Salute to a brave warrior
By Asit Jolly
Chandigarh, Nov. 21: Honorary Capt. Umrao Singh, the last of the 40 gallant Indians to be decorated with the Victoria Cross, died fighting his final battle with cancer at the Indian Armyâs Research and Referral Hospital in Delhi Cantonment on Monday afternoon.
He was the last of a very special breed of brave soldiers, who possessed "exceptional courage and gallantry," said Lt. Gen. J.F.R. Jacob (Retd), who vividly remembers Havildar Umrao Singh as "a very fine chap." Himself a young major in 1944, the general said the award of the Victoria Cross, then the highest possible gallantry medal, "could not have been better deserved."
The exceptional valour displayed by the then 24-year-old gunner relates to a battle in the Burmese Aarkans on December 15, 1944. In charge of a field gun in the advanced section of his battery in the Kaladan Valley, Havildar Umrao Singh helped successfully repulse many repeated assaults by Japanese soldiers. In the final attack he killed three of the enemy in hand-to-hand combat using little more than his hand-spike (implement employed to push in shells in artillery guns). "They found him lying face down on the dead Japanese soldiers with his fingers still tightly clutched around the hand-spike," Gen. Jacob remembered.
Exhausted and barely conscious, Havildar Singh was the lone survivor of that fateful day in the Kaladan Valley. There were as many as 10 enemy soldiers lying dead around him but he had succeeded in protecting his gun, which was pressed into action later the same day.
The brave havildar of the 24th Mountain Regiment, who was later conferred the rank of honorary captain, retired from the Army to live a full life with his children and later grandchildren in his ancestral village, Palra, in Haryanaâs Jhajjar (then part of Rohtak) district.
He was diagnosed with cancer of the prostrate only recently (July 5 this year) and had undergone surgery for the ailment. However, doctors attending on him at the R&R Hospital said the malignancy had already spread to other vital organs.
Capt. Singh breathed his last on Monday afternoon, exactly 85 years after the day he was born on November 21, 1920 in the home of Mohar Singh Yadav. Today, he is survived by two sons, a daughter and four grandchildren.
Indian Army buglers will sound the Last Post at Palra village to bid a final farewell to Capt. Umrao Singh on Tuesday. The funeral, to be conducted with full military honours, is expected to be attended among others by top military brass, British diplomats and military officers, and several politicians.
A defence ministry communiqué issued on Monday stated: "His outstanding bravery, devotion to duty and his setting of a wonderful example was an inspiration to all."
Grieving but intensely proud of his truly illustrious grandfather, the soldierâs grandson, Sukhdev Singh, said many former soldiers, for whom Capt. Umrao Singh was nothing less than a legend, have already begun arriving in Palra to pay their last respects. "To them and to virtually everyone else in the village, he was simply but very fondly known as the âVC Sahibâ."
Only six years ago, in London to attend a reunion of Victoria Cross awardees, Palra villageâs VC Sahib was crossing the road when the traffic about him came to a halt. The then UK secretary of state for defence, Mr Michael Heseltine, who had seen the bronze Victoria Cross pinned on Capt. Singhâs chest, much to everyoneâs surprise, jumped out of his car, raised his hand in salute and said, "VC first, Sir!"
He was a fighter to the last. Lt. Gen. Jacob remembers another time when Capt. Singh unhesitatingly walked up to British Prime Minister John Major and politely told him off about the "meagre" pension being paid to VC recipients. "The pensions were immediately raised to a respectable level," said the general. |
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