Kulbir Thapa

Kulbir Thapa was born on December 15, 1889, in the hill country of Palpa District in western Nepal, into a Magar family of the Thapa clan, one of the communities from which the British Indian Army had long recruited its Gurkha regiments ^[1]. The Nepal of his childhood was a closed kingdom governed by the Rana dynasty, which permitted the British to recruit young men from the hills under arrangements dating back to the treaty that ended the Anglo-Nepalese War of 1814 to 1816 ^[2].

For boys from farming villages in districts such as Palpa, enlistment offered steady pay, a pension, and standing at home that few other paths could match. Recruiting parties led by serving Gurkha officers traveled through the hills each year, and the journey to the regimental depots in British India was itself a rite of passage ^[2]. Little documentation survives about Kulbir Thapa's family or schooling, which was typical for hill recruits of his generation; his life enters the written record only when he joined the army.

He enlisted in the 3rd Queen Alexandra's Own Gurkha Rifles, a regiment with its depot at Almora in the Kumaon hills of British India ^[1]. By 1914 he was serving as a rifleman, the most junior rank, in the regiment's 2nd Battalion. Anyone asking who was Kulbir Thapa before the First World War would have found an unremarkable answer: one young soldier among thousands, learning musketry and drill far from home.

The outbreak of war in August 1914 transformed the Gurkha regiments from frontier troops into part of a global expeditionary force. The Indian Corps, including Gurkha battalions, was shipped to France in the autumn of 1914 to reinforce the hard-pressed British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front ^[3]. The 2nd Battalion of the 3rd Gurkha Rifles served in the Garhwal Brigade of the Meerut Division, and Kulbir Thapa went with it into a style of warfare no one in the regiment had trained for: static trench lines, artillery bombardment, machine guns, and the sodden cold of a northern European winter ^[3].

The Indian Corps fought through 1914 and 1915 at Givenchy, Neuve Chapelle, and Aubers Ridge, suffering heavy casualties. Conditions were punishing for troops raised in the Himalayan foothills and equipped for colonial campaigning; frostbite and trench foot thinned the ranks alongside enemy fire ^[3]. It was in this environment that the question of gallantry awards for Indian and Gurkha soldiers took on new weight. Until 1911 they had been excluded from the Victoria Cross and were decorated instead with the Indian Order of Merit. King George V extended VC eligibility to Indian Army soldiers during his Delhi Durbar visit of 1911, and the war in France soon produced the first awards under the new rule ^[4].

By September 1915 the Allies were preparing a major offensive in the Artois region. The British contribution became known as the Battle of Loos, and the Indian Corps was assigned a supporting attack near the village of Fauquissart, north of the main assault ^[3]. The 2nd Battalion, 3rd Gurkha Rifles was among the units ordered forward on the morning of September 25, 1915.

The attack at Fauquissart on September 25, 1915 went badly almost from the start. Gas released in support of the assault drifted unpredictably, uncut wire held up the advancing companies, and German machine gun fire cut down the leading waves ^[3]. Kulbir Thapa was wounded but pressed on through the German wire and found himself behind the enemy's first-line trench, one of a small number of men who had penetrated the position. There he came upon a badly wounded British soldier of the 2nd Battalion, Leicestershire Regiment, lying behind the German front line ^[1].

The wounded man urged him to save himself. Kulbir Thapa refused. He stayed beside the soldier through the rest of the day and the whole of the following night, in ground held by the enemy ^[1]. In the misty early hours of September 26 he dragged the Leicester through the German wire and, leaving him in a place of relative shelter, went back twice more to bring out two wounded Gurkhas of his own regiment, carrying each man to safety in turn. Then he returned in broad daylight for the British soldier and carried him across the open, under fire for much of the distance, until he reached his own lines ^[1]. The citation for his award, published in the London Gazette on November 18, 1915, described conduct of the most conspicuous bravery ^[5].

