The Dangerous Book of Heroes Page 28

  In the battle for the Falkland Islands in 1982, the Gurkhas were involved in the final assault to liberate Port Stanley from Argentinian troops. They were particularly feared by the Argentinian soldiers, whose own propaganda had led them to believe the Gurkhas were savages who killed their own wounded, slit Argentinian throats, and sometimes even ate the enemy.

  While the Second Scots Guards took Mount Tumbledown and the Second Para took Wireless Ridge, the Gurkhas’ objective was the key position of Mount William. To the north of Tumbledown, there was a minefield the Gurkhas could either go around or feel their way through. At dawn they chose to go through. They came under artillery fire but didn’t falter as fourteen were wounded.

  Meanwhile, some three hundred Argentinians were retreating before the Scots Guards when they ran into an advance Gurkha patrol. They immediately turned about and surrendered to the guards.

  The main force of Argentinians on Mount William then saw that they were faced by the Gurkhas. They left their positions, threw away their rifles, and bolted for Port Stanley. The Gurkhas were bitterly disappointed to take Mount William without resistance.

  “They knew we were coming and they feared us,” said Lieutenant Colonel David Morgan, then commander of the Gurkha Rifles. “Of course, I think they had every ground to fear us.” The Argentinian lines of defense were broken wide open.

  Gurkha regiments also served in Iraq and Afghanistan at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Despite their history, they are in every way modern riflemen, but they maintain an age-old spirit and discipline. They see courage as the greatest aim and honor in life and regard those of their number who have won the Victoria Cross as an elite group of Nepalese national heroes. Every young man who joins the regiments today cherishes the idea that he may one day be part of that small, valiant number.

  One problem faced by Gurkhas from World War II is that they did not qualify for a pension unless they had served a full fifteen years. Those who had fought in Malaya, Borneo, and Brunei were sent home with just a small gratuity in 1967–71 as the overall numbers were reduced. More than ten thousand of those who returned to Nepal after risking their lives for Britain are still alive today and depend on the work of charities such as the Gurkha Welfare Trust for support.

  In a landmark ruling in September 2008 the British High Court ruled that Gurkha soldiers who retired before 1997 should have the right to live in Britain. That was a huge step forward for a group that has rarely been rewarded as it deserves. Even so, after many decades of being forbidden the right or the pension to live in Britain, a large number will prefer to spend their final years in Nepal, where the continuing work of British charities is vital.

  Recommended

  The Gurkhas by Byron Farwell

  Supreme Courage: Heroic Stories from 150 Years of the Victoria Cross by General Sir Peter de la Billière

  Journeys Hazardous: Gurkha Clandestine Operations: Borneo 1965 by Christopher Bullock

  The Gurkha Museum, Winchester, U.K.

  Horatio Nelson: The Immortal Memory

  The 29th of September, 1758: the Wife of the Rector of Burnham Thorpe Parish, of a Son.

  All Saints’ Church, Burnham Thorpe, Norfolk, is today much as it was in 1758 when a son of the rector and his wife was baptized and christened. The most notable additions to this quiet Anglican church since that christening are the wooden lectern and rood, carved from the original oak of HMS Victory. For the boy born that autumn was Horatio Nelson, destined to become the most famous naval commander in the world—with his and Victory’s name forever joined.

  Beneath the flat skies of East Anglia, Horatio lived an ordinary boyhood. Although the family was educated, they were not wealthy. He attended local schools, went hunting for birds’ nests, and pilfered apples and pears from orchards with his friends. His mother died when he was nine years old, and it was through her family that there was a connection with the sea—Captain Maurice Suckling, an uncle serving in the Royal Navy. Horatio asked his father for permission to join his uncle in a ship being commissioned for possible war with Spain over the Falkland Islands. It was agreed. In January 1771, aged twelve years and three months, Horatio Nelson joined his first ship, the sixty-four-gun Raisonnable, at Chatham Naval Dockyard, Kent.

  Across the dock from the Raisonnable was the new first-rate Victory, a one-hundred-gun ship of the line launched in 1765 but held in reserve. There’s no doubt that Midshipman Nelson noticed her. It’s likely he boarded and looked her over, for she was a most impressive ship: two thousand English oak trees had been used to build her.

