India's War Read online

  Srinath Raghavan

  * * *

  INDIA’S WAR

  The Making of Modern South Asia, 1939–1945

  Contents

  List of Figures

  List of Maps

  List of Tables

  List of Illustrations

  Prologue

  1. Politics of War

  2. Defence of India

  3. Competing Offers

  4. Mobilizing India

  5. Into Africa

  6. The Oil Campaigns

  7. Fox Hunting

  8. Collapsing Dominoes

  9. Coils of War

  10. Declarations for India

  11. Rumour and Revolt

  12. Indian National Armies

  13. Allies at War

  14. War Economy

  15. Around the Mediterranean

  16. Preparation

  17. Back to Burma

  18. Post-war

  Epilogue: Last Post

  Illustrations

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  For Sukanya Venkatachalam

  List of Figures

  Expansion of Indian armed forces

  Real GDP of India, 1938–45

  Net value added in manufacturing industries

  Freight rail traffic, 1938/9–1942/3

  Coal production, 1939–44

  Sterling balances of India, 1942–5

  Indian war expenditure, 1939/40–1945/6

  List of Maps

  The Libya–Egypt Border

  East Africa

  Gallabat

  Kassala to Keren

  The Middle East, 1941

  Syria

  The Invasion of Iran

  Operation Compass

  Operation Crusader

  North Africa, 1942

  Tunisia and Italy

  Malaya

  Japanese Advance into Burma

  Burma

  North Burma and Assam

  The 1945 Burma Campaign

  List of Tables

  Indianization during the War

  Industrial Disputes during the War

  Tax Yield

  Subscriptions to Government Loans

  Current Yield of the Government of India’s 3.5% Rupee Bond

  Wartime Inflation

  Casualty Figures of Indian Troops in North Africa

  Physical Standards for Recruitment of Infantry

  Traffic on the Bengal & Assam Railway

  List of Illustrations

  Viceroy at Bay, Lord Linlithgow. (photograph: Wallace Kirkland/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)

  Gandhi with Rajendra Prasad and Vallabhbhai Patel, October 1939. (photograph: Central Press/Getty Images)

  Nehru, Song Meiling and Chiang Kai-shek, September 1939. (photograph: The Granger Collection/TopFoto)

  Generals Auchinleck and Wavell. (photograph: James Jarche/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

  Indian students in Lahore, c. 1940. (photograph: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

  Indian infantrymen, c. 1940. (photograph: Keystone/Getty Images)

  Clearing a village in Eritrea, 1941. (photograph: copyright © IWM)

  Indian armoured division in Iraq, 1941. (photograph: copyright © IWM)

  Securing an oil refinery in Iran, September 1941. (photograph: copyright © IWM)

  4th Indian Division in Tunisia, April 1943. (photograph: copyright © National Army Museum)

  Raising of the Free Indian Legion in Berlin, 1942. (photograph: ullstein bild)

  Bose and Tojo in Japan, 1944. (photograph: ullstein bild)

  General Stilwell inspecting Chinese troops in India, 1942. (photograph: Universal History Archive/UIG)

  Quit India, Protestors being teargassed in Bombay, 1942. (photograph: Topham Picturepoint)

  Manufacturing armoured vehicles in an Indian railway workshop. (photograph: copyright © IWM)

  Machines and Men. (photograph: copyright © IWM)

  Building a US Army Air Force Base in Assam, c. 1943. (photograph: Ivan Dmitri/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

  War artist’s potrayal of Indian soldiers in the Arakan campaign of 1943. (photograph: Anthony Gross/© IWM)

  Cartoon depicting the neglected famine in Travancore. (photograph: K. Shankar Pillai (Shankar)/courtesy of the Shankar Estate)

  Gearing up for Burma, 1944. (photograph: copyright © National Army Museum)

  Cartoon from Josh newsletter, April 1944. (photograph: LHMCA Heard Collection)

  Fighting malaria. (photograph: copyright © The National Army Museum/Mary Evans Picture Library)

  Indian soldiers in Rome, 1944. (photograph: copyright © National Army Museum)

  Into Burma, 1944. (photograph: copyright © National Army Museum)

  General Slim with Indian troops, 1945. (photograph: copyright © IWM)

  Lord Mountbatten with Indian troops, 1945. (photograph: copyright © National Army Museum)

  Road to Meiktila, 1945. (photograph: copyright © National Army Museum)

  On to Rangoon, 1945. (photograph: copyright © National Army Museum)

  Closing in on the Japanese in Burma, 1945. (photograph: copyright © IWM)

  Cabinet Mission members Pethick-Lawrence and Cripps with Jinnah, 1946. (photograph: copyright Margaret Bourke-White/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

  Prologue

  A viceregal broadcast on a Sunday evening was rather unusual. Yet at 8.30 p.m. on 3 September 1939, the All India Radio stood by for a message from Lord Linlithgow. Speaking from his summer eyrie in Simla, the viceroy tersely announced that His Majesty’s Government was at war with Germany – and so was India. ‘I am confident’, he solemnly declared, ‘that India will make her contribution on the side of human freedom as against the rule of force.’1 That was all. In taking this decision, the viceroy had consulted neither his Executive Council, nor the Central Legislative Assembly, nor yet any Indian leader. To him it was a foregone conclusion. And so began India’s Second World War.

