Tale of a Gorkha Victoria Cross Winner

Retired Colonel Jason Waltham warmly shook hands with retired Captain Joge Limbu, and felt a surge of the old affection.  He reached up, gripping Limbu’s shoulders, and asked, “How are you, old chap?  It has been a long time.”

It was obvious Limbu reciprocated Waltham’s feelings.  He regarded Waltham with the old twinkle in his eyes.  Waltham had stayed trim, his tall frame still looking good in his khakis, which showed creases sharp enough for a novice teenager to shave with.  The big difference about Waltham that Limbu could see was a nearly bald head.

“I am fine, thank you, sir.  It has been a long time – 12 years, I think.  How are the Missus and the children?”

“They’re fine, thanks.  How’re your folks? Has your wife come with you” Waltham asked as he studied his old fellow soldier.  Limbu had put on some weight: his small frame no longer looked as wiry as it had been during his army days.  His cheerful Mongolian face had enough wrinkles on it to suggest a contour map of one of the terraced mountains of his native Nepal, but he sported a full thatch of hair.

“They are fine, sir.  My wife stayed behind in Nepal because my mother-in-law has been in poor health recently.  Thank you, sir.”

Waltham and Limbu were at a reunion in London for Victoria Cross awardees.  Limbu had won his Victoria Cross under Waltham’s command against the Japanese in Burma.  He was flaunting it right now and looking at it, Waltham just could not suppress a grin.

Limbu caught him grinning, looked bemused for a while, then smiled widely.

Waltham drifted back to that day in the Chin Hills in Burma.

Major Jason Waltham stared with bleary eyes from his trench at the Japanese bunker on the small hill less than two hundred yards away, and wondered how he was going to get around it.  He looked around at the tired men of the 5th Royal Gorkha Rifles under his command.  He knew they were game, but he needed a plan.

It was May 1943, and his D Company had been pinned down for hours by withering fire from the Japanese.  He had made three fierce assaults, but had repeatedly been driven back by the stuttering death thrown at them by the heavy machine gun in the bunker.  Casualties had been high; he had the consolation of knowing that the Japanese had also suffered several losses.

He ducked as another rapid crochet of lead from the Japanese machine gun tore up the earth around like an invitation to death in morse code.  Stooping low, he crabbed about fifty yards through the trench to another little hill, almost as high as the one with the Japanese bunker on it.  His hill ran down sharply to a small stream of cold water meandering through a patch of light brush.  On the other side of the stream rose the hill with the Japanese.  There was a covering of brush extending almost to the bunker.

Havaldar Joge Limbu was shooting the breeze with Rifleman Kul Bahadur Magar in a small cleared space behind the trench embankment.  They were squatting on their haunches with a bunch of their fellow Gorkhas.  Every now and then one of them would raise his head cautiously and peer out over the embankment at the Japanese position.

“So will any of them wait for you?” asked Limbu in Nepali.

“I don’t know,” Magar replied in the same language. 

“Do you intend to marry one of them?”

“No.  Why buy a cow when milk is available aplenty in the market?”  A few of the guys around laughed.

They were discussing Magar’s love life.  He prided himself on being a stud with a belle in every village in his native district, Gorkha, in Nepal.

“How do you do it?” asked Limbu.  “I am hopeless with women.”

Magar grinned slyly, like one of the three monkeys caught peeking out from between its fingers.  “Some guys have it, some don’t,” he smirked.

Major Waltham reached them just then.  “How’s it going, men?” he asked.

“Okay, I suppose, for now, but we aren’t going to get anywhere until we silence that machine gun,” replied Limbu.

The Major clapped his hands to make sure he had the attention of all present.

“I need a volunteer to take out the bunker,” he said.  “We have seen that frontal attacks are not working, and I hope one guy can worm his way through sneakily and destroy the bunker.”

His men looked at each other.  Limbu straightened up and stared out at the Japanese position, ignoring the peril.

One of the other Gorkhas asked Waltham, “When, sir?”

“Now,” he replied.  “I will be back in five minutes.  Let me go and organize covering fire.”  He started moving back the way he had come, and had gone about 10 yards when he heard an almighty commotion behind him, and turned to look back.

His mouth flew open as he saw Limbu fly out of the trench, hit the slope and tumble all the way down to the stream below.  Limbu regained his footing, cast a strangely angry look behind him, shook his fist and then plunged across the stream and onto the opposite hill. 

Limbu was rapidly scrambling up the hill, and Waltham wondered if he was going to reach the bunker without getting spotted by the Japanese.  His heart hammering, he willed Limbu on, so enrapt in the scene that he forgot his own vulnerability: in his amazement, he had straightened up, and was horribly exposed.

It was too good to last.  Limbu was more than halfway up the hill when the machine gun sounded off with its insane chatter and the brush around Limbu started to shred.  In what seemed to be a slowed down dream sequence of crystal clear clarity, Waltham saw Limbu strike off at an angle, running hard, trying to get out of the line of sight of the machine gun slot.

Just as Waltham was thinking he had made it, he jerked hard and fell to his knees.  Waltham saw him shake his head, then rise slowly, drop his rifle and draw his khukhuri, the famous curved knife that is lethal in a Gorkha’s hands.  Two Japanese soldiers suddenly appeared from nowhere right in front of Limbu, and Waltham saw Limbu jab, then slash and slash again.  The Japanese soldiers dropped like ripe jackfruit off a tree, and Limbu raised his right hand, waved his khukhuri above his head and roared, “Ayo Gorkhali!”  Here come the Gorkhas!

The shouted war cry broke the trance.  Waltham yelled at his men to give covering fire to Limbu, and to charge the Japanese bunker.  A fusillade broke out, threshing the brush and ground in front of the bunker and chipping the bunker’s walls.  Several of the Gorkhas rushed out of their trenches like they had been goosed.  Their clarion call Ayo Gorkhali rang out like the calls of a murder of crows circling around an electrocuted compatriot as they rushed towards the Japanese position.

Waltham jumped out of the trench, heedless of the chatter of the Japanese machine gun and the ceaseless clatter of rifles.  He could see Limbu engaged with another pair of Japanese soldiers as he rushed down his hill.  He literally flew across the stream, hearing the crunk of a grenade, then another.  He instinctively knew Limbu had taken out the Japanese bunker, and could feel the adrenalin in him pushing him almost to the point of actual flight.

When Waltham got to the top of the Japanese hill, the fight was over.  The dead and the dying looked like surrealistic images on a backdrop of smoke and cordite smell.  No quarter had been asked, none given.  There were no prisoners.  The Gorkhas went around confirming that none of the Japanese were playing possum, and than came and formed a ring around Waltham.  Most of them stood with their khukhuris dripping blood.

They were suddenly cheerful and nattering away in Nepali.  Waltham looked around for Limbu.  He did not see him at once – and then there he was suddenly, staggering into the group, his normally pleasant face pinched with rage, his color aglow with the red of a rhesus monkey’s rump.  He was shaking with temper and stood there silent for a while, incoherent with the emotions that churned in him.  He had been shot thrice, once in the left shoulder, and twice just above the hips, on the right.  He had been scratched badly on the face while tumbling down the hill from his trench.  He was bleeding badly, and was barely able to stand, but he was so pissed he just did not seem to know it.

Waltham could not understand why Limbu was so incensed.  He patted him on the shoulder and said, ”That was a fantastic piece of work, old boy.  You were bloody great.  Why don’t you go get your wounds looked at?”

Limbu finally found voice.  “Who was the son of a yeti who pushed me out of the trench when the Major asked for a volunteer?” he demanded in a strangled whisper.