  Five months later, Spain withdrew her claim to the Falklands and Captain Suckling and Nelson transferred to the seventy-four-gun Triumph. Suckling arranged for his nephew to ship for a year to the West Indies in a merchant vessel. Most seamen in the Royal Navy of that era spent time in the merchant service; it was the best training in seamanship available. One such officer, James Cook, had returned from a voyage around the world that July, and all Britain was talking about him.

  A year after his return, Nelson joined an Arctic expedition seeking the Northeast Passage through the ice around the top of Russia to the Pacific. At fourteen, he wangled a berth in the bomb ketch Carcass as coxswain, a petty officer in charge of one of the small boats. Icebound one polar night, Nelson left the ship on foot to hunt polar bear across the sea ice. He wanted to send his father a white bearskin for his hearth, but the bear escaped when Nelson’s musket misfired. Nelson himself escaped the enraged bear only after Carcass fired a cannon to frighten it off. Heavy ice turned the expedition back north of Norway.

  At the end of 1773, Midshipman Nelson joined HMS Seahorse, a twenty-gun frigate in a squadron sailing to the East. He served on the Seahorse for two years, visiting Africa, India, and the Spice Islands before he contracted malaria and almost died. Semi-paralyzed, Nelson was invalided home but was to suffer from the aftereffects for the rest of his life. Yet only a few days after his return, five days before his eighteenth birthday in 1776, Nelson was appointed acting lieutenant to the sixty-four-gun Worcester, escorting convoys to Gibraltar and elsewhere. The following year, having served the required minimum six years aboard ship, he passed his lieutenant’s examination.

  The bitter American War of Independence was then being fought, and Nelson was posted to the West Indies station in the frigate Lowestoffe. In her he obtained his first command, the captured American schooner Little Lucy. A year later he was promoted to first lieutenant on the flagship HMS Bristol. In December 1778 he was promoted again, to be master and commander of the brig Badger, his second command. Only six months later, of just twenty years of age, Horatio Nelson was posted captain. That same year, in the far Pacific, Captain Cook was killed.

  Although Nelson was “known” at the Admiralty through his uncle, promotion on the West Indies station was due to the fact he was keen, imaginative, and good at almost everything he did. Most superior officers appreciated his talents, most contemporaries enjoyed his company, and most seamen liked him and worked willingly for him because he looked after them—their health, their conditions, and their few comforts.

  On being appointed to the twenty-gun frigate Hinchinbrooke, replacing a captain killed in action, Nelson wrote: “I got my rank by a shot killing a Post-Captain, and I most sincerely hope I shall, when I go, go out of the World the same way.”

  He contracted yellow fever during a combined naval and army assault up the shallows and swamps of the San Juan River on the Spanish Main. His efforts were the main reason the expedition finally succeeded in capturing Fort San Juan, but in 1780 he had to be invalided home. By the spring of 1781 he’d recovered, to be appointed captain of the frigate Albemarle for convoy work into the Baltic and to Canada. In 1783 a treaty with the colonial Britons was signed by which the independent United States of America was created. The Albemarle and many other vessels returned home and were paid off, and Nelson took leave to visit France.

  Before he himself was paid off the active list, Nels
on served once more on the West Indies station, from 1784 to 1787. He incurred the displeasure of British planters and traders for enforcing the new trading laws with America, and the displeasure of his king, George III, for associating with his womanizing sailor son, Prince William.

  On the Isle of Nevis in March 1787, Nelson married “Fanny” Nisbet, a widow with one son. Prince William gave away the bride.

  In his career to that point, Nelson had accumulated some very talented friends and admirers, both senior and junior to him—Admirals Parker, Hood, and Jervis; Captains Cornwallis and Ball; Lieutenants Collingwood, Troubridge, Saumarez, Berry, and Hardy. During the twenty-two years of French wars, these men became household names in the long fight for freedom from tyranny.

  Yet in 1787, Horatio Nelson was “on the beach,” a captain without a ship, living on half pay in the Burnham Thorpe parsonage with his wife, stepson, and father. He was twenty-nine years old. He was also beginning to go blind, from a then untreatable disease of the conjunctiva spreading slowly across each eye.

