized among Gurkhas than strength is loyalty, a quality that has inspired many acts of supremely selfless courage. A poignant example comes from World War II. In 1942, when Singapore fell to Japan, Gurkhas there were ordered, to their disgust, to surrender.
They were separated from their British officers and kept in appalling conditions. The Japanese tried to force them to change sides. Almost all refused, despite being tortured, beaten to death or executed.
After Japan’s surrender, a British officer went to find his Gurkhas in their PoW camp. To his amazement, their sergeant led them out, emaciated but marching straight-backed, and formed them into sections where they stood to attention.
Though threadbare, their uniforms had been ironed to smooth perfection: they had heated their mess tins over a fire to use as irons. Their morale and discipline were firmly intact, their loyalty unbroken.
As one admiring British officer wrote of his Gurkha comrades: ‘Bravest of the brave, most generous of the generous, never had a country more faithful friends than you.’
Read more: Why you should NEVER cross a Gurkha revealed in book | Daily Mail Online
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
Read more: Why you should NEVER cross a Gurkha revealed in book | Daily Mail Online
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
Read more: Why you should NEVER cross a Gurkha revealed in book | Daily Mail Online
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
- British have hired soldiers from Nepal to serve in the Army for 200 years
- Prince Harry, who served alongside Gurkhas during his 2007 to 2008 tour in Afghanistan, said there was ‘no safer place’ than by the side of a Gurkha
- New book - The Gurkhas: 200 Years Of Service To The Crown - reveals why you should never cross a Gurkha
It was May 1945, and British Empire Forces had the Japanese in retreat. But the men knew their epic struggle was not yet over. Their battalion, 4/8th Gurkhas, had been ordered to cut off the formidable 54th Japanese Division as they headed south.
And the retreating Japanese were far from beaten. They fought more fanatically than ever, mounting suicide attacks, and remained merciless to those they captured: British, Indian and Gurkha soldiers had been found crucified on trees, or tied up and bayoneted to death.
Now, positioned at a valley through which the Japanese would have to pass, the Gurkhas dug in and waited. The rifleman, Lachhiman Gurung, and his comrades checked their ammunition pouches and felt for their kukris, their traditional Nepalese curved knives. All was quiet save a few murmured prayers.
Then, at 1.20am, the silence was shattered by a rattle of bullets and a hail of grenades. The Japanese assault had begun.
Lachhiman was in the advance position of the forward-most company. If this post fell, the company behind them and then the whole valley would fall. Knowing this, the Japanese concentrated their fire on his position, determined to knock it out.
Grenades hammered down. One hit the lip of the trench. Before it could explode, Lachhiman grabbed it and hurled it back at the enemy. Then another fell. Again, he snatched it up and threw it back. A third grenade fell just in front of the trench.
He tried to throw it back once more — but this time it exploded in his hand, blowing off his fingers, shattering his right arm and severely wounding him in the face, body and right leg. His two comrades, badly wounded, lay helpless in the trench.
The enemy, sensing victory, surged screaming up the slope. It seemed impossible that the forward post would not be overrun, and with it the entire company.
But then, to the astonishment of those in nearby trenches, a small figure — Lachhiman was less than 5ft tall — stood up, blood cascading from his wounds. Using his left hand he continuously loaded and fired his rifle at the enemy, just feet away.
Wave after wave of fanatical Japanese attacks were repulsed as the tiny rifleman fired continuously at point-blank range, giving not an inch of ground. For four hours he fought on, his magnificent example inspiring those around him to stand firm, despite the overwhelming odds.
For three days and two nights the fighting raged as the company held fast, though many of their number lay wounded, stomachs laid open, limbs blown off. Finally, with the help of air strikes, the Japanese were driven back. The battle was won.
Nearly 300 Japanese corpses lay on the battlefield, 31 of them in front of Lachhiman’s position. The battalion had lost ten men.
For his outstanding bravery that day Lachhiman was awarded a Victoria Cross. His commanding officer, who wrote his citation, was Lieutenant Colonel (later General) Walter Walker, my grandfather.
My other grandfather, Ralph Venning, also served with the Gurkhas during World War II, and a generation later so did my father, Richard.
Seventy years on from that day, the country from which Lachhiman and his fellow Gurkhas were recruited, Nepal, lies devastated by earthquakes that have killed more than 8,000 people.
Poignantly, this tragedy has occurred in the very year that marks the bicentenary of an extraordinary relationship between Britain and Nepal.
