Winter Trenches: Gurkhas Against The Elements
Winter Trenches: Gurkhas Against The Elements
With winter now upon us, we are taking the opportunity to look back at some of the most gruelling winter fighting ever faced by Gurkha soldiers. In 1914, the Indian Corps was sent to the Western Front to reinforce the beleaguered British Expeditionary Force. Six Gurkha battalions went into a winter worse than any Europe had seen in years. Confronting not only an active enemy but also atrocious conditions, their resilience was put to the test.
The Western Front: November – December 1914
When Indian army units began arriving in France at the end of September 1914, the active and mobile fighting of the summer was beginning to bog down. By mid-November, the Western Front had mostly settled into the static trench warfare that would come to characterise the First World War.
However, the intricate networks of deep, well-constructed trenches would come later. The trenches the Gurkhas held during the first winter of the war were often hastily dug, narrow and sometimes only accessible by crawling across perilous open ground.
A trench held by the 9th Gurkha Rifles, c. 1914 – 1915. Note the sentry using a mirror to observe no man’s land and the Gurkhas stooping low to avoid sniper fire. Due to a lack of dugouts, Gurkhas are sleeping exposed on the fire step.
To make matters worse, once bad weather set in freezing rains reduced the trenches to a quagmire. In the trenches of the 1st Battalion of the 4th Gurkha Rifles the water was waist deep and the Gurkhas had no choice but to stand in it for hours. To try and stop themselves sinking into the mud, the men took discarded mangolds from nearby fields and stamped them into the trench floor. Movement was also difficult. An officer of the 8th Gurkha Rifles recalled a communication trench near Le Plantin that, although only being 700 yards long, was so full of mud and water that it took a relief six hours to move along it.
Having recently been serving in India, many Gurkhas were wearing kit that was unsuitable for winter conditions, with some Gurkhas wearing khaki shorts well into November. Unsurprisingly, casualties from sickness, frostbite and trench foot began to occur within Gurkha units. Equipment wasn’t immune to the cold either. Gurkhas of the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Gurkha Rifles found that two of their machine guns had become useless after the water in their cooling jackets had frozen. The Gurkhas had to place hot bricks around the jacket to get the machine gun back into working order.
9GR machine gun post in France, c.1914 – 1915.
Christmas 1914 is famous for the informal ‘Christmas truce’, where in many sectors along the frontline British and German soldiers met each other in no man’s land between the trenches. But in the sectors held by the Indian Army there was little in the way of peace and goodwill. In fact, between 17 – 21 December, many Gurkhas faced the fiercest fighting they had yet seen in France when the Germans attacked Givenchy. The defence of Givenchy and subsequent counterattacks were extremely costly – 1/4GR alone suffered 138 officers and men killed, 37 wounded and 47 captured.
After the heavy fighting in December, the Gurkha battalions spent Christmas resting in villages behind the frontline, giving them a sorely needed opportunity to rest and re-fit. They would enjoy their break from the fighting for several weeks, though difficult trials still lay ahead for the Gurkhas in the spring battles of 1915.
Gallipoli: November 1915
1500 miles away from the Western Front, four Gurkha battalions were fighting a different trench war. In April 1915, British, French, Indian and Commonwealth troops had landed in Turkey on the Gallipoli Peninsula, hoping to break through to the capital of Constantinople (now Istanbul) and force the Turkish Ottoman Empire out of the war.
Over the next five months, Gurkha soldiers would fight in a number of actions, such as the assault on Gurkha Bluff, but no breakthrough was achieved and the campaign descended into the same gruelling trench warfare that dominated the Western Front. By September, British forces on the peninsula were at a standstill, and winter was beginning to loom.
Men of the 6th Gurkha Rifles snatch a few hours of sleep in their trench, Gallipoli, 1915.
In late November, a massive storm blew onto the peninsula, battering British and Turkish forces alike with rain and violent winds. The resulting floods became so severe that in some places soldiers on both sides had to abandon their trenches, sitting on the parapets and facing each other helplessly as water rushed around them. The floodwater disturbed the detritus of the battlefields, and men would later report seeing dead bodies wash by.
The rain quickly turned to snow, and for three days the Gurkhas endured a terrible blizzard. Some battalions fared better than others. 1/4GR, which had transferred from France in September 1915 and was hardened by the winter it had faced there, had relatively few casualties. However, in the 2nd Battalion, 10th Gurkha Rifles, there were 447 cases of frostbite – all of which required evacuation. For many of the men their condition was so bad that they were permanently disabled from further service. After the blizzard, 2/10GRs fighting strength was reduced to just 100 men.
One small consolation was that for the Gurkhas, and indeed all of the Allied soldiers on the peninsula, the ordeal was coming to an end. With any sort success at Gallipoli now extremely unlikely and resources being diverted to other theatres of war, the British government decided to evacuate the peninsula. Throughout December, troops were pulled away from the trenches and by early January the evacuation was complete, with the Turkish forces having no idea it was happening until the final moments.
From 1916, the Gurkhas main theatres of war would shift to Palestine and Mesopotamia. Although there would be tough fighting ahead, the Gurkhas would at least avoid the harsh winters of the previous two years.