  Nelson remained on half pay for five years, concerning himself with the conditions of farm laborers and campaigning for improvements. He thought he might never go to sea again, but in 1792 revolutionary France declared war on Austria, Sardinia, and Prussia and invaded the Austrian Netherlands. Despite Britain’s neutrality in continental politics, the die was cast in early 1793, when French batteries fired upon HMS Childers without warning or provocation. Nelson was appointed captain of HMS Agamemnon.

  The British government still refused to respond, but on February 1 France declared war on Britain and Holland. Thus began a world war that was fought from Ireland to Russia, from Norway to South Africa, in North and South America, in India and in Southeast Asia, and across almost every sea in the world. France further inflicted on the world a gunnery corporal named Napoléon Bonaparte, the man responsible for the greatest destruction in Europe until the rise to power of Adolf Hitler. During the war against French oppression Nelson grew to despise Bonaparte.

  Ship of the line Agamemnon was a sixty-four-gun vessel from Hampshire, strongly built yet fast, maneuverable, and with a crew mostly of volunteers. She was Nelson’s favorite command. Soon after joining, he was offered the command of a seventy-four-gun ship. He declined. In a fleet under the command of Admiral Hood in HMS Victory, Nelson sailed for Gibraltar and the Mediterranean.

  Nelson and the Agamemnon were deployed continuously for three years throughout the western Mediterranean. During the capture of Corsica, Nelson received a severe wound to his right eye from a stone chip, leaving it virtually useless. However, he never wore an eye patch; it was over his weakening left eye that he occasionally wore an eyeshade to protect it from glare. At sea he usually wore a green shade beneath his cocked hat to protect both eyes. The Trafalgar Square statue depicts him accurately with no eye patch.

  In the Agamemnon Nelson hoisted his commodore’s pennant, fought a series of successful actions against the French and the Spanish, and wrote a brief autobiography, Sketch of My Life. A weather-beaten Agamemnon was sent home for a refit in 1796, and Nelson transferred his commodore’s flag to HMS Captain. In February 1797 came the first great sea battle of the war—and of Nelson’s career. It was named the battle of Cape Saint Vincent, fought in the waters off southwest Portugal.

  On the morning of Valentine’s Day, a Spanish fleet of twenty-seven ships of the line—the 130-gun four-deck Santissima Trinidad, six 112-gun ships, two 80s, and eighteen 74s—was intercepted on its passage to the English Channel by Admiral Sir John Jervis. Jervis’s fleet comprised only fifteen ships of the line, including the 100-gun Victory and Britannia, three 98s, one 90, eight 74s, and one 64. As the enemy vessels gradually emerged from a bank of fog, Captain Calder in the Victory counted them for his admiral: “There are eight sail of the line, Sir John.” “There are twenty sail of the line, Sir John.” “There are twenty-five sail of the line, Sir John.” “There are twenty-seven sail of the line, Sir John.”

  “Enough, sir. No more of that!” Jervis thundered. “If there are fifty sail, I will go through them!”

  Go through them he did. The Culloden led the British fleet and opened fire at 11:30 A.M., splitting the Spanish line in two. The majority of Spanish vessels on the right altered course to the north, engaging the British sailing on the opposite course. Jervis ordered his captains to tack in succession to pursue the main body and to prevent the gap being closed by the eight Spanish ships on the left. Broadside after broadside drove those ships out of the battle.

  Close to the rear of the British line in the north, Nelson saw that the majority of Spanish ships were attempting to escape. Disobeying orders, he hauled the 74-gun Captain out of the line and engaged the 130-gun Santissima Trinidad, the largest warship in the world. Collingwood followed Nelson in the Excellent. With Troubridge in the Culloden, Frederick in the Blenheim, and Rear Admiral William Parker in the Prince George arriving from the south, a fierce battle within a battle took place as those five British ships attempted to stop the Spanish fleet from escaping.

  All the vessels suffered heavy damage. At one stage the Captain was fighting five ships at once, and Nelson was wounded in the stomach by a flying splinter of wood. Then the Spanish first-rates San Jose and San Nicolas ran onto each other and were locked together. Nelson saw his chance. He steered the Captain onto the the San Nicolas. “Calling for the boarders, I ordered them to board,” he wrote later.

