HISTORY OF THE BALOCH REGIMENT 1820-1939

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The record of a regiment over one hundred and seventy-five years of service, its battles andn campaigns. During the Great War a member of the regiment was the first Indian soldier to be awarded the VC. Pre-partition it was the Indian Army’s 10th Baluch Regiment; it is now in the Pakistan Army.

The spelling ‘Baloch’ in the title is the first time I have come across it, the usual spelling, in use since the beginning of the last century, is ‘Baluch’ (‘ch’ is soft, as in church). The 1st Battalion is descended from the 2nd Marine Battalion of the 12th Bombay Native Infantry Regiment, raised in 1820. Four more battalions were formed over the next forty years, three of them designated ‘Belooch’ battalions but by 1901 all had become Baluch regiments of the Bombay Native Infantry, numbered 24th, 26th, 27th, 29th and 30th. In his reforms of 1903 Kitchener removed all references to former presidential affiliations (Bengal, Madras and Bombay) and renumbered all regiments in one sequence; the Bombay regiments’ numbers all had ‘100’ added to their designations, thus the Baluch regiments became 124th, 126th etc. It should be said that the Bombay regiments were hardly touched by the Mutiny of 1857, only two out of more than thirty regiments mutinied (neither of them Baluch). All five regiments were on active service during the Great War - on the Western Front, in Egypt, Palestine , Mesopotamia and Persia. The 129th was the only one to go to France with the Indian Corps where one of its soldiers, Khudadad Khan, had the distinction of being the first Indian soldier to be awarded the VC, in October 1914. This history traces the history of the regiment and its battalions across two hundred years, its battles and campaigns. The author was commissioned into the regiment in 1958, more than ten years after the foundation of Pakistan to which the regiment now belongs; he retired in 1992.

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Product Code:	5481
Author:	by Maj Gen Raffiudin Ahmed
ISBN:	9781843422228
Format:	1998. SB. xx + 269pp with 21 illus, and 25 maps.
Shipping Time:	Usually despatched Next Day
Our Price:	£12.95