Following a recent post where I counted through the 474 individual awards for gallantry in the Burma campaign and identified the country of origin of the recipient, I was asked by a number of friends for an analysis of the awards in the Indian Army between Indian and Gurkha regiments.
For context, after 1922 the Indian Army was structured into 19 Indian and 10 Gurkha Regiments regiments, thus:
(Taken from an appendix in my book, A War of Empires).
Now, I know that I need to spend a bit more time identifying the Indian and Gurkha regiments and their battalions involved in the Burma Campaign (this will take some time, and will be Version 3 of the blog) but over the weekend I went through all 474 citations again splitting out the Indian from the Gurkha. The results are below:
Superficially, they indicate that with only 6.5% of the troops, Gurkhas received 21% of the total awards given during the campaign. Lots of other things intrude at this point, but the figure itself is remarkable.
In due course, when I have more time - I’m spread as thin as butter at the moment - I’ll give you a flavour of some of these citations, British, Indian, Gurkha and African. All of them are remarkable, and speak volumes about the men who made up the extraordinary 14th Army.
Who Got the Gongs? (Version 2)
The problems with gallantry citations is someone seeing the event and surviving to write it up. And then get through a review process. I wonder how many actions that might have warranted an MC or even a VC went unnoticed or unrecorded because literally nobody lived to tell the tale.