by Rising Sun Victorious: An Alternate History of the Pacific War
The Japanese soon brought into India their own army of Indians recruited from prisoners of war and ethnic Indians in Southeast Asia after their victories in Singapore and Hong Kong.34 These units had seen little fighting in the Japanese conquest of India, being mainly used for logistics and second-line duties, including occupation. They were important in allowing the Japanese to try and legitimize their authority by borrowing the cause of Indian nationalism. However, the disintegration of the “voluntary” Indian National Army in December 1942 showed how ineffective the Japanese were at dealing with the realities of India in anything other than the direct top-down attempt to work through the control of local intermediaries, which had characterized their actions from Korea through China into Southeast Asia.35
The Bengal famine of 1943 led to the first major crisis of Japanese rule. It took several million lives and reflected the poor harvests in much of India and the loss of rice imports from Burma. The Japanese had commandeered much of the remaining transportation assets to support their continuing military campaigns against the British in the south and west, so there was little ability to shift food. Despite repeated air attacks on Ceylon, which suppressed much of its offensive capability, Japan continued to collect taxes in rice at the height of the famine, as it had in similar circumstances in Java.
The Japanese did attempt to alleviate hardship in the areas of India they occupied. They tried to increase rice yields. They tried to introduce sweet potatoes and other alternative crops. Conscript labor was rounded up whenever it could be identified—which in India often meant in urban areas—under military direction, and was sent to the field for what amounted to slave labor either in agriculture or on infrastructure repair. Fugitives from this conscription were soon on the move throughout Japanese-occupied India.
But in the final analysis the Japanese Indian Empire was faced with widespread famine conditions because of the lack of petrol, the disastrous collapse of internal communications, and the continued destