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 Gurkha 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 Gurkha 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 33rd 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 Gurkha 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 Gurkha Rifles joined the new Indian Army.
Lachhiman had reached the rank of havildar (sergeant) but, because of his disabilities, 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 onehectare (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 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 Gurkha Rifles of the Indian Army in India to inspire future generations of Gurkha 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
Richard Holbrooke
'The Raging Bull of US diplomacy' who brought peace to Bosnia but antagonised allies in Afghanistan
Famously robust US diplomatic troubleshooter who masterminded the Dayton agreements which pacified the former Yugoslavia
One of America’s toughest and roughest diplomats, Richard Holbrooke was an obvious choice for President Obama to make for the challenging assignment as his Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Throughout his career Holbrooke specialised in missions impossible — though none so daunting as bringing peace to the Balkans after years of vicious wars and massacres.
President Obama called him “a towering figure in American foreign policy”, but his last assignment as the senior policy maker on the administration’s most pressing foreign policy issue did not go well. He was involved in in-fighting with the US military and civilian advisers, and there was evidence that his role was becoming marginalised. He pressed for increases in both US troops and development projects in Afghanistan but died before it was possible to say whether that policy was succeeding in stabilising the country.
His efforts to strengthen the role of Afghanistan’s local government and police were dealt a setback in 2009 after the Afghan presidential election was widely declared fraudulent. He made an enemy of President Hamid Karzai, with whom he frequently had bad-tempered clashes — Karzai referred to him as “the devil” — and he succeeded in infuriating the US Vice-President, Joe Biden.
Holbrooke was described by Biden in Bob Woodward’s book Obama’s War as “the most egotistical bastard I have ever met”. However Biden did add: “He may be the right guy for the job”.
During his term in Afghanistan Holbrooke helped to shape the civilian component of the Administration’s Afghan strategy, deploying more than 1,000 diplomats and aid workers to help the nation to rebuild its state institutions. But he was quoted as saying of the overall US strategy: “It can’t work.”
In the Balkans in the mid-1990s, however, Holbrooke’s involvement turned out to be a striking success. For four years Washington had hoped that it could leave it to Europe to solve the upheavals after the breakup of Yugoslavia that cost a quarter of a million lives and created two million refugees. But such influential figures as Lord Carrington and Lord Owen and the might of Nato failed to master the wily and ruthless Balkan leaders who met their match only when confronted with Holbrooke, President Clinton’s chief negotiator.
Holbrooke was an imposing bear of a man with restless energy, always prepared to shout and swear and bully to get his way. In his negotiations with the Balkan leaders he became known as the “bulldozer diplomat”. Friends and acquaintances said that he could be charming, but at other times he was insufferable.
The launch of his mission in August 1995 to broker agreement among the warring factions in Bosnia began disastrously. The three senior members of his team died when their armoured vehicle rolled off a mountain track while trying to reach the besieged city of Sarajevo. Holbrooke returned to Washington to attend the funerals of his dead colleagues but within days he was back in the Balkans with a new team. He then began 14 weeks of shuttle diplomacy culminating in the Dayton Peace Accords which ended the war and established a unified Bosnia.
Holbrooke, the architect of the peace agreement, called it “the most important test of American leadership since the end of the Cold War”.
Before Dayton Holbrooke had succeeded in lifting the four-year siege of Sarajevo with the backing of a large Nato bombing campaign against the Bosnian Serb military positions surrounding the city. This demonstration of force — at that time the largest military action in Nato history — proved to be the essential prelude to the peace agreement. The negotiations in Dayton, Ohio, which took three weeks and involved three Balkan presidents, looked likely to end in failure until Holbrooke announced a one-hour ultimatum for agreement after which he threatened that he would close down the conference.
In his award-winning book To End a War Holbrooke said that in only 18 weeks, when the situation seemed most hopeless, the US put its prestige on the line with a series of dramatic and high-risk actions which redefined America’s role in post-Cold War Europe. “Had the US not intervened the war would have continued for years and ended disastrously,” he wrote.
Holbrooke was one of America’s most unorthodox and most successful diplomats, but he failed twice in his efforts to become Secretary of State. In 1997 President Clinton picked Madeleine Albright for the post, and in 2009, when Holbrooke was again a candidate, President Obama gave the job to Hillary Clinton.
Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke was born in 1941 in New York. His father, a doctor, was a Russian Jewish émigré and his mother was from a German Jewish background. Neither was religious, and their son was given Quaker upbringing. Holbrooke attended Scarsdale High School, and then Brown University in 1962 and Princeton in 1970, where he completed a postgraduate fellowship.
In youth he was influenced by the guidance of a former Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, whose son was Holbrooke’s closest friend. After graduating from Brown Holbrooke entered the State Department and, after Vietnamese language training, began six years of involvement with Vietnam. He served first in the Mekong Delta as a civilian representative for the Agency for International Development working on the rural pacification programme.
He then moved to the US Embassy in Saigon as assistant to Ambassadors Maxwell Taylor and Henry Cabot Lodge. As the war in Vietnam escalated, President Lyndon Johnson formed a team of Vietnam experts to work at the White House, and Holbrooke was asked to join the group when he was only 24 four years old. In 1968 he was asked to be part of the US delegation to the Paris peace talks on Vietnam, led by the Governor of New York, Averell Harriman. He also drafted a volume of the famous Pentagon Papers, a topsecret report on the government’s decision-making on Vietnam, the publication of which led indirectly to the Watergate scandal.
In 1970 he was assigned to be Peace Corps Director in Morocco but after two years he left to become managing editor of the influential American magazine Foreign Policy, a post he held from 1972 to 1976. In 1976 he helped to prepare Jimmy Carter for foreign affairs debates in his presidential campaign.
After Carter’s victory he became Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, the youngest person ever to hold that position — he remained in the post until 1981. During that period he was involved in the culmination of the normalisation of relations with China and with bringing hundreds of thousands of Indochinese refugees to America.
In 1992 President Clinton appointed Holbrooke Ambassador to Germany, and he helped to shape US relations with the new state after its reunification. He was ambassador when Clinton visited Berlin in July 1994 and was a key figure in promoting Nato enlargement after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
In 1994 he was appointed Assistant Secretary for European and Canadian Affairs and negotiated the Balkans peace agreement. On leaving the State Department in 1996 he was asked by President Clinton to become, as a private citizen, a special envoy to the Balkans where he worked to end the conflict between the armed forces of Serbia and the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army. In March 1999 he travelled to Belgrade to deliver the ultimatum to the Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic before the Nato bombing campaign against Serbia.
In August that year he became the US Ambassador to the UN and negotiated a controversial, long-delayed deal to settle the bulk of arrears owed by the US to the UN. Holbrooke and his team received a standing ovation in the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee when the terms of the deal were presented.
Upon leaving the UN a year later he took over a nearly moribund global business coalition on HIV/Aids and as its president turned it into an effective NGO in the fight against Aids, tuberculosis and malaria. Latterly he had suffered from a rare arterial condition.
Holbrooke was married three times. He is survived by his wife, Kati Marton, an author and journalist, whom he married in 1995. He is survived by two sons of his first marriage.
Richard Holbrooke, diplomat, was born on April 24, 1941. He died after surgery to repair a ruptured aorta on December 13, 2010, aged 69
When a Russian was caught stealing a Mickey Mouse toy from the Kensington department store Derry & Toms in December 1970, British diplomat David Miller, a second secretary at the Moscow embassy, had no idea the theft would end his career prospects as a Russian-speaking Sovietologist.
The furious Russians, claiming their citizen had been framed, chose to expel Miller, his wife Caroline and their six-month old daughter in April 1971 after four months of heavy stalking by KGB men and allegations that Miller was behaving undiplomatically.
The expulsion of the Millers heralded a much noisier UK-USSR diplomatic cannonade. Operation FOOT, masterminded by MI5, had identified 120 Soviet agents of the KGB or military GRU among the 550 Soviet diplomats in London — more than in any other Western country, including the United States. A memorandum from Reginald Maudling, the Home Secretary, and Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the Foreign Secretary, told Prime Minister Edward Heath that the Russians were swamping MI5 resources and that a defector, Oleg Lyalin, had identified the spies and saboteurs who were planning disruption in the United Kingdom.
