Monday 16 August 2010

The Naga Queen

Yesterday was the 65th anniversary of VJ-Day and coincidentally I spent a good part of the evening "googling" an intriguing story from the Burma campaign.


Ursula Graham Bower was a 30 year old former debutante who led a group of Naga headhunters as a Captain in V Force during WW2 despite having no formal military training. Her story is quite amazing (as is much of V Force's) and she became so well respected she was given command of a Gurkha unit as well as Assam Rifles troops and other Nepalese soldiers in addition to her ill-armed Naga (the Americans loved he so much they wrote a comic book about her!)


Aside from this article from the Daily Mail, I also found a site with nearly 700 photos she took of the Naga and their homeland which are very interesting even if only a few are of a military subject matter.


Her book The Naga Path (published 1950) seems to be worth hunting down to find out more and 'Bower Force', as her unit was called, would certainly make an interesting and unusual WW2 unit.

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