  When the war ended six years later, India stood among the victors. Indian soldiers had fought in a stunning range of places: Hong Kong and Singapore; Malaya and Burma; Iraq, Iran and Syria; North and East Africa; Sicily and mainland Italy. The Indian army had raised, trained and deployed some 2.5 million men. Even at the time, this was recognized as the largest volunteer army in history. Nearly 90,000 of these men were killed or maimed. Many more millions of Indians were pulled into the vortex of the Second World War – as industrial, agricultural and military labour. India’s material and financial contribution to the war was equally significant. India emerged as a major military-industrial and logistical base for Allied operations in South-East Asia and the Middle East, and the country was also among the largest wartime creditors of Britain. Such extraordinary economic mobilization was made possible only by imposing terrible privations on a population that barely skirted the edge of subsistence. The human toll on the Indian home front must be counted in millions.

  And yet, the story of India’s war is only dimly remembered.

  Just over five decades after the end of the war, I joined the Officers Training Academy of the Indian army. Soon after our arrival, we were corralled in the drill square to be divided into training companies. As I awaited my turn, nervously sweltering in the late summer sun, the Subedar Major tipped his regimental cane towards me and said, ‘Meiktila.’ It took me a moment to realize that ‘Meiktila’ was the name of the company to which I was assigned. And it took me much longer to understand the significance of the name. The names of the other companies sounded equally strange. ‘Jessami’ rang no bell, while I knew ‘Kohima’ only as the capital of the Indian state of Nagaland. Back in our barracks, I found that my fe
llow cadets were quite as bemused. Those who had friends training in the Indian Military Academy trotted out names of some companies there: Keren and Cassino, Alamein and Sangro – almost all were unfamiliar to our ears.

  I wrote off my ignorance to my training in the sciences and my unfamiliarity with anything more than high school history. And soon, I figured out that these were names of places where the Indian army had fought famous battles during the Second World War. Yet, even instructors in military history at the Academy were unable to tell me much more than that. Indeed, my instructors seemed to proceed on the premise that ‘Indian’ military history began on 25 October 1947 – with the outbreak of the First Kashmir War.

  On completion of my training, I was commissioned into an infantry regiment: the Rajputana Rifles. In his welcome speech, the Colonel of the Regiment loftily reminded us that we were privileged to join the oldest and most decorated rifle regiment of the Indian army. On my first visit to the regimental officers’ mess, I was struck to note from the banners that thirteen battalions of my regiment had fought in almost every theatre of the Second World War – from Malaya to Italy, including in such seemingly exotic countries as Eritrea and Tunisia. Skimming through the soporific regimental history, I picked up some basic details about which battalion fought where and who won the Victoria Cross. I was hooked. But subalterns in the Indian army rarely have the leisure to read history – never mind trying to write it. In the event, it was my interest in Indian military history that prompted me to abandon the seductive rigours of the army for the sheltered groves of academia.

  Over the years, I have come to take a more charitable view of my ignorance as a cadet. There are two large and apparently uncontrollable bodies of work that are germane to anyone interested in India’s Second World War. On the one hand, there is the unceasing outpouring of books on the war itself. In most of these, India is rarely assigned more than a walk-on part. Some aspects of the war relating to India – especially the Burma campaign – have received more sustained treatment. But these tend to be insulated from the wider context of India’s contribution to the war. On the other hand, there is a mountain of monographs on Indian history in the decade preceding 1947. Almost all of these, however, treat the Second World War as little more than mood music in the drama of India’s advance towards independence and partition. The plot and the acts are by now wearily familiar: the resignation of the Congress ministries at the outbreak of war; the Cripps Mission and the Quit India movement of 1942; the Cabinet Mission of 1946; Independence with Partition in August 1947.

  To be sure, there are some fine specialized studies that throw important light on particular aspects of Indian involvement in the war: military, economic or social.2 Yet there is no comprehensive account of India’s war. Two books come close. Johannes Voigt’s Indien im Zweiten Weltkrieg was published in 1978 – an English translation appeared almost a decade later. A model of scholarly thoroughness, the book offered an as yet unsurpassed account of Indian politics and military policy during the war. And in Forgotten Armies, Chris Bayly and Tim Harper presented a brilliantly fascinating social history of the war in the ‘great crescent’ arching from Bengal to Singapore. Yet the book is not – and does not claim to be – a history of India during the Second World War. More recently, we have had Yasmin Khan’s The Raj at War, which offers an engaging ‘people’s history’ of India’s participation in the war. As with many studies of the ‘home front’ in various wars, however, the exclusion of the strategic and military dimensions results in a partial and puzzling picture. Still missing is the single volume that presents a rounded narrative, bringing in the manifold dimensions of the war.

  The book in your hands attempts to provide such an integrated account. In so doing, I am interested not just in telling the story of India’s war but in explaining the course of events and exploring their consequences. The narrative that follows has five intertwined strands.

