Khudadad Khan

Khudadad Khan was born on October 20, 1888, in the village of Dab in the Chakwal area of Punjab, then part of British India and today in Pakistan ^[1]. He came from a Punjabi Muslim family of modest means in a district long associated with military recruitment. The Salt Range country around Chakwal and Jhelum supplied a steady stream of young men to the army of the Raj, and enlistment offered a rare route to regular pay, land grants, and standing within the village ^[2].

Little is recorded of his childhood beyond the outlines common to rural Punjab at the turn of the century: farm work, limited formal schooling, and an early awareness that soldiering ran through the community. As a young man he enlisted in the 129th Duke of Connaught's Own Baluchis, an infantry regiment of the British Indian Army that, despite its name, recruited heavily among Punjabi Muslims, Pashtuns, and other communities of the northwest ^[2]. He trained as a machine gunner, a specialist role that placed him with one of the regiment's small detachment of Maxim guns.

When war broke out in Europe in August 1914, the British government turned quickly to India for reinforcements. The regular British Army was small, and the Indian Corps, comprising the Lahore and Meerut Divisions, was shipped to France within weeks ^[3]. The 129th Baluchis landed at Marseilles in late September 1914 as part of this force. For most of the sepoys, including Khudadad Khan, it was their first journey beyond the subcontinent ^[3].

The men arrived poorly equipped for what awaited them. They carried older pattern rifles, wore uniforms suited to the Indian climate, and reached Flanders just as the autumn rains and the first hard frosts set in ^[4]. Within a month of disembarking they were fed into some of the most desperate fighting of the war's opening phase, plugging gaps in a thin Allied line as the German army pushed toward the Belgian coast.

The 129th Baluchis were among the first Indian units committed to battle on the Western Front. Their sector lay near the village of Hollebeke, south of Ypres, on ground that would soon become infamous ^[4].

On October 31, 1914, during the First Battle of Ypres, German forces mounted a heavy assault against the positions held by the 129th Baluchis near Hollebeke. The regiment's two machine guns bore much of the burden of holding the line. One gun was knocked out by a shell. At the second, the British officer commanding the detachment was wounded, and one by one the crew were killed around their weapon ^[1].

Sepoy Khudadad Khan, himself wounded, was the last man standing at his gun. He continued to work it alone, firing into the advancing German infantry until the position was finally overrun. The attackers bayoneted the men they found at the gun and left Khudadad Khan for dead. He survived, feigned death until nightfall, and then crawled back toward his regiment's lines despite his wounds ^[1]. The stand made by the Baluchi machine gunners bought time that mattered: the German thrust at that point of the line was aimed at the Channel ports, and every hour of delay allowed British and Indian reinforcements to come up ^[3].

His award of the Victoria Cross was announced in the London Gazette on December 7, 1914 ^[5]. The citation recorded that on October 31, at Hollebeke, the sepoy had remained working his gun after all the other men of his detachment had been put out of action. A change in eligibility rules in 1911 had opened the Victoria Cross to Indian soldiers for the first time, and Khudadad Khan became the first South Asian recipient in the award's history ^[1]. Recovering from his wounds in England, he was decorated by King George V ^[6].

Khudadad Khan returned to duty after his recovery and continued to serve in the Indian Army. He was promoted through the viceroy's commissioned ranks and eventually held the rank of subedar, a senior position that carried real authority within an Indian infantry battalion ^[2]. His regiment, the 129th Baluchis, went on to serve in East Africa later in the war, and the unit's successors were absorbed into the Baloch Regiment after later reorganizations of the army ^[2].

The war took a severe toll on the men who had sailed from India in 1914. Of the roughly one million Indians who served overseas during the conflict, more than 70,000 died, and the Indian Corps on the Western Front suffered particularly heavy losses in the trenches of 1914 and 1915 ^[3]. Khudadad Khan was one of eleven Indian soldiers awarded the Victoria Cross during the First World War, a group whose service was widely publicized at the time and then, for decades afterward, largely faded from public memory in Britain ^[6].

After the partition of India in 1947, Khudadad Khan's home district became part of the new state of Pakistan, and his old regimental lineage passed to the Pakistan Army's Baloch Regiment. He lived quietly in retirement in Punjab, respected as the country's most famous soldier of the First World War generation ^[7]. Veterans' gatherings and regimental commemorations occasionally brought him back into public view, and the Pakistan Army treated him as an honored elder of the Baloch Regiment's tradition ^[7].

He attended the centenary review of the Victoria Cross in London in 1956, when surviving recipients from across the Commonwealth paraded before Queen Elizabeth II in Hyde Park ^[6]. Khudadad Khan died on March 8, 1971, in Mandi Bahauddin, Punjab, at the age of 82, and was buried there with military honors ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Khudadad Khan usually receives a one-line answer: the first Indian recipient of the Victoria Cross. The fuller story, traced in any careful Khudadad Khan biography, is about the moment the armies of the British Empire became visibly multinational on European soil. His medal made front-page news in 1914 precisely because it recognized that soldiers from Punjab were holding the same line as men from Yorkshire and Flanders ^[3].

His memory is kept alive in both Pakistan and Britain. A statue of him stands at the entrance of the Pakistan Army Museum in Rawalpindi, and the Baloch Regiment counts his Victoria Cross among its proudest inheritances ^[7]. In the United Kingdom, the centenary of the First World War brought renewed attention to the Indian Army's contribution. In October 2014, a hundred years after Hollebeke, a commemorative paving stone honoring Khudadad Khan was unveiled at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire, part of a national program marking the war's Victoria Cross recipients from overseas ^[8]. His medal group is held today by his descendants and has been displayed at exhibitions on the Indian Army's war service ^[6].

Among the most cited Khudadad Khan facts is the sheer arithmetic of his stand: one wounded man, one machine gun, and a line that did not break until help arrived. Khudadad Khan's achievements opened a path for the ten Indian Victoria Cross recipients who followed him during the war, and his name now serves, in two countries, as shorthand for the largely forgotten million who served ^[8].