The Raj at War

by Yasmin Khan

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  In 1944 Irwin Reiss was an American officer working as a young labour contractor on the Ledo Road. He spent his time criss-crossing the land between Assam and Burma. He suffered incessant ill-health and became dangerously thin, was repeatedly hospitalised and pined terribly for his wife and a newborn son that he had never seen. He would have much rather been back on his farm in Illinois. ‘The rainy weather is becoming almost unbearable. Everything that I have is moldy.’ He complained of the mildew that was embedded in his clothes and even clogged up his camera lens. ‘My clothes feel like a wet dish rag when I put them on in the morning. In the past 3 months I have seen one continuous day of sunshine.’15 Reiss’s antipathy for India and Indians burned strongly throughout the war and his bitter complaints about persistent beggars and unscrupulous merchants were only matched by his distaste for the British colonials that he encountered.

  Irwin Reiss’s job was to find, allocate and pay Indian and Burmese labour. This brought its own tribulations and he had to travel thousands of miles by road and air to find the ‘coolies’ he needed and to meet the demand of ‘dozens of units screaming for labour’. Using local middlemen and interpreters, he was responsible for employing, feeding and paying thousands of workers and would often awake to find crowds outside his bamboo basha clamouring for food or for pay. Reiss’s linguistic skills (he had trained in Chinese at Yale) were wasted in north-east India and he was thrown into a mystifying new cultural cocktail, bargaining with labour middlemen over pay, working 100-hour weeks, often carrying long ledger rolls and heavy sacks of cash containing 15,000 rupees at a time to hand out to his labourers. Those who did not yet know a cash economy took payment in other ways. The Nagas treasured bottle tops and cowrie shells from which they made jewellery. Others were rumoured to be receiving payment in opium. Even wage-workers looked sceptically at rupee notes and wanted the rupee coins that were in such short supply. In one photograph the labourers look on inquisitively, perhaps cynically, arms folded across their chests as the labour contractor sits in front of great piles of coins. Their headman is taking receipt of the payment, signing with an inked thumbprint, counting the coins against days worked which he had measured by tying knots in a piece of string.

  As workers became scarce, Reiss travelled further and deeper into the jungle to find suitable men and women. As an army newspaper put it, the coolies were ‘clearing right of way for communications and pipelines, packing rations and gasoline through hip-deep mud for bulldozer crews … ditching and shelving the road overhang, loading supply convoys, unloading railroad freight cars … carving sub-depots from the jungle, assisting with air dropping, and performing a thousand other tasks unknown to the outside world’.16 In return the Indian and Burmese contractors made their own demands for food and better conditions clear. ‘To Washington one coolie is like another coolie, but actually the picture is very different’, recorded Reiss, as he grappled with vocal demands and complaints about unsuitable rations, and as he struggled to find the necessary quantities of grains and rice.17

  Inflation was driving up salaries but not matching prices, and the locals drove the best deal that they could manage with the Americans. ‘I pay these jokers more in a week than they used to earn in a month in peacetime’, Reiss commented. Daily rates of pay had tripled in the past two years for the average labourer and the ‘coolies’ also found inventive ways to evade the tough contracts which they had entered, or swapping the metal identification tags that they had been given and working under different names, leaving in the night to return to their village fields at harvest time.18

  Chinese civilians also found employment on the Ledo Road, particularly skilled craftsmen, but could also fall foul of the complex borders, citizenship rules and uncertainties over national belonging as the theatre of war expanded over the borders of China, Burma and India. Two Chinese carpenters, for instance, Cheng Chee-Ching and Hsu Kee Pao, were hired for specialist work on the Ledo Road but were arrested by local Assamese police. Cheng Chee-Ching was locked up for being a foreign national in Assam without a permit. He was taken away and imprisoned in Dibrugarh Jail for nearly two months without trial, unable to return and to collect his pay. ‘Mr Hsu tried to go to his rescue but was advised that the police were then also contemplating to arrest him too.’ Mr Hsu lobbied the Consulate and eventually managed to get his friend released and his overdue wages restored to him.19

  The Ledo Road was finally opened for military traffic in January 1945 with great fanfare, hailed as a triumph of persistence, engineering ingenuity and sheer sweat and blood. Fifteen Labour Corps officers had managed teams of labourers each numbering around 50,000. They did not know their workers’ names and only dimly heard of the ways in which some of them had run away to join the Labour Corps, hoping for a quick profit or encouraged by their families to take up seasonal work while it was available. Few knew who had died or when. Slowly the workers were demobilised and began to make their way back to villages in South India, to Burma, Orissa and Nepal with the money that they had saved sewn into saris and pockets. Their tag-line in one American GI newspaper was not the forgotten army but the ‘unknown army’.20

  20

  Insults and Discriminations

  BY 1944 IN the cities and towns of India it was not unusual to see a black man in uniform. Of the 150,000 American servicemen who came to India in the 1940s, some 22,000 were black GIs. This was, the Commanding Officers feared, potentially unsettling to many in South Asia. Caste hierarchies and distasteful comparisons of skin colour had a long domestic history. In the nineteenth century some Indians had indulged in phrenology and had taken up Social Darwinism with gusto, celebrating their own ‘Aryan’ origins and denigrating Africans as inferior. The officers of the Raj fervently believed that the presence of too many black troops in India was politically inflammatory and that local people would become incensed simply by the sight of black soldiers.

  At the same time, the barefaced discrimination and maltreatment of black GIs was not welcomed either. The segregation of the American South permeated the American Army, and while stationed in India black and white GIs faced blatant and enforced separation. Black soldiers worked in segregated platoons, had different and fewer canteens, poorer sources of entertainment, less tolerable living conditions and had to take on harder menial labour, from building the Ledo Road to unloading at ports and docks under the unrelenting sun. In Calcutta, there were segregated Red Cross canteens with black Red Cross women shipped in especially to staff them. One anonymous black staff sergeant relived the indignity of being turned away from a CBI canteen:

  When we first came to this Theater a friend and myself dropped into the Red Cross for a sandwich and [were] very rudely told that they didn’t serve colored soldiers. It so hurted that until [now] I haven’t had the feeling of attending anything that is given by them – don’t feel like I can ever live down that being a soldier of the US Army didn’t mean anything. Even [though] there is a colored Red Cross now, would rather stay away.1

  The one service swimming pool in Calcutta had white days and black days. Black troops were given second-class medical treatment, were more likely to catch malaria, had less chance of leave, received harsher treatment from officers and drew the ire of Military Police. The officials of the Raj (like some of their counterparts back in Britain) barely knew what to think or how to react to these unprecedented new troops: Allied and imperial troops coming to help save the empire? Or racial and national threat? Did the treatment of black soldiers suggest American hypocrisy about democracy and freedom? Was the Raj any better or worse in its treatment of Indians?

  Black troops and Indians found common cause contrary to imperial expectations. Local people chatted and traded with the troops, striking up friendships even in the marketplace and the streets. Banned from using some of the facilities allocated for white soldiers and housed initially in the densely populated area of Howrah in Calcutta, black GIs spent more time in local markets and backstreets. They used loca
l barbers, tea shops and rickshaws and came into conversation with local people. As a consequence black soldiers made new friends, received invitations to local parties and dances and were more likely to have an Indian or Anglo-Indian lover. Black troops in the trucking units in the north-east interacted with Chinese, Burmese and Indian workers.2

  There was recognition between people in Asia and America, albeit complex and shot through with ambiguities, that Indians and black people shared racial subjugation and were on the wrong side of the imperial worlds that they still served. As with so many aspects of the war, the daily interaction of people in the imperial context was entangled deeply with much broader political considerations. At the heart of Washington DC and London, race was a weighty issue of wartime diplomacy. Many colonised peoples had started to argue with increasing stridency that America should resolve the glaring anomalies in its own backyard. Gandhi himself stressed the problem of America’s internal racial problems. A number of American voices spoke up for a ‘global double victory’, stressing how America could win a double advantage by remedying its own racial inequalities and thus winning hearts and minds in the British Empire.3

  One Times of India journalist who watched at the port of Chittagong as gangs of sweating Indian dockworkers struggled to load heavy crates onto a naval vessel noted how a white sergeant shouted at them. ‘“Coom on yer black bastards git goin” was among the mildest of his abuses …’4 Men who championed black civil rights could find common cause with Indian nationalists, from the American singer Paul Robeson who had an enduring friendship with Nehru to the GI and the man on the street. A number of prominent Indians had spent time in the USA, and had forged sympathetic bonds with black leaders by the 1940s. Some eighty black intellectuals in the USA wrote to President Roosevelt in the midst of the Quit India movement to urge action on behalf of Indians.5 Those Americans who supported a people’s war, and intended not only to defeat fascism, but to construct a new world order, looked to Gandhi and the Indian nationalists with admiration and sympathy.

  A black staff sergeant based on the Ledo Road, who had been in India for nineteen months, expressed his fury with his own second-class status and also articulated his sympathy for the Indian nationalists when completing a questionnaire for the military:

  I am a Negro soldier. Whether the Army wants to believe this or not, morale among Negro soldiers is deplorably low and it will continue to be so as long as negroes are delegated a second class position in the army … The effect has been to make America lose her number one position among ideologically respected nations. The writer has made numerous contacts with intelligent, educated Chinese and Indians and he is convinced that a deep mistrust and even an actual dislike of America now exists among these peoples. The Indians of course, are powerless since they are an economically and politically enslaved people; these voices are not heeded today …

  The list of insults and discriminations to which we have been subjected because of race since donning the khaki is too long for detailed discussion here, but it is pertinent to state that it has been long and disgusting enough to make the writer indifferent and apathetic with regards to this war and to tempt him on more than one occasion to request imprisonment rather than continue to accept the indignities to which the Army insists on subjecting him. There are barber shops and hospitals at this base which will serve Chinese and Indians, but refuse to serve us. My own Army tells me in no uncertain terms that it prefers to cater to alien peoples than to me – and I am expected to be proud of my unit and Army.6

  At times, Indian labourers and Americans worked side by side performing exactly the same tasks. Along the Ledo Road, military truckers and Indian drivers made the same difficult runs along hundreds of miles of muddy tracks, sharing the same tiredness and danger. Down at the Calcutta docks, American and West African soldiers could be seen working alongside a stevedore battalion made up of 1,800 specially trained Indian ‘coolies’. As the historian Nico Slate has commented, ‘American racism fundamentally structured the experience of black soldiers in India’.7 This created another layer of complexity in the social world of the Raj. Hierarchies and pecking orders along racial lines became confusing and contradictory. Who was the real protector of development, democracy and freedom in India?