For 200 years, the British have recruited soldiers from Nepal’s hills to serve in the Army.
They have fought side by side with the British in the deserts of Afghanistan and Iraq, the jungles of South-East Asia, both World Wars, the Falklands and beyond.
A fascinating new history of the Gurkhas by Major General Craig Lawrence, who has served with them for 30 years, recounts these two centuries of loyal and courageous service.
And next Tuesday, a pageant at the Royal Hospital Chelsea will commemorate this alliance that sprang, ironically, from war.
For it was in 1814 that Nepalese troops invaded British India. The British sent a large army to repel them but, despite their superior weaponry, simply could not defeat the fearless, skilful soldiers from the mountains of Nepal.
They were so impressed by their stamina and professionalism that, after the conflict ended in stalemate, the British asked if the Gurkhas — named after the area of Gorkha from which many of them came — would serve in the Indian army.
The Gurkhas, equally impressed by the calibre of the British officers, agreed, and so the first Gurkha regiments were formed in 1815.
They fought with the British on India’s borders; in the Indian Mutiny of 1857; and in the Second Afghan War, when British India invaded Afghanistan in the late 19th century.
There they helped to defeat the Afghans at the Battle of Kandahar and at Peiwar Kotal, where most of the Afghans’ shots went over the heads of the diminutive Gurkhas as they charged up the hill towards their foe.
Few sights can be more terrifying to an enemy than that of Gurkhas charging, kukris raised, yelling their battle cry of ‘Ayo Gurkhali!’ — ‘The Gurkhas are coming!’
Famously, in 1982, Argentine soldiers defending Mount William in the Falklands heard that the Gurkhas were coming and promptly surrendered to the nearest British regiment rather than face them in battle.
‘It is better to die than to be a coward,’ is the Gurkha motto. Time and time again, Gurkhas have been inspired by those stirring words, laying down their lives for their comrades, risking death to charge the enemy, turn the course of a battle and honour their oath of loyalty to Britain.
Their courage has been recognised by the many bravery awards earned by officers and men of the Brigade of Gurkhas, including 26 Victoria Crosses, 13 of them by Nepalese Gurkhas, 13 by British Gurkha officers.
As recently as 2010, Acting Sergeant Dipprasad Pun was awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross, second only to a VC, for single-handedly repelling a Taliban assault in Afghanistan, felling one fighter by hitting him with a machine-gun tripod when he ran out of ammunition.
Prince Harry, who served alongside Gurkhas during his 2007 to 2008 tour in Afghanistan, said there was ‘no safer place’ than by the side of a Gurkha — and is himself an honorary Gurkha.
It was not until 1911 that Nepalese Gurkhas were eligible for the Victoria Cross, however. Four years later, in World War I, two Gurkhas were awarded VCs, one for staying a whole day and night with a wounded British soldier.
Though wounded himself, he carried the man to safety under heavy fire, returning for two other wounded soldiers. Miraculously, he survived.
The cheerful stoicism of the Gurkhas in the mud and misery of the trenches deeply impressed those around them. ‘We Gurkhas are like brothers with the British,’ said one soldier.
Two decades later, Gurkhas once more came to Britain’s aid, serving in almost every theatre of World War II, from Burma to North Africa, Greece and Italy.
There were 23,000 casualties among the 137,000 who served, a heavy toll for a country whose population was just six million.
One night in Tunisia in 1943, a Gurkha battalion was ordered to take a hill held by the Germans which was thought by many to be impregnable.
Creeping silently forward, they were nearly upon the enemy when a German sentry cried out. A kukri silenced him but the Germans had already opened up with shattering machine-gun fire.
At the head of his platoon, Gurkha Lalbahadur Thapa ran forward through a curtain of bullets, cutting down the enemy with his kukri. Even as those around him gasped and fell, Lalbahadur urged his men on until they reached the machine guns.
There he killed two of the crew with his revolver, four more with his kukri, demolishing this vital point of the enemy’s defence — the key to the whole battle, which was eventually won by the Allies.
In 1944 at Monte Cassino, the notoriously bloody battle in Italy where Allied troops tried to dislodge German paratroopers from an almost unassailable position, Rifleman Sherbahadur Thapa won a posthumous VC for charging several German machine gun posts with his Bren gun, wiping them out.
After running out of ammunition, he then dashed through mortars and machine-gun fire to rescue two wounded men, before falling himself, riddled with bullets.