For these actions Kulbir Thapa received the Victoria Cross, becoming the first Gurkha soldier ever to win it ^[1]. Among Kulbir Thapa achievements this stands alone, but its significance reached beyond one man's courage. The award answered lingering doubts about whether soldiers from the subcontinent would be honored on equal terms, and it opened a record of Gurkha VCs that would eventually number more than a dozen across two world wars ^[4]. King George V presented the decoration to him in person; the investiture took place after his recovery from his wounds ^[1].

Kulbir Thapa needed months to recover. He was treated in England, where wounded Indian and Gurkha soldiers were cared for in dedicated hospitals, including the converted Royal Pavilion complex at Brighton, which the British government used deliberately to signal its regard for imperial troops ^[6]. Photographs and press reports from the period record the attention paid to the new Gurkha VC; he became, briefly, a recognizable face of the Indian Army's war in the British press ^[6].

At the end of 1915 the Indian Corps infantry was withdrawn from France, judged better suited to theaters closer to its bases and reinforcements. The 3rd Gurkha Rifles went on to serve in Egypt and against Ottoman forces in the Middle East, and Kulbir Thapa returned to duty with his regiment once fit ^[3]. He continued to serve through the remainder of the war and afterward, rising from rifleman to the rank of havildar, the Indian Army equivalent of sergeant ^[1].

His later service attracted none of the drama of 1915, which is its own kind of fact worth recording in any Kulbir Thapa biography: he did not seek celebrity, and the army of the day offered a decorated Gurkha noncommissioned officer a steady, unglamorous career rather than a public platform. He completed his engagement and took his discharge in 1929 after roughly two decades in uniform ^[1].

After leaving the army Kulbir Thapa did what most Gurkha veterans of his era did: he went home. He returned to Nepal and settled back into the hill country from which he had been recruited, living on his pension ^[1]. Nepal remained largely closed to outsiders until 1951, and the lives of even its most decorated sons went mostly unrecorded once they crossed back over the border. Details of his marriage and family are sparse in published sources, a gap common to Gurkha veterans of the First World War generation ^[2].

Veterans who held the Victoria Cross occupied a special place in the Gurkha world. Regimental associations kept in touch with them, pensions were paid through arrangements between the British authorities and Nepal, and their names were taught to new recruits at the training depots ^[4]. Kulbir Thapa's example was cited within the Gurkha Brigade as the standard of conduct expected of a rifleman, and his story passed into the regimental histories written between the wars ^[3].

He died in Nepal on October 3, 1956, at the age of 66 ^[1]. His death drew notice in Britain as well as Nepal, for by then the Gurkhas' Second World War record had made the achievements of the first Gurkha VC part of a much larger tradition.

Kulbir Thapa's Victoria Cross is held today by the Gurkha Museum in Winchester, England, where it forms part of the collection commemorating more than two centuries of Gurkha service to the British Crown ^[7]. The museum's displays present his rescue at Fauquissart as the founding episode in the story of Gurkha VCs, followed in the same war by Karanbahadur Rana in 1918 and by further awards in the Second World War ^[7].

Commemoration of his deed has grown rather than faded. In 2015, a century after the Battle of Loos, his name was among those honored during the Gurkha 200 celebrations marking two hundred years of Gurkha service, and memorial paving stones and ceremonies in Britain recalled the Indian and Gurkha recipients of the Victoria Cross from the First World War ^[8]. His citation is regularly quoted in histories of the Indian Army on the Western Front, which treat the Loos rescue as one of the war's clearest examples of selfless courage ^[3].

The plain Kulbir Thapa facts explain the durability of his reputation. He was wounded, alone, and behind enemy lines, with every reason to crawl back to safety, and he chose instead to spend more than a day saving three other men, one of them a stranger from another regiment and another army. In Nepal he is remembered as proof of what hill soldiers gave to a distant war; in Britain he is remembered as the man who began the Gurkha Victoria Cross tradition. Few private soldiers of any nation left a mark so far out of proportion to their rank ^[4].