On September 2nd, 2010, 35-year-old Bishnu Shrestha gazed out of the window of a Moria Express train as it chugged through the dense jungles of West Bengal. Around midnight, the train came to a screeching halt as gangsters poured aboard, armed with knives, clubs, and firearms. Stomping up and down the carriage, they began extracting cash, jewelry, laptops, and watches from the terrified passengers. Initially, Shrestha kept his head down.
It was only when the hijackers put their hands on a helpless young woman that he could no longer stand idly by. He leapt up, drew his kukri knife, and threw himself upon the fiends. In the ensuing melee, Shrestha single-handedly killed three gangsters and injured eight more, causing the rest to flee. Who was this humble superhero whose badassery could serve as the inspiration for a diehard movie? He was a Gurkha, a member of arguably the single most elite fighting force of the 20th century.
In this presentation, we will explore the history of a revered community of modern warriors with a reputation that surpasses the ancient Spartans. Welcome to our blog on the friendly, chipper, and utterly fearless Gurkha Brigade, whose motto is, Better to die than be a coward.
According to a remark from Indian Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw, a man is either lying or a Gurkha if he claims he is not terrified of death. The Gurkhas are elite soldiers native to Nepal, a mountainous country which has long existed at the crossroads of the great empires of Eurasia. They are most famous for their 200-year history of foreign service in the British Army and other global military forces, in which they have earned a reputation as arguably the most reliable, disciplined, and fearless warriors of the 20th century.
Although it originated with the medieval Nepalese Kingdom of Gorkha, the term "Gurkha" now only refers to Nepali citizens who are enlisted in foreign armed forces or police departments. Since time immemorial, the frigid peaks and steep valleys of the Himalayan mountains have incubated many hardy peoples, who developed robust martial societies in an unforgiving high-altitude environment.
A culturally diverse fighting force, the Gurkhas are drawn from across Nepal's many distinct ethnic minorities, most of whom speak their own unique language and practice a unique variation of the Buddhist or Hindu faith. However, all Gurkhas are fluent in both English and the national language of Nepal, an Indo-Aryan tongue of Sanskrit heritage.
The Gurkhas are the world's most fearsome short monarchs, standing an average of five feet and three inches tall. They are deadliest in CQC, wielding their iconic weapon the Kukri knife with fatal finesse. The Gurkhas' prowess with the curved blade is the stuff of legend and spawned this amusing wartime gag.
Locked in close combat in the trenches, a squat Gurkha takes a swing at a tall German with his Kukri. The German appears to sidestep the swipe. Ha! He taunts you, you missed! To this, the Gurkha takes a swing at a tall German with his kukri.
The German appears to sidestep the swipe. Ha! He torches. You missed it! To this, the Gurkha wipes a drop of blood from his knife and replies, shake your head. Because of their incredibly demanding training schedule, Gurkhas are among the world's most physically fit people. In order to even qualify for training camp, each prospective Gurkha has to be able to perform physical feats that would make a prime Rocky Balboa look geriatric.
These include performing 75 bench jumps in one minute, 70 sit-ups in two minutes, and running three miles up the steep foothills of the Himalayas while carrying 55 pounds of rocks on their backs in under an hour. pounds of granite on their backs in less than sixty minutes. Only 200 seats in the British Army's Brigade of Gurkhas are given to almost 28,000 young men from Nepal each year, meaning that only the strongest among the tough are enlisted in the most feared fighting force in the modern era. Gurkha history is utterly inundated with insane stories of military heroism, and we would be remiss not to retell some of them here.
In 1945, Lechiemangurung of the 8th Gurkha Rifles was cut off and encircled by over 200 Japanese soldiers in the Burmese jungle. Alone in a trench with only two other comrades, he held off the enemy hordes single-handedly. Twice the Japanese lobbed grenades into his trench, and twice he managed to return them to sender. A third grenade landed.