Whenever ammunition runs low, or fighting is at close quarters, the Gurkhas’ battle-sharpened kukris are unsheathed.
Used in Nepal as everyday farming tools, in battle they become fearsome instruments of death, separating heads from bodies with lethal efficiency.
In Burma in 1945, one young rifleman, Bhanbhagta Gurung, exposed himself to huge danger to kill a Japanese sniper who had kept his section pinned down.
As the section advanced under heavy fire, he dashed forward alone and attacked one enemy foxhole after another, hurling grenades, stabbing with his bayonet.
Then, under a relentless rain of machine-gun bullets from a bunker, he rushed towards it and, having used his last explosive hand grenade, flung in smoke grenades. Two Japanese emerged. With a few slices of his kukri, he felled them.
But still the machine gun kept firing. So with breathtaking audacity he leaped into the bunker and fell upon the gunner.
With no room to use either kukri or bayonet, he bashed the man’s brains out on a rock.
Then, with three other Gurkhas, he held the bunker and repelled the enemy advance. He, too, was awarded a VC. But medals were not the only rewards.
One Gurkha awarded a Military Medal for felling ten Japanese with ten bullets in an ambush took part in a victory parade in 1947 in England. Later he proudly recalled meeting the Royal Family: ‘I shook hands with the King and Queen and their daughters the Princesses. Happy! Very Good. That made all our wartime trouble worthwhile.’
He also rather coyly suggested the British women in that grey, post-war world found a certain attraction in the dashingly courageous young foreign heroes.
‘I knew no English, but seven or eight of the men who did were taken away by the English memsahibs [women] and never came back [that night]. The memsahibs loved us and one Gurkha had a queue of ten of them waiting for him.’
In the Sixties, the Gurkhas transferred their jungle-fighting skills to Borneo, where they fought to repel an Indonesian invasion.
It was in Borneo that a 16-year-old Gurkha earned the first of two Military Medals with some highly accurate firing. He was hiding behind a tree when four enemy came in sight. He sprang out and fired a round.
‘All fell,’ he later recounted. ‘I went up to inspect the bodies and saw that my one bullet had killed three of them, the first man was shot in the stomach, the second in the chest and the third in the head.’
The fourth man had fallen too, wounded. He was taken prisoner. As the young Gurkha put it, modestly: ‘It was my lucky day.’
What is it that makes these men from the Himalayan hills such formidable soldiers, not merely brave but resourceful, hardy and loyal?
Some Gurkhas profess a fatalism that allows them to face death without fear: ‘I have to die one day. Why not die now?’ said one, explaining why he did not flinch as bullets zinged around his head.
Though small in stature, their stamina and strength are extraordinary. Those who are recruited into The Royal Gurkha Rifles face the most arduous military selection test in the world to whittle 8,000 applicants down to 230 recruits.
Its finale is the doko, a run up more than three miles of vertiginous hillside, in which they must carry 55lb of rocks on their backs in less than 48 minutes.
Even more prized among Gurkhas than strength is loyalty, a quality that has inspired many acts of supremely selfless courage. A poignant example comes from World War II. In 1942, when Singapore fell to Japan, Gurkhas there were ordered, to their disgust, to surrender.
They were separated from their British officers and kept in appalling conditions. The Japanese tried to force them to change sides. Almost all refused, despite being tortured, beaten to death or executed.
After Japan’s surrender, a British officer went to find his Gurkhas in their PoW camp. To his amazement, their sergeant led them out, emaciated but marching straight-backed, and formed them into sections where they stood to attention.
Though threadbare, their uniforms had been ironed to smooth perfection: they had heated their mess tins over a fire to use as irons. Their morale and discipline were firmly intact, their loyalty unbroken.
As one admiring British officer wrote of his Gurkha comrades: ‘Bravest of the brave, most generous of the generous, never had a country more faithful friends than you.’
- The Gurkhas: 200 Years Of Service To The Crown by Major General JC Lawrence CBE (Uniform Press, £40). Royalties support the Gurkha Welfare Trust. Ayo Gorkhali: The Gurkhas Are Coming is on Radio 4 on June 8 at 11am.
Read more: Why you should NEVER cross a Gurkha revealed in book | Daily Mail Online
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
Read more: Why you should NEVER cross a Gurkha revealed in book | Daily Mail Online
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
Read more: Why you should NEVER cross a Gurkha revealed in book | Daily Mail Online
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
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