They were heroes in cummerbunds and overalls. The staff of the Taj Mahal Palace hotel saved hundreds of wealthy guests as heavily armed gunmen roamed the building, firing indiscriminately, leaving a trail of corpses behind them.

Among the workers there were some whose bravery and sense of duty led them to sacrifice their own lives, witnesses said.

Prashant Mangeshikar, a guest, said that a hotel worker, identified only as Mr Rajan, had put himself between one of the gunmen and Mr Mangeshikar, his wife and two daughters.

“The man in front of my wife shielded us,” Mr Mangeshikar said. “He was a maintenance section staff member. He took the bullets.” For the next 12 hours, before Mr Rajan was finally taken out of the hotel, guests battled to stop the bleeding from a gaping bullet wound in his abdomen. It is not known if he lived.

The Taj Mahal had been renowned for its sublime service for decades. Few of the hotel’s wealthy patrons would have predicted, however, that the men and women who delivered their meals and carried their bags – people earning a fraction of the sums of those they served – would display such courage and composure as the death toll quickly rose around them.

As the terrible events of Wednesday night unfolded, the staff of what had been Bombay’s finest hotel leapt into action. Scores of tales later emerged of unnamed workers hiding guests, barricading doors, tending the vulnerable and issuing orders.

Dalbir Bains, a British businesswoman, was with friends beside the hotel pool when the first crackle of automatic gunfire was heard a short distance away. “We heard shots and saw a man who’d just been shot. The terrorists were just behind us as we ran,” she said.

She made her way upstairs to Sea Lounge, a café on the first floor of the hotel, where the guests were still unaware of the fast-approaching threat. “Within seconds the staff had locked the doors, turned off the lights and told everybody to get on the floor,” she said. “They were fantastic. They saved lives.” Yesterday, as the most sophisticated terror attack to be mounted in India moved into its third day, Indian special forces from the crack Marine Commando Force (Marcos) gave an account of their mission to liberate the Taj – and the scenes of horror that staff and guests had witnessed.

The soldiers said that they were led by a hotel employee as they fought a sequence of running battles with gunmen in corridors and rooms strewn with dead bodies and seriously injured guests.

They also described the ferociousness of the gunmen. “They were the kind of people with no remorse – anybody and whomsoever came in front of them they fired at,” said a senior Marcos officer, clad in black, his face masked to protect his identity.

Faced with conditions that the troops, India’s toughest soldiers, said had tested them to the limit, the staff of the Taj Mahal remained astonishingly composed, witnesses said.

With the gunmen only metres away, a waiter at the Golden Dragon, the hotel’s Chinese restaurant, barricaded the doors. The staff then led the diners to the hotel’s business centre, which became a makeshift bunker for hundreds of guests. Parizaad Khan, 26, who sheltered there, said: “They handed out blankets, drinks. Despite the chaos all around they didn’t stop working for a second. They were amazingly calm.”

Before the attacks, the Taj Mahal was possibly one of the most civilised places on earth, largely thanks to the people who worked there.

Everything about them was just so, from the impressive moustaches of the impeccably dressed porters who opened guests’ car doors, to the perfectly pressed waistcoats of the bartenders and to the silk saris of the female concierge staff.

This army of workers had been brought together from the four corners of the world – Japanese sushi specialists served daily delicacies; there was a Turkish head chef at the famed Lebanese restaurant, Souk, an establishment favoured by the wealthy Arabs who regularly pass through. For an ordinary citizen of Bombay, a city where half the population lives in slums, a trip to the Taj would leave a memory that would last a lifetime. The hotel staff prided themselves on serving maharajas and princes, heads of states, tycoons, captains of industry and modern-day corporate nomads.

The Taj’s architectural influences are Moorish, Oriental, Indian and Florentine. Public areas have vaulted alabaster ceilings, hand-woven carpets and crystal chandeliers. And the staff were just as classy as the décor.

Times Recommends

• 'Lost' cargo ship Arctic Sea gives up its secrets
• Army wants to retreat in Afghanistan
• Jungle angel was Obama’s mother