This time when he picked it up, it exploded in his hand, blowing off most of his fingers and severely wounding his face, torso and right leg. Disregarding his mortal wounds and operating his rifle one-handed, the Nepalese warrior fought off wave after wave of Japanese assaults for four hours all while screaming, come and fight a Gurkha. By the time the enemy retreated, he had amassed a final kill count of 31.
He lived to be ninety-two years old, received the Victoria Cross, and recovered from his wounds. Six months earlier, Tul Bahadur Poon of the 6th Gurkha Rifles was advancing on a Japanese-held railway bridge when his entire platoon section was wiped out. As the last man standing, Rifleman Poon charged alone into a hailstorm of enemy fire, barreling ahead over 30 yards of open ground while ankle-deep in mud, weaving through shell holes and leaping over fallen trees.
Miraculously, he reached the enemy position without being hit. Leaping into a bunker, he killed four Japanese soldiers with his Bren gun and another three with his Kukri. He then gave accurate supporting fire from the bunker, which allowed the remainder of his platoon to advance. Rifleman Pun was awarded the Victoria Cross and lived until the age of 88.
Gurkha families are often warrior dynasties, with sons and grandsons striving to live up to the deeds of fathers and grandfathers. As it turned out, Rifleman Poon's grandson would more than live up to the legacy of his fearless grandfather. In 2010, Acting Sergeant De Prasad Poon was standing guard on a roof checkpoint in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, when he found himself surrounded and under attack by up to 30 Taliban fighters armed with AK-47s and RPGs.
Believing he was about to die, Sergeant Poon resolved to kill as many of the enemy as he could before he went down. Fending off the attackers from three sides, he fired more than 400 machine gun rounds, launched 17 grenades, and detonated a mine. When he ran out of ammo, he resorted to using his gun's tripod as a club, smashing it against an insurgent's skull as he scaled the roof. Single-handedly, Sergeant Poon fended off the attack and was awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross by Queen Elizabeth.
Having introduced the Gurkhas and provided a sampling of the action movie heroics they are capable of, let us explore their origins and how they came to serve in the British army. The story begins in the year 1743 with the ascension of Prithvi Narayan Shah to the throne of the tiny kingdom of Gorkha, one of many petty statelets strewn about the Himalayan foothills at the time. Prithvi Narayan soon came into his own as one of the greatest visionaries in the history of the Indian subcontinent.
Embarking on a mission to unify all of Nepal, he slowly conquered over 54 other principalities throughout the Himalayas, training up one of the most well-drilled, disciplined and experienced armies in Asia in the process. However, Gorkha was not the only rising power in the Indian subcontinent at the time. By the late 18th century, the British conquest of India was well underway, spearheaded by a private mega-corporation, the British East India Company.
Back in 1757, this Hydra of capitalism defeated the last independent Nawab of Bengal at the Battle of Plassey, annexing all of Bengal in the aftermath. This put the Gorkha Kingdom and the East India Company on each other's borders, causing their spheres of influence to overlap. In 1767, Prithvi Narayan Shah set his sights on conquering the Kathmandu Valley.
Seeking to curtail the expansion of their regional rival, the British deployed a 2,500-man expedition under one Captain George Kinloch to prevent Kathmandu's capture. In the hilly jungle province of Sindhuli, the Gorkhas ambushed their foe, pouring out of the thickets and wreaking havoc among the enemy formation with Khukri in hand. It was the first time that British Redcoats had faced Gaukhas in battle, and it would be an experience they would not soon forget. Out of Kinloch's 2,500 men, less than 1,000 returned to Bengal alive.
With the East India Company knocked out of the picture, King Prithvi Narayan Shah captured Kathmandu in 1768 and made it into his royal capital. The great Nepalese conqueror king died in 1775 and would go down in history as the man who had thoroughly humbled the British Empire and unified all of Nepal. For the next few decades, the Kingdom of Gorkha and the British megacorporation maintained an uneasy peace, but it was only a matter of time before their next clash.
