Noor Inayat Khan was born in Moscow in 1914. Her father was Muslim from India, her mother was American. She was a descendant of Tipu Sultan, ruler of Mysore which meant she was a princess.
She went to France shortly after her birth, and then to London at the start of the First World War. The family moved back to Paris in 1920.
Noor became a musician like her father and she wrote poetry and children’s stories. Some of these were animal stories from India called “Jataka Tales”.
The family were forced to leave France in 1940 after the start of World War 2 in 1939. In Britain she learned to be a radio operator and she flew back to France in 1943 under the code name “Madeleine”. She landed by parachute at night.
By now Paris was occupied by Germany and Noor’s radio messages to London were very important. Although other radio operators were arrested Noor refused to leave. In October she was arrested and questioned after someone betrayed her.
She was taken to Germany and put in solitary confinement in prison at Karlsruhe, classified as “highly dangerous”. In spite of being repeatedly tortured for ten months, Noor refused to give any information. She was finally executed in 1944.
In 1949 Noor Inayat Khan was posthumously awarded the George Cross, and the French Croix de Guerre. There are memorials to her in France and Belgium.
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Indian soldiers fought in France in World War 1. One regiment was led by John George (Jackie) Smyth who won the Victoria Cross for bravery. He said afterwards that the Indian soldiers should have had higher honours than himself.
On 18th May, 1915 ten men from the 15th Ludhiana Sikh Regiment volunteered in an extremely dangerous mission, This was near Richebourg L’Aouve in France, They had to take heavy crates containing 96 bombs to within twenty yards of the enemy’s position under heavy fire. Two earlier attempts had failed. They had to cross a stream wwith machine guns and rifles firing at them.
Three men succeeded in getting the ammunition to their colleagues, the other eight were killed or wounded. Jackie Smyth survived along with Lal Singh and one other.
Indian soldiers fought in both World Wars in Europe, Africa and South East Asia. Over 130,000 fought in France in World War 1 and the injured were taken to Brighton on the south coast of England. There is a memorial on the South Downs which was also the site of a funeral pyre where those who died were cremated according to Indian tradition.
Vital Link Educational 2006

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