WW2 100 - 10 September 1939 - ‘A gallant lad’s death in Tibet’: Lieutenant Richard Vivian Warren (1914-39), 1st Battalion, 15th Punjab Regiment, Indian Army
This post is the first of many which commemorate the people, linked in some way to Budleigh Salterton, who died while on active service during WW2. Their names are recorded on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website at https://www.cwgc.org/
Richard Vivian Warren, serving with 1st Battalion, 15th Punjab Regiment, is thought to have died of pneumonia on 10 September 1939, aged 24, at Yatung during a forced march through Tibet. It was the first WW2 death of a serviceman listed on Budleigh Salterton's War Memorial, and it occurred just a week into the war.
Why Tibet, I wondered? I had not heard of it as a theatre of war in WW2.
Most people think of Tibet before it was taken over by China as a remote mountainous land which seemed closed to the outside world. To some extent the country enjoyed its isolation and a high degree of autonomy before its annexation in 1951, but during the early part of the 20th century more than a hundred British officials served in Tibet. Between 1904 and 1947 Agents from the Indian Political Service, and supporting staff, were stationed in the Tibetan towns of Gyantse and Yatung. They were under the control of the Political Officer in Sikkim, a state in NE India which had become a British protectorate in the later decades of the 19th century. An Agency was also maintained at Gartok in Western Tibet.
A soldier
of the 1st Battalion, 15th Punjab Regiment, Tibet, 1936. Collection of the
National Army Museum
Part of the 1st Battalion, 15th Punjab Regiment’s role in the late 1930s was to protect the British Mission which had been established in Lhasa in 1936. After that there was a permanent British representative in Lhasa who claimed to promote trade but whose real job was to watch for and report on Russian or Chinese interference. The isolation which such representatives enjoyed, and the lack of trade, meant that they had the time to study a variety of aspects of the region, and to gain a great knowledge of the country and its people, becoming in effect Tibetologists.
In the years prior to WW2, both the German and the Japanese governments were also interested in Tibet. In May 1939, Nomoto Jinzo, a Japanese lieutenant who had been specially trained in the Tibetan language, succeeded in arriving secretly at Lhasa via Calcutta and Sikkim, posing as a Tibetan lama or monk, and began an 18-month intelligence-gathering mission on behalf of the Imperial Japanese Intelligence Service.
Much more complex and interesting is Nazi Germany’s fascination with Tibet, which showed itself in the so-called scientific expedition to the country from April 1938 to August 1939. It was led by the German zoologist Ernst Schäfer who was also an officer in the SS, or Schutzstaffel, the foremost agency of security, surveillance, and terror within Germany at that time. The Tibet project was encouraged by Heinrich Himmler, a main architect of the Holocaust.
Himmler had been influenced by Karl Haushofer, the Nazis’ chief geopolitical theorist who had developed a strong interest in Tibetan-style esoteric Buddhism while on assignment as an artillery officer in Japan prior to World War I. There have been allegations that one of the expedition's purposes was to determine whether Tibet was the cradle of the ‘Aryan race’.
At a more sinister level, it has been pointed out that propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels issued a secret warning to German newspapers in 1940 affirming that the chief task of the Tibet expedition was of a political and military nature and had not so much to do with the solution of scientific questions. It has been suggested that one of the expedition's aims was to prepare maps and survey passes for possible use of Tibet as a staging ground for guerrilla assaults on British India.
Schäfer and his companions left Lhasa in August 1939. On 3 September, Britain declared war on Germany. When grilled by US military intelligence in February 1946, Schäfer stated that after his return, he had a meeting with Himmler in which he outlined his plans to launch another expedition to Tibet in case of war. The idea was to win Tibet over to the German side and organize a resistance movement there. The project never took off.
An expedition member was Bruno Beger, a racial anthropologist and ethnologist who later worked with the anatomist and war criminal August Hirt at the Reichsuniversität Straßburg. His assignment was to provide Hirt with a selection of detainees of diverse ethnic types from Auschwitz as subjects for racial experiments.
The expedition was no doubt tracked,
especially in Tibet, by British intelligence officers of the Secret
Intelligence Service or SIS, better known today as MI6. This photo, entitled ‘A
young Englishman, member of the Secret Intelligence Service, in Yatung, Tibet’,
was taken by Ernst Schäfer himself in 1938.
Reports on individual expedition members were kept by Sir Basil Gould, British Political Officer in Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet from 1935 to 1945.
It would be fascinating to know about the nature and circumstances of the forced march which apparently led to Richard Warren’s death on 10 September, shortly after the outbreak of war. Were he and members of the 1st Battalion, 15th Punjab Regiment engaged in an operation which related to the German so-called science expedition to Tibet?
Richard himself came from a background which has been described by historian and Tibetologist Professor Alex McKay in his 1995 PhD thesis ‘Tibet and the British Raj 1904-47’ as characteristic of British military or civil service officers who had served in Tibet: a middle, or upper-middle, class background, and close family connections with India, together with a public school education. As one of the founders of the Colonial Service stated, quoted by Prof McKay, 'the Public Schools...are vital. We could not run the show without them. In England universities train the mind; the Public Schools train character and teach leadership'.
Heathgate, the Budleigh Salterton home of the Warren family
Richard’s parents, George Bodley Warren and Edith Florence Catherine Warren had married in Bombay in 1907 and Richard himself, their first son, was born on 20 October 1914. An elder daughter, Joan Emelie Warren had been born in 1908 and would live until 1996. The parents would eventually settle in Budleigh Salterton, in a fine house called Heathgate at 7, Lansdowne Road.
Following in his father’s footsteps, Richard entered Charterhouse School in 1928 where he spent five years, leaving in 1933 before joining the Indian Army.
And above, he can be seen in the 1933 School Hockey team. I am most grateful to Charterhouse Archivist Catherine Smith for allowing me to reproduce these photos.
Richard would be the first Carthusian - as pupils at the School are known – to die in WW2.
Richard’s family background was in fact more to do with West Country churches than with the Indian sub-continent. His great-grandfather, the Rev George Bodley Warren, and grandfather, the Rev Frederick King Warren, had both been Rectors of Exton, in Somerset. The east window in the village’s St Peter’s Church, is a memorial to the former. Richard’s uncle, the Rev William Meade King Warren had served as a curate in Bridgwater, Somerset, and is noted for the help that he gave the musician Cecil Sharp, collecting a total of 192 folk songs in the town. These would form part of the collection of more than 1600 tunes or lyrics which made Sharp’s work a key part of the first 20th century folk 'revival'.
To return to Tibet, it was obvious, as historian Prof McKay has written, that service in that country implied an interest in its customs and an ability to get on with Tibetans of all classes. But firstly, physical fitness was a requirement because of the high altitude. Medical examinations were introduced before an officer was posted to Tibet, but despite this, as Alex McKay noted, a Major Laughton fell ill at Gangtok en route to Tibet in 1940, and his replacement, Sinclair, also suffered badly from altitude and returned early to India. Altitude could cause ill-feeling between some individuals on occasions; it contributed to shortness of temper, and those stationed together in isolated posts such as Lhasa and Gyantse could find that pressures built up and nerves became frayed’.
Pneumonia, said to have been the cause of Richard’s death, is a viral infection. High-altitude pulmonary oedema has similar features but would have been a different diagnosis.
Richard was buried at Yatung, now Yadong, a frontier town in the middle of the southern Himalayas, near the borders of Sikkim and Bhutan. Its name literally means ‘rushing deep valley’ but the town is situated at over 3,000 meters (almost 10,000 feet) high.
Apart from Budleigh Salterton’s War Memorial he is remembered on the Charterhouse Roll of Honour, and with the inscription at the Guwahati War Cemetery Assam North-East India.
Memorial tablet commemorating Lieutenant Richard Warren at the Guwahati war cemetery, on Navagraha Road in Guwahati, Assam. The cemetery was started during the Second World War as a burial site for Commonwealth servicemen
The next post is for SEAMAN CHARLES JOHN (‘JACK’) SEDGEMORE (Service Number D/X 18702, Royal Naval Reserve, who was killed in action while serving on HMS Rawalpindi, on 23 November 1939.
You can read about him at
https://budleighpastandpresent.blogspot.com/2020/11/ww2-75-you-have-done-your-duty-nobly.html
These ‘orphans’ are listed on Budleigh Salterton War
Memorial, but have not been identified. Their first names,
date of death and service numbers are not known.
They are recorded on the Devon Heritage website as
'Not yet confirmed’
If you know anything which would help to identify them,
please contact Michael Downes on 01395 446407.
F.E. Newcombe
P. Pritchard
F.J. Watts
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