In November of 1814, during the reign of King Girvan Yudha Bikram Shah, an escalating frontier dispute led to the second and final showdown between the two powers, the Anglo-Nepalese War. According to historians, the Gorkha army at this time numbered around 12,000 to 14,000 strong.
To contend with this force, the East India Company mustered an expedition of over 50,000 men. That the British levied such a massive army in preparation for their push into Nepal displayed just how highly they regarded the fighting skills of their mountain-dwelling opponents, Kinloch's doomed expedition no doubt still fresh in their minds. As expected, the East India Company's advance into the Himalayas was slow, brutal, and bloody.
Despite being heavily outnumbered, the Gokhali army put up an extremely effective resistance, utilizing the mountainous terrain of their native homeland to stymie the advance of their numerically superior foes. The first major battle of the Anglo-Nepalese War took place at the fortress of Nalapani, where Gorkha captain Balbedra Kunwa and a garrison of 600 Nepalese men, women, and children held the line against British General Rollo Gillespie's force of over 3,500 men.
Outnumbered 7 to 1, Balbedra withstood the British bombardment for over a month and even managed to kill General Gillespie in action. Throughout the battle, many British soldiers developed a begrudging respect for their lion-hearted enemies, not just for their fighting spirit but for the honor they displayed in battle.
James Bailey Fraser, a Scottish adventurer accompanying Gillespie's division, wrote, There was here no cruelty to wounded or to prisoners, no poisoned arrows were used, no wells or waters were poisoned, no rancorous spirit of revenge seemed to animate them. They fought us in fair conflict, like men, and, in intervals of actual combat, showed us a liberal courtesy worthy of a more enlightened people.
The bill the British paid for Nalappani amounted to over a thousand casualties and the life of an experienced commander. This Pyrrhic victory would set the tone for the rest of the war, in which the East India Company would continue to make slow, incremental, and costly advances into Gorkha territory, all the while growing increasingly impressed by the gallant resistance put up by their fearless, yet noble enemies.
Indeed, the Gorkhas fought on, with seemingly no comprehension of their own mortality. In April of 1815, at the Battle of Duthal, 74-year-old Gorkha general Bhakti Thapa repeatedly threw himself headlong into British cannon fire until he and his warriors had been mown down to the last man. Out of respect for this old man's incredible courage, the British wrapped his body in an expensive shawl and ensured it was returned to his people with due honours.
Despite their seemingly inexhaustible font of courage, the Gorkha Kingdom was eventually ground down by the British Empire's superior manpower and firepower. In March of 1816, the Anglo-Nepalese War came to an end with the signing of the Treaty of Sogoli, which forced the Kingdom of Gorkha to cede about a fourth of its recently conquered territory to the East India Company, reducing it to the borders that mark present-day Nepal.
Although the Nepalese war effort had been a losing one, they had fought fiercely enough to maintain their independence and would remain a free nation even as the British extended their rule across the entire rest of the Indian subcontinent. However, while Nepal would not be colonized directly, there was still one further price to be paid for their defiance.
Incredibly impressed by the tenacity of the Gorkha soldiers who had fought them so bravely, the British made it a term of the peace that the Kings of Gorkha would have to allow British recruiters to roam the Nepalese countryside and encourage their able-bodied warriors to volunteer in the British army. In the British narrative, the creation of the Brigade of Gurkhas is considered an event to be celebrated. Peace had been made with a gallant foe who they had come to respect, and henceforth, Gurkha and Britain would no longer be enemies but fight side by side as comrades in arms.
However, from the Nepalese perspective, this watershed moment is often cast in a more somber light. Tim Gurung, a modern Nepalese writer and Gurkha veteran, claims that the policy of recruiting young Nepalese men into the British army not only took the sting out of the Gokhali army, but also made the country into a toothless tiger and crippled it for the foreseeable future.
By depleting Nepal of its youth and able men for generations, Gurung says, Nepal would never again be able to raise its head against the British. Gurung's words are important to remember. For, as captivating as stories of Gurkha invincibility are, we must remember that, at least originally, they were hired mercenaries serving an imperialist power in colonial wars, often fought to subjugate the homelands of indigenous peoples, and that this has resulted in the Gurkhas having a complex and controversial legacy both in their own homeland and beyond.
Indeed, the Gurkhas' reputation among the British public for loyalty and reliability began coming into form during the Great Revolt of 1857, when a massive uprising against the British East India Company erupted across the Indian subcontinent. As some of the only native troops who remained loyal to the British, the Gurkhas played a significant role in putting down the insurrection.
From the end of the Great Revolt to the start of World War I, British Gurkha regiments were deployed to fight in colonial wars in Afghanistan, Burma, Tibet, and China. Throughout all these campaigns, the Gurkhas slowly cultivated their reputation as some of the most resilient, adaptable, and indomitable soldiers in the known world.
Throughout the First World War, over 200,000 Gurkhas served in the British Army. They fought with all the discipline and bravery that had come to be expected of them, suffering around 20,000 casualties and receiving almost 2,000 gallantry awards for feats of both individual and regimental heroism.
The Gurkhas were among the first to arrive and the last to depart the meat grinder of Gallipoli, where they flung themselves against the Germans in the trenches of Ypres and Loup and bloodied their Kukri against the Turks.
Throughout the Second World War, over 250,000 Gurkhas served in almost every theater of battle, suffering around 32,000 casualties. They fought Hitler's Nazis and Mussolini's fascists in Syria, North Africa, Sicily and Greece, while bloodying the nose of Imperial Japan in Burma and Singapore.
Earlier in this video, we told the stories of Lachimanguru and Tul Bahadur Pun, two Gurkhas whose insane feats of bravery against the Japanese in the Burmese jungle earned them the Victoria Cross. These were just two of a mind-boggling 2,734 bravery awards the Gurkhas earned throughout World War II. After India achieved its independence, the British lost their monopoly on Gurkha invincibility when some of the Gurkha regiments that had formerly formed part of the British colonial army in India were transferred to the newly independent Indian army.
Meanwhile, in Singapore, a unit of British Army Gurkhas was formed as a riot control and counter-terrorism wing of the local police force in 1949 and played a crucial role in stabilizing the city-state in its turbulent road to independence. The Gurkha regiment that remained in the British Army continued to see action in every conflict the United Kingdom took part in.
They were in Cyprus in 1974, the Falklands in 1982, participated in the Gulf War of 1991 and were deployed into Afghanistan in 2001. After over 200 years of loyal service to the British crown, the Gurkhas have undoubtedly been immortalized as some of the modern era's most lionized soldiers, with a reputation of immortality that rivals the ancient Spartans. However, despite being celebrated as heroes by the British public, their relationship with the British government has not been quite as rosy. In retirement, the Gurkhas have long been subject to unequal treatment by their British paymasters, their military pensions only a fraction of what British veterans of equal rank received.
Moreover, Gurkha veterans seeking to immigrate and live in the UK, a country they had fought and killed for, faced significant barriers to entry. In 2007, the British government finally gave in to decades of opposition and began paying salaries and pensions commensurate with those of British soldiers. Then, in 2009, the House of Commons passed a motion allowing all Gurkha veterans the right to residence in the UK. In their home country of Nepal, the Gurkhas are considered in some circles to be a source of national shame, a consistent drain on the country's best and brightest, and a major contributor to economic stagnation back home.
However, despite the controversies, many in Nepal hold the Gurkhas in high regard and take pride in the reputation for fearlessness and invincibility they have earned for the Nepalese people on the world stage. Thus, it seems that for the foreseeable future, young men throughout Nepal will continue to enlist in foreign Gurkha brigades, where they will cultivate themselves into some of the physically and mentally toughest people on the planet, living up to the legacy of their Gurkha fathers and grandfathers as the fiercest soldiers of the modern age.