Heath ordered huge expulsions on September 24, 1971. When the smoke cleared, 105 Russians had been expelled and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, alleging “hooligan-like acts by the British police”, booted out a further 18 British diplomats to join the Millers in London.
For Miller, it was the end of a chance to pursue his career in the Soviet Union, he ended his service instead as the first resident ambassador to Armenia. The next time he went to the Soviet Union was 19 years later when, seconded to Nato in Brussels, he formed part of a delegation headed by Secretary General Manfred Woerner to Moscow and Leningrad (now St Petersburg) and met Mikhail Gorbachev when glasnost and perestroika were in full flow. Miller was among the delegates led by Woerner, a German, who laid a wreath at the tomb of the Soviet unknown soldier commemorating the millions killed by the Germans in the Second World War.
After his retirement he visited St Petersburg as a tourist with his wife — and was mugged by two Russians. This did not shake his interest in Russia but in the last days of his life he deplored the failure of the Putin regime to install democracy and media freedom.
He said: “Three hundred journalists have been killed in Russia since 1990. If anyone deserves a memorial, it is they. Today’s Russia seems to be just a nasty, fascist backwater, with no claim to legitimacy or even respectability in its actions, at home or abroad. I despair of it completely.”
David Ivimey Miller was born at Stanmore, Middlesex, in 1937, the younger son of an electrical engineer. He and brother James were brought up as Anglicans and James became a clergyman. But Miller was attracted to Roman Catholicism in his student days. Anxious not to upset his brother, he did not convert until early this year after his brother’s death.
During his National Service he served in the Army, taking two Russian courses. Subsequently he obtained a BA (Hons) from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London University, and then Magdalen College, Oxford.
He joined the Foreign Office in 1964 and went to Moscow as a third secretary the next year where he met Caroline Jackson, who was working for the British Embassy’s resident physician. They married in 1968 and continued to live in Moscow, Miller by now a second secretary, until their expulsion.
Miller then served two years in Berlin and the CSCE in Geneva before a posting to Belgrade where he served as first secretary and head of chancery until secondment to the Cabinet Office from 1982-1985. He was then seconded to Nato’s Political Affairs Directorate, serving Lord Carrington and Woerner as Secretaries General until 1990.
After five years back at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) as assistant director of research, Miller was appointed as the first resident ambassador to Armenia from 1995-97. Miller had to check in to a hotel while searching for suitable embassy quarters and conditions were so sparse wife that his wife opted to remain in the UK for much of the time.
Miller became ardent in his support of the Armenian efforts to have the great slaughter of their people by the Ottoman Turks in the First World War recognised internationally as genocide. After his retirement he was outspoken in his defence of the Armenian line despite the fact that this was contrary to British policy. Modern Turkey says the killing of the Armenians in 1915 and 1916 was not premeditated but admits that 200,000-300,000 may have been killed or starved under Ottoman rule. The Armenians say up to two million were killed. Many countries accept the slaughter as genocide but the UK, United States and Israel use different terminology.
One of Miller’s successors, Ambassador Thorda Abbott-Watt, caused uproar in Yerevan in 2004 by asserting that the Armenian massacres did not constitute genocide, triggering a stern Armenian note to London. In March, Miller told a discussion panel at the London School of Economics that he was delighted at the news that a US congressional draft resolution called for the Armenian slaughter to be recognised as genocide. He was not reproached by the Foreign and Commonwealth office for his contradictory views.
In retirement Miller became a part-time sensitivity reviewer at FCO’s main archive near Milton Keynes, deciding whether classified documents could be published after 30 years. His favourite document was a report by a British diplomat who interviewed a Polynesian chieftain to brief him on an invitation to London. The chieftain said: “I’ve always felt there’s a bit of an Englishman within me”. It turned out this feeling was physical rather than philosophical, as the chieftain’s ancestors had once eaten several shipwrecked English sailors.
Miller’s hobbies included an interest in lower-division English football teams and their grounds and a fascination for postwar British railways. He was appointed OBE in 1991.
He is survived by his wife and two daughters.
David Miller, OBE, diplomat, was born on March 26, 1937. He died of cancer on November 30, 2010, aged 73