  Over 100,000 African troops were also disembarking, readying for the fight back in Burma. The first East African units from Kenya and Tanganyika arrived in Ceylon in 1942, followed by West African divisions from Nigeria and the Gold Coast in 1943 and 1944. Military commanders fretted about sending African troops to India in the build-up to the campaign and the men were rushed through Indian towns, quarantined from local contact as far as possible, kept in remote encampments far from civilians and watched with nervousness by their officers.8

  Adding to the military melting pot in India, Chinese troops also became more visible in North and East India from the midpoint of the war. In Ramgarh in present-day Jharkhand, a camp of Chinese soldiers had been set up in the barracks of an old POW camp, on large chunks of land requisitioned using Defence of India rules. ‘Soon Chinese troops began to arrive’, remembered Gian Singh, who was stationed nearby in Ranchi. ‘We had never seen Chinese troops before and they aroused our curiosity. We saw NCOs hitting men for various reasons. This never occurred in the Indian Army and it was never forgotten. It drew many comments … In a short time they became smart soldiers but they had strange customs.’9 This camp for Chinese soldiers was initially a contingency plan and part of the response to the initial crisis in Burma as Chinese soldiers who had become detached from their units started to reach India. These men needed feeding, housing and rehabilitating; many were very sick and so malnourished on arrival that some gained twenty pounds in weight during the first weeks of their stay.10

  Soon, encouraged enthusiastically by Chiang Kai-shek, it became part of the official policy to train up Chinese troops in India, and men were flown over from China to Ramgarh. Part diplomatic softener, part serious military strategy, the Chinese base grew and buildings and facilities became established, roads and power developed. The soldiers were equipped by the Americans and given state-of-the-art training. Officers from West Point taught them tactics and graduates from Ivy League universities were engaged to teach them English. But conditions could also be tough and rural Bihar was a strange and spartan environment to the newcomers. Miss Elsie Chin, a Chinese American nurse working at the camp, wrote, ‘Life during the past four months in India has hardened me quite a bit.’11

  Stilwell was a strong believer in using India as a base and a training ground for strengthening the Chinese Army; at one point he asked the Raj to allow the camp to grow to 100,000 men at which Amery baulked: half that number was ‘the limit which we can accommodate in India without serious inconvenience’.12 The Viceroy worried about the British losing their sovereign grip and also about the local effects of more foreign soldiers in central India, and the Government of Bihar objected to the presence of the camp because of the risk of conflict with villagers. The camp was close to a colliery run by Bird & Co. and the managers complained about the presence of Chinese miners frightening away seasonal labourers and of the local women ‘selling their bodies for a few annas’.13 The Government of India tried to block the camp’s expansion, but by December 1943, 5,368 officers and 48,124 enlisted men from the Chinese Army had trained in India. Many of these troops would join the Allies on the road to Assam, and take part in the reconquest of Burma. Ultimately, Amery’s protests came to nothing and over 100,000 Chinese soldiers were in India at the end of 1944.14

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  In 1944 for one week the Stars and Stripes and the Chinese flag hung alongside the Union Jack on central New Delhi’s great ceremonial roads, and fluttered from all central government buildings in Delhi and Simla. The Viceroy had ordered this to mark American Independence Day and the anniversary of the start of China’s war of resistance. The sight of international servicemen had now become commonplace in Indian cities. Women too, Anglo-Indian, Indian, B
ritish, Canadian and Australian, could be seen taking on all kinds of new responsibilities and living in all kinds of ways that challenged the usual gendered conventions of the Raj, walking and cycling about freely, buying and selling from market traders, smoking, wearing trousers and working in canteens, hospitals and blood banks. Unmarried women travelled and lived together. Wives of white civilian officers were now joined increasingly by well-educated professionals from the Queen Alexandra’s Nursing Service, American Women’s Auxiliary Corps and women recruited especially into the Women’s Auxiliary Corps (India).15

  Women even when working long hours in strenuous jobs regarded cheering up the men and boosting their morale as duty. And many of them also wanted to find boyfriends and husbands. Single white women in the WAC (I), nursing corps or Red Cross were encouraged to court officers and often had a large contingent of suitors. Margaret G. Schmertz, an American in the Army Nursing Corps, remembered that ‘Green’s Hotel [in Bombay] was the first place I had ever seen men dancing with men. But the Russians would come in, and they danced together, or some of the British.’16 Heavily outnumbered, European, Canadian and American nurses and Red Cross women dated officers and officials, who received access to better food and supplies and whirled women around the dance floor, took them up in planes and whisked them off to Kashmir or Simla for holidays.