08/21/2026
Taungdaw, Burma. West bank of the Irrawaddy. The night of 12 May 1945. Two companies of the 4th Battalion, 8th Gurkha Rifles had been sent to block a withdrawing Japanese force and had ended up surrounded, their lines of communication cut. Rifleman Lachhiman Gurung was 27 years old. He stood just under four foot eleven, too small for the peacetime army that had only taken him in 1940 because the war was going badly. His trench was the most forward post of the platoon, roughly a hundred yards ahead of the main company position, sitting over a jungle path. Two other men shared it with him.
At twenty past one in the morning, at least 200 Japanese soldiers assaulted the company. Before they came forward they threw gr***des across thirty yards of open ground. One landed on the lip of Gurung's trench. He grabbed it and threw it back. Seconds later a second gr***de dropped inside the trench. He stooped, picked it up, threw it back. A third landed just in front of him. He reached for it and it detonated in his hand, blowing off his fingers, shattering his right arm, and tearing into his face, body and right leg. Both men beside him were badly wounded and could not move.
The Japanese formed up shoulder to shoulder to rush the position. Gurung understood exactly what his trench was. If it fell, the whole reverse slope behind it fell with it. He later described the decision without a shred of drama: "I had to fight because there was no other way. I felt I was going to die anyway, so I might as well die standing on my feet." He drove his khukri into the parapet in front of him. His section commander later recorded what Gurung told him afterward: the enemy could not have passed that knife while he was still alive.
Then he fought for four hours with one hand. He rested the rifle on the front of the trench, worked the bolt and loaded with his left hand, and fired at point blank range into each wave as it came. Wave after wave was thrown back. The men in the trenches behind him could hear him shouting through the dark, calling the Japanese forward to come and fight a Gurkha. Nobody could reach him. The firing never stopped long enough.
They got to him the next morning. Of the 87 enemy dead counted around the company position, 31 lay in front of his section. His company was cut off for three days and two nights, so he could not be evacuated. He stayed in that position until relief arrived at midday on 15 May. His platoon havildar recorded that Gurung made one complaint the entire time: the flies that settled on his blood-soaked bandages and on his eyes and lips, which had been burned by the blast. At one point he could not see and asked to have his eyes bathed. He asked for nothing else. He told the havildar he was not going to die, because he intended to keep serving. In hospital his right hand was operated on three times before it was amputated. He lost the right eye.
The Victoria Cross recommendation was signed by his commanding officer six days after the action, downgraded twice on its way up the chain, then restored to a VC by the Commander-in-Chief of Allied Land Forces. It was gazetted in late July 1945. He was decorated at the Red Fort in Delhi that December. His father, then about 74, was carried for eleven days from their village in Nepal to watch. Gurung stayed in uniform, transferred to the Indian Army at independence, retired as a havildar in 1947 and went home to farm two acres. Then in 2008, at 90, he backed a legal challenge against the British government, which had barred roughly 2,000 Gurkhas who retired before 1997 from settling in Britain on the grounds that they had failed to demonstrate strong ties to the country. The High Court ordered the policy reviewed. In May 2009 the government gave way. Gurung then had to petition separately to stop the deportation of his granddaughter Amrita, who was caring for him.
He is buried at Chiswick New Cemetery, and his Victoria Cross sits with his old battalion in India. The argument he joined at 90 is still running. Around 25,000 Gurkhas who retired before 1997 remain on the 1948 Gurkha Pension Scheme, drawing less than British veterans of the same rank. On 3 March 2026 the UK government responds to a Nepalese Supreme Court judgment on those pensions. On 26 March 2026 the Commons debates Gurkha veterans and MPs call the disparity an uncomfortable truth. Veterans' groups, who say more than 20,000 of their number have died waiting, set an end-of-March deadline and threaten to resume protests in Kathmandu and London.
He gave Britain his hand, his eye and four hours of his life. Britain is still working out what that was worth.