  First, there is the strategic dimension of the war. It is tempting to see India merely as an appendage of the British Empire. Didn’t the viceroy unilaterally take India into the war? Of course, India was a cog in the imperial machinery. But India was also a significant power in its own right, with the Raj having a sub-imperial system of its own. India’s sphere of influence and interference stretched from Hong Kong and Singapore to Malaya and Burma, Tibet and Xinjiang, Afghanistan and southern Iran, Iraq and the Persian Gulf states, Aden and East Africa. This ‘empire of the Raj’ – to use Robert Blyth’s resonant phrase – was as variegated as the British Empire itself. Some of these territories had been directly governed by India, while others were dependencies where India’s formal and informal writ continued to run. Others still were nominally independent states in which India discerned vital interests or which were seen as useful geopolitical ‘buffers’.3 Even before the war broke out in 1939, the Raj stood ready to defend its own empire.

  In many ways, British India exercised greater freedom in its external relations than the Dominions of Australia, Canada and South Africa. As the viceroy of India observed in 1929, ‘Though India, unlike the Self-Governing Dominions, does not formally enjoy an independent position in the sphere of foreign policy, she is possibly more continuously and practically concerned with foreign policy than any of them.’4 India’s peculiar situation as a colonial entity but also a regional power was recognized in the international system. India was a signatory to the Treaty of Versailles after the Great War. And it was a founding-member of the League of Nations – the only non-self-governing entity in the League.5

  This brings us to the second theme running through the book: the international dimension of India’s war. The Raj’s security commitments remained manageable so long as East Asia was quiescent and no European power could credibly threaten an invasion of the Middle East. The belying of these expectations led to an enormous expansion of India’s commitment during the war. India’s war was strongly shaped by the actions and choices of several major powers apart from Britain: the United States and Japan, China and Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union.

  The strategic and international contexts were closely related to a third thread in the story: domestic politics. In the two decades before the onset of the war, the British government had, in response to the rising tide of nationalism, been compelled to undertake political reforms. These were designed to increase the involvement of Indians in the administration, and apparently progress India towards self-government within the British Empire. Yet the British wished neither to hand the Indians any serious power nor to hasten self-government. As war loomed, the politics of India directly impinged on strategic matters. The viceroy’s decision to join the war without consulting the Indians would considerably complicate politics during the war. And the widening political divide would also lead other great powers to intervene in the affairs of India.

  Politics also had an impact on the fourth strand of our narrative: the economic and social dimensions of the war. The billowing demands on India would entail ever greater extraction of societal resources. Yet the wartime mobilization of India was contingent on securing popular support and participation, which in turn depended on co-opting Indian political parties and leaders. At the same time, the demands of war led the Raj to rely heavily on traditionally marginalized social groups, and so gave them greater political voice.

  The story of the ‘home front’ can be fully understood only by relating it to the fifth concern threading through this book: the war front. After all, it was the demands of the war front that led to the wide-ranging mobilization and the ensuing transformations at home. Understanding why the military effort required such resources leads us to the terrain of military history. In focusing on the various theatres in which the Indian troops fought, I do not aim at providing a blow-by-blow – or hillock-by-hillock – account of battles. The really interesting story is the transformation of the Indian army, step by painful step, from a backward constabulary outfit into an effective and adaptable fighting force. In this story, such seemin
gly mundane matters as training and logistics, health and morale loom large.

  Wars are ultimately waged, opposed and supported, won and lost by individuals. In the domain of ‘high’ politics and strategy there is a stellar cast of characters: Gandhi and Churchill, Nehru and Roosevelt, Jinnah and Linlithgow, Bose and Chiang Kai-shek, Wavell and Mountbatten, Auchinleck and Slim. But perspectives from ‘below’ are rarer. In particular, the voice of the Indian soldier has been rather difficult to recover. We have only slivers of letters exchanged between soldiers and their families, captured in censors’ reports and other official documents. Few soldiers wrote down or orally recorded their memories. Nevertheless, I have tried to understand what the war meant for those who fought it on the fronts and those who supported it from home.

  Finally, this book is not just about what India did for the war. I also look at what the war did to India. The South Asia of today is in very many ways the product of India’s Second World War. The emergence of Pakistan and its protracted rivalry with India; the establishment of a constitutional democracy in India and the dominance of the military in Pakistan; the adoption of planning for economic development; the role of the state in the provision of social goods; the popular movements in the region fired by ideas of economic and social rights – none of these can be understood without accounting for the impact of the war. In the absence of a full reckoning with the war our understanding of modern South Asia remains deeply deficient. The Second World War is the one black hole in our historical imagination that exercises a deep gravitational pull on the region even today. By restoring the war to the centre-stage, this book challenges and revises our understanding of the making of modern South Asia.

  The story of India’s war is also central to understanding the country’s rise on the world stage. India is now acknowledged to be an emerging global power – one that could buttress an open and liberal international order. Yet the rise of India was first foretold during the Second World War, when a desperately poor country mobilized to an astonishing degree and simultaneously fought for its own freedom and that of the world. As we ponder India’s emerging role on a global canvas, the story of its Second World War provides the crucial starting point.