  From the Captain, Nelson led the British marines and seamen onto the 80-gun San Nicolas and captured her. Seeing no reason to stop, he then led them onto the 112-gun San Jose and captured her, too. On the quarterdeck of the San Jose he received the sword of the dying Spanish admiral and handed it to bargeman William Fearney, who “placed it, with the greatest sang-froid, under his arm.” Pursuing the Spanish fleet, the Victory passed by and her crew lined the rails and cheered the amazing sight of the three ships all now flying Royal Navy ensigns. This unique action of boarding one enemy ship via another was referred to as “Nelson’s patent bridge for boarding first-rates.”

  Although his understanding of tactics was supreme, he had taken an enormous risk, disobeying both Jervis’s order of battle and Admiralty Fighting Instructions. Jervis had told him to use his initiative, but it might have been a court-martial offense. Instead, after the battle, Jervis welcomed him to the deck of the Victory with open arms. The last shots were fired at 5 P.M., and the Spanish retreated into Cadiz. They had lost four ships and three thousand men killed, wounded, or captured; the British lost no ships but seventy-three killed and four hundred wounded. Jervis was created Earl Saint Vincent, Nelson made a Knight of the Bath and, unknown to the fleet, was already promoted to rear admiral, though the news didn’t arrive until April. He was just thirty-eight years old.

  Elsewhere, there was mutiny in the Channel Fleet. The cause was partly due to ill treatment by a few captains but primarily to the government not paying the seamen. One of those vessels, the Theseus, was ordered to Jervis’s fleet. Jervis transferred Rear Admiral Nelson, Captain Miller, and a handful of former Agamemnon seamen to her.

  Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

  The Theseus was under-provisioned, lacked most of her military stores, had never seen action, and her seamen were still mutinous. It’s indicative of Nelson’s leadership and care for his men that within one month a note was left on the quarterdeck. It read: “Success attend Admiral Nelson, God bless Captain Miller, we thank them for the officers they have placed over us. We are happy and comfortable and will shed every drop of blood in our veins to support them, and the name of Theseus shall be immortalised as high as Captain’s. Ship’s Company.” It was all part of what came to be called the “Nelson touch.”

  A month later Nelson experienced his greatest defeat. He devised and led an attempt to capture the port of Tenerife in the Canary Islands and a Spanish treasure galleon lying there. He was soundly beaten. He lost a quarter of the landing force—250 men killed or wounded—as well a
s his right arm. It was shattered by grapeshot and amputated below the shoulder. There was no anesthetic in those days, only the surgeon’s saw, a leather pad to bite upon, and rum or opium afterward. The next day, using his left hand, he wrote a request for sick leave. Nelson was sent home to convalesce, the first time he’d been in England for more than four years.

  At that stage of his life Horatio Nelson had seen action against the French and Spanish more than 120 times. He’d become the man we recognize from the portraits: slightly built, five feet six inches tall, white-haired, sightless in his right eye, impaired in his left, one-armed, with his decorations worn proudly upon his blue uniform coat. Behind this public image, he sometimes wore, for fun, a diamond wind-up clock in his cocked hat. He famously suffered from seasickness as well as the continuing effects of malaria and yellow fever, and the splinter wound to his stomach caused him great distress. He was in almost constant pain. Yet the three greatest achievements of his career, three of the most important naval battles of all time, were yet to come.

  On March 29, 1798, Nelson hoisted his flag as rear admiral of the Blue—the Blue Ensign—on the Vanguard at Portsmouth. Through the Royal Navy, Britain was taking the offensive. Under overall command of Earl Saint Vincent, a fleet was sent back to the Mediterranean to wrest control from the French. Intelligence reports had indicated that Bonaparte was about to make a major attack there—perhaps Greece, perhaps Constantinople, perhaps Egypt—then move on India. It was a pivotal moment in world history.

  Admiral of the French fleet transporting Bonaparte and his thirty-thousand-strong Army of the East was François Brueys, a very capable tactician. Skillfully, he avoided the hunting British squadrons and landed Bonaparte in Egypt. Alexandria fell by July 2, and leaving his fleet in Aboukir Bay by the estuary of the Nile River, Bonaparte marched on Cairo. That city fell on July 24, and Bonaparte declared himself a Muslim. In France he had declared himself an atheist revolutionary; during his invasion of the Italian principalities and Rome he’d become a devout Catholic.