Republic Day Special: An untold story of a true hero, true legend!

 Late Havildar Lachhiman Gurung, VC. Photo Courtesy: Alan Abercrombie

Forwarded by Wg Cdr Tarun Kumar Singha, VSM
PRO-IAF, Ministry of Defence

Wg Cdr T.K Singha

There is a story told in the Himalayan foothills village of Dahakhani of how a man sent out his son to buy some cigarettes at the village shop one morning in 1941. The son returned five years later, blind in one eye, minus his right hand and wearing the Victoria Cross, but without the cigarettes.

Young Lachhiman Gurung had met a friend in the village who told him he intended to enlist in the Gorkha Rifles. Recruits were urgently needed; the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and landed on the Malay peninsula only a few days earlier.

In normal times, Lachhiman would not have been accepted as a Gorkha rifleman, as he was not quite five feet tall.  Like many other soldiers from the hills of Nepal, Lachhiman found himself fighting in Burma.

The campaign had swung back and forth but by the spring of 1945, although far from beaten, General Seizo Sakurai was attempting to extract the remnants of the 28th Japanese Army across the Irrawaddy so as to escape eastwards into Thailand.

At the beginning of May Lieutenant-General Sir Montagu Stopford's 33^rd Corps reached Prome in central Burma, on the east bank of the river. His orders from the commander of 14th Army, General Sir William Slim, were to keep Sakurai bottled up west of the river while 4th Corps under Sir Frank Messervy fought its way south to relieve Rangoon.

4th Battalion the 8th Gorkha Rifles was serving with the 7th Indian Division of Stopford's Corps. The battalion faced repeated, fanatical Japanese attempts to break out over the Irrawaddy and across

Messervy's lines of communication.  One company, commanded by Major Peter Myers, became cut off at Taungdaw west of the river in the direct path of successive waves of enemy attacks. Rifleman Lachhiman Gurung had joined Myers's company just two months previously as part of a reinforcement draft.

On the night of May 12-13 Lachhiman Gurung's section was manning the forward edge of Myers's company position. At 0120 hours on 13 May a force of 200 Japanese launched a night attack. The brunt was borne by Lachhiman's section and his post in particular, as it covered a track leading into the centre of his platoon position. The attack began with a hail of grenades, one of which fell onto the lip of Lachhiman's trench. He seized it and threw it back at the enemy. Almost at once another landed in the trench. Lachhiman snatched that up and threw it back. A third grenade fell in front of the trench but exploded as Lachhiman grasped it, blowing off his fingers, shattering his right arm and severely wounding him in the face, body and right leg. His two badly wounded comrades lay helpless in the bottom of the trench.

The enemy, screaming and shouting, formed up shoulder to shoulder and attempted to rush the position by sheer weight of numbers. Regardless of his wounds, Lachhiman loaded and fired his rifle with his left hand, maintaining a continuous and steady rate of fire as he had been trained.

For four hours Lachhiman Gurung remained alone at his post, waiting calmly for each attack which he met with rifle fire at point-blank range, determined not to give an inch of ground. Of the 87 enemy dead counted in front of the company position at dawn, 31 lay in front of Lachhiman's section. Had the enemy managed to overrun this point in the company's defence, they could have dominated and then turned the whole of the reverse slope position.

Although cut off for three days and nights, Lachhiman's company, inspired by his example, held and smashed each attack as it came.

Lachhiman Gurung was invested with the Victoria Cross by Field Marshal Lord Wavell, the Viceroy of India, at the Red Fort in Delhi on December 19, 1945. His father, aged 74 and very frail, had been carried for 11 days from his village to see his son decorated.

Lachhiman's injuries were so severe that he was unable to return to active Service during the remainder of the war. Not only had he lost the lower part of his right arm and right eye, he was deafened in one

ear.  On the Partition of India in 1947, the 8th Gorkha Rifles joined the new Indian Army.

Lachhiman had reached the rank of Havildar (Sergeant) but, because on health grounds, he decided to retire to his father's tiny farm in Dahakhani in the Chitwan district of Nepal. He married and continued to plough his one hectare (2.5 acre) plot until infirmity made it impossible for him to go on.

The isolation of his village caused grave hardship, as it was necessary for him to collect his pension money once a month from Bharatpur, 22 miles away. This could be reached partly by bus, but only after scrambling and slithering down the hillside for 12 miles to the road. Eventually, in order to collect his pension, it was necessary for one of Lachhiman's sons, Reshamial, to carry him piggy-back down to the bus stop on the road and back again up the mountain.

The former CO of 4/8th Gurkhas, Lieutenant-Colonel (later General Sir Walter) Walker, and Lachhiman's company commander Peter Myers maintained what contact they could with him over the years. In addition, so did Eric Williams, of Great Yarmouth, who had served as a forward OP Signaller with 136 Regiment Royal Artillery in support of 4/8th Gurkha Rifles in Burma in 1945.

This experience gave Williams a lasting admiration for the Gurkhas and, after discovering the straits in which Lachhiman was living, he paid for the education of his children.

The 50th anniversary of the end of the war in the Far East was celebrated in London in July-August 1995. Lachhiman Gurung was flown from Kathmandu to London to join other surviving VC holders for the

celebration.

This led to a wider appreciation of the conditions in which he was living and a scheme to build him a new house at Bharatpur with funds raised by public appeal initiated by the Honourable Company of Armourers and Brasiers and the Victoria Cross and George Cross Association and sponsored by the Gurkha Welfare Trust and the Sunday Express newspaper.

The two-storey house was completed in September 1995 and handed over to Lachhiman Gurung and his family, together with a sum of money to ensure his essential needs were met.

His VC has a place of honour in the room of the Regimental Quarterguard of the 4/8th Gorkha Rifles of the Indian Army in India to inspire future generations of Gorkha riflemen.

In 2008 Lachhiman Gurung came to England to live in Hounslow, where he became a freeman of the borough. Later, after moving to Chiswick to live in the Memorial Home for Retired Gurkha Soldiers, he became the honorary vice-president of the local branch of the Royal British Legion.

In recent years he invariably attended the biennial celebrations of the VC and GC Association in London, most recently those held from November 8 to 11 this year, including a reception given by the Queen.His last public appearance was at the Cenotaph on November 11 this year.

According to Army records Lachhiman Gurung was born in Dahakhani in 1917. He was twice married. His first wife died in the late 1950s. He is survived by his second wife Manmaya, two sons and a daughter of his first marriage and two sons of his second. His eldest son Sibadatt became a Major in the Indian Artillery and his youngest son Krishnabahadur is serving in the Royal Nepalese Army.

Havildar Lachhiman Gurung, VC, was born in 1917. He died on December 12, 2010, aged 93. A true hero and a true legend.

May his soul rest in peace.

(The medal is currently held in India, in the possession of Gurung's parent unit, the 4th Battalion, 8th Gorkha Rifles. The article is an email forward.)
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