3 days ago
Havildar Maj Dhatt, among last surviving Sikh soldiers who saw WW-II action, dies at 103
Punjab-born World War II veteran Havildar-Major Rajindar Singh Dhatt MBE has died in the UK aged 103.
He was one of the last surviving Sikh soldiers who saw action during WW-II.
Born in pre-Partition India in 1921, Dhatt had almost finished school when the war broke out.
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"I asked my father that I wanted to go to college. He told me 'I don't have plenty of money to spend on you like that.
You can join the army,'" he told the Royal British Legion in an interview before he died.
After joining as a sepoy in Feb 1941, Dhatt was appointed to the Royal Indian Army Service Corps and was selected to become an army physical training instructor. He excelled and was promoted to havildar major (sergeant major) in 1943 before he was drafted to the Far East campaign to help the Allied forces fight in Kohima, Northeast India.
"The Japanese were all around Kohima and Imphal and they had circled our two divisions, one Indian division and one British division."
A British Lieutenant came up to him and told him: "You are in a theatre of war."
"We were laughing, a theatre…we were thinking that it was a film or something. It was then after that that he said, 'we will defeat them.' He gave us a lecture like that," he recalled. "I stood up and said that we Sikhs were not afraid of fighting.
It doesn't matter, we came here to fight and we will do that."
After the liberation of Kohima and Imphal, he spent the rest of the war fighting in Burma. "We were very happy when on Aug 15, 1945, the Japanese surrendered. We said 'Thank God we have won the war'."
After the war, he returned home to India and worked as a physical training instructor at a school and on his family's land.
"They announced in 1962 that people who fought in the war can apply for a voucher to go to Britain.
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I applied and they gave it to me," he said.
He came to Britain in 1963 and settled with his family in Hounslow where he co-founded the Undivided Indian Ex-Servicemen's Association, which aims to unite British Indian veterans. On April 12 at Windsor Castle, King Charles invested the 103-year-old as an MBE for services to the South Asian community in the UK. He died on May 21.
The Royal British Legion said: "We are deeply grateful for Rajindar's contributions to the Royal British Legion's work in supporting the armed forces community. His life and legacy serve as a poignant reminder of the invaluable sacrifices made by those who served from across the Commonwealth during the Second World War."
