Lachhiman Gurung

Lachhiman Gurung was born on December 30, 1917, in the village of Dahakhani in the Chitwan district of central Nepal, into a hill farming family of the Gurung community, one of the ethnic groups from which the British had recruited soldiers since the early nineteenth century ^[1]. His childhood followed the pattern of subsistence agriculture common to the middle hills: terraced fields, livestock, and little formal schooling. Nothing in the record suggests he sought a military life early; the army came to him, as it came to many young men of the hills, through wartime necessity.

When the Second World War broke out, recruitment standards for the Gurkha regiments were relaxed to meet the enormous demand for manpower. Lachhiman stood about four feet eleven inches tall, below the peacetime minimum height, and by his own later account would not have been accepted in ordinary years ^[1]. He enlisted in December 1940, at the age of 22, and was posted to the 4th Battalion, 8th Gurkha Rifles, a regiment of the British Indian Army ^[2]. For anyone asking who was Lachhiman Gurung before the war, the honest answer is a farmer's son of no particular note, one of tens of thousands of Nepalese hillmen who took the recruiting officer's shilling between 1939 and 1945.

The 4th Battalion, 8th Gurkha Rifles fought in the Burma campaign, one of the longest and most punishing theatres of the war against Japan. By the spring of 1945 the Fourteenth Army under General William Slim had crossed the Irrawaddy and was driving south toward Rangoon, and Japanese forces, cut off and increasingly desperate, launched repeated counterattacks to break out toward the east ^[3].

In May 1945 Lachhiman's battalion held positions near the village of Taungdaw, on the west bank of the Irrawaddy, astride a route the retreating Japanese needed. Rifleman Lachhiman Gurung manned the most forward post of his platoon, a trench position that would take the first weight of any assault ^[2]. He was 27 years old and, by the standards of the campaign, an experienced soldier, though nothing he had yet done had marked him out from his comrades.

In the early hours of May 13, 1945, at least 200 Japanese troops attacked the battalion's positions, concentrating their assault on the sector held by Lachhiman's platoon ^[2]. Grenades began landing in and around his trench. He picked up the first and hurled it back, and it exploded among the attackers. He did the same with a second. The third grenade detonated in his right hand as he grasped it, blowing off his fingers, shattering his arm, and wounding him severely in the face, body, and right leg ^[2]. His two comrades in the trench were also badly wounded and could no longer fight.

What followed became one of the defining episodes in the history of the Victoria Cross. Unable to use his right arm, Lachhiman loaded and fired his bolt-action rifle with his left hand alone, working the bolt against the lip of the trench, and held the position for four hours as the Japanese came on in wave after wave ^[2]. The citation published in the London Gazette on July 27, 1945, recorded that he shouted that no enemy would pass while he lived, and credited his stand with breaking the attack at its most dangerous point ^[2]. When the fighting around the forward posts ended, 31 Japanese dead lay near his trench, and the majority were attributed to his fire ^[2]. Of the 87 enemy dead counted in the battalion sector, the citation judged that the defence of Taungdaw had hinged on his refusal to yield.

His wounds cost him his right hand and most of the sight in his right eye. He was evacuated and spent months in hospital. On December 19, 1945, at the Red Fort in Delhi, the Viceroy of India, Field Marshal Lord Wavell, presented him with the Victoria Cross; his elderly father made a journey of many days from the hills of Nepal to watch the investiture ^[1]. Among Lachhiman Gurung achievements, this single night's fighting stands first and overwhelms all else, which is how he himself seemed to regard it: in later interviews he spoke of it plainly, saying he had simply done what a soldier does.

The loss of his hand ended Lachhiman's fighting career, though the army retained him and he was eventually granted the honorary rank of havildar, equivalent to sergeant ^[1]. When British India was partitioned in 1947, the 8th Gurkha Rifles passed to the new Indian Army, and Lachhiman left the service and went home to Chitwan ^[3].

He resumed the life he had left in 1940, farming his family's land with one hand. For decades he lived in near anonymity, his pension modest and his fame limited to regimental histories and occasional reunions of Victoria Cross holders in London, which he attended when circumstances allowed ^[4]. He married twice and raised a family; one of his sons later settled in Britain. Any full Lachhiman Gurung biography has to reckon with this long middle stretch of ordinary rural life, roughly sixty years of it, between a few hours of extraordinary violence and a late burst of public attention.

In old age Lachhiman was drawn into a very public fight of a different kind. Gurkha veterans who had retired before 1997, the year the Brigade of Gurkhas moved its base from Hong Kong to Britain, had no automatic right to settle in the United Kingdom, and their pensions were far smaller than those of British soldiers. From 2007 the campaign for equal treatment, fronted by the actress Joanna Lumley, whose father had served with the Gurkhas, gathered force in the press and in Parliament ^[5].

Lachhiman became one of its most powerful symbols. Frail, nearly blind, and using a wheelchair, he travelled to London and appeared alongside Lumley at rallies and outside the High Court, a living reminder of what Nepal's soldiers had given Britain ^[5]. In 2008 he was granted the right to live in the United Kingdom, and in May 2009 the government of Gordon Brown announced that all Gurkha veterans with at least four years of service could apply to settle there, a reversal widely credited to the campaign in which he had taken part ^[5]. He spent his final years in Chiswick, in west London, near his son ^[4].

Lachhiman Gurung died in a London hospital on December 12, 2010, eighteen days short of his ninety-third birthday, after a short illness ^[4]. Obituaries in the British press retold the night at Taungdaw at length, and tributes came from the Brigade of Gurkhas, veterans' organisations, and the campaigners he had stood beside ^[4]. At his death he was one of the last surviving Victoria Cross recipients of the Second World War.

His medal group and his story are preserved in regimental and national collections, and the Gurkha Museum in Winchester and the National Army Museum in London both record his action among the most remarkable defensive stands of the Burma campaign ^[6]. He was one of thirteen Gurkha soldiers awarded the Victoria Cross while serving in Nepalese-manned regiments, a roll of honour that remains central to the identity of the Brigade of Gurkhas today ^[3].

The basic Lachhiman Gurung facts are stark enough to need no embellishment: a small farmer's son, initially too short for the army, who with one working arm held a trench through a night of massed attacks, then went home to his fields for sixty years, and finished his life helping to win a measure of justice for the men who had served as he had. Few lives compress courage, patience, and quiet persistence into so clear a shape ^[1].