The Gurkhas in the First World War

The Gurkhas were soldiers from Nepal who served in the Gurkha Rifles regiments of the British Indian Army. Nepal was an independent kingdom, but its rulers allowed Britain to recruit their subjects, and in 1914 they also placed their own army at the British disposal. In the First World War Gurkha battalions fought in France and Flanders, at Gallipoli, in Mesopotamia, Persia and Palestine. According to the National Army Museum in London about 100,000 Gurkhas fought in the war, and their casualties exceeded 20,000 men.

Nepal and recruitment

The British first knew the Gurkhas as enemies. In 1814–16 the East India Company fought a war against the state of Gorkha, and after its victory agreed to Nepalese service in its army. The Gurkhas came from many peoples and clans, among them the Gurung, Magar, Limbu, Tamang, Rai and Chhetri, and in Nepal itself nobody called himself a Gurkha. A soldier in a foreign army was called a lahure there. Poverty and landlessness drove men into the army, and according to research cited by the historian Gajendra Singh, village headmen and landlords often sent the poorest and most indebted into the army.

At the start of the war Nepal placed its whole army at the British disposal. More than 16,000 Nepalese soldiers guarded the frontier and garrisons in India in place of troops sent overseas. Estimates of the number of Gurkhas vary widely. Singh, drawing on an Indian compilation of 1923, gives 55,589 Nepalese recruited during the war, who reinforced the roughly 17,000 Gurkhas serving before it. Other works give a figure of more than 200,000 Nepalese in British service, which Singh considers mistaken. The number of Gurkha battalions grew during the war to more than thirty.

France and Flanders (1914–1915)

On 26 September 1914 the first soldiers of the Indian Corps, Gurkhas among them, came ashore at Marseille, where the French greeted them with flowers. They arrived in light tropical uniforms, and the autumn in Flanders was cold and wet. At the end of October the Indian Corps took over the front from Givenchy to Fauquissart, and as early as 2 November the Germans drove one of their battalions out of its trenches. In December, at Givenchy, a double company of the 1st Battalion, 4th Gurkhas was killed by the explosions of German mines or buried in its trenches.

In 1915 Gurkha battalions fought at Neuve-Chapelle, in the Second Battle of Ypres and in the subsidiary attack at Pietre on the first day of the Battle of Loos. There a battalion of the 8th Gurkhas fought to the last and, in the words of the Indian Corps commander, “found its Valhalla”. The corps was losing men faster than India could send drafts, and fallen British officers were replaced by men who often knew neither the soldiers nor their language. In November 1915 the corps’ infantry began to leave France.

Gallipoli (1915)

In April 1915 the 29th Indian Brigade, with the 1st Battalion, 6th Gurkhas, sailed for the Dardanelles. At Cape Helles, on the night of 12–13 May, Gurkhas climbed a steep headland known thereafter as Gurkha Bluff, and from 28 June they fought at Gully Ravine, retaking trenches with their kukris. In August the brigade moved to Anzac. In the Battle of Sari Bair the 1/6th Battalion under Major Cecil Allanson reached the crest, from which the Dardanelles, the goal of the whole campaign, could be seen, but it soon had to come down. In December the Gurkhas left the peninsula.

Mesopotamia, Persia and Palestine (1915–1918)

In the Middle East the Gurkhas fought the Ottoman Empire from the first months of the war. In February 1915 their battalions stood on the Suez Canal when the Turks tried to cross it. In Mesopotamia, in November 1915, the 2/7th Gurkhas advanced across open plain against the Turkish trenches at Ctesiphon, where Gurkhas and Punjabis held all night a mound later called Gurkha Mound.

On 23 February 1917 the pontoons of the 2/9th Gurkhas crossed the Tigris under fire at Shumran. The next day the Turks abandoned Kut and began to retreat towards Baghdad. Major George Wheeler of that battalion received the Victoria Cross for the day.

After the fall of Baghdad the Gurkhas pushed further up both rivers. At Istabulat on the Tigris, in the battle of 21–22 April 1917, the 1/8th Gurkhas, together with the Scottish Black Watch battalion, took the Turkish redoubts that barred the way to Samarra. On 28 September on the Euphrates Gurkhas of several battalions fought in the battle in which the 15th Division encircled the Turks at Ramadi. There the 1/5th Battalion went up onto a completely open ridge under heavy fire from the main Turkish position.

In Palestine, in November 1917, Gurkhas of the 3/3rd Battalion defended the mosque on the hill of Nebi Samwil near Jerusalem, driving off the Turks with bayonets and kukris. In Persia 150 men of the 1/2nd Gurkhas helped in July 1918 to defend Rasht. In October 1918, in the last days of the war with Turkey, the 1/7th Gurkhas crossed the Tigris to help the British cavalry at Sharqat.

The balance

The National Army Museum states that the Gurkha regiments received hundreds of gallantry awards during the war, including three Victoria Crosses, and suffered more than 20,000 casualties. Nepal also gave Britain a million pounds, timber and other supplies. The war fixed the legend of the fearless Gurkha, kukri in hand, which Singh calls a colonial fiction: many veterans came home embittered, because the recruiters had talked to them of money, food and pensions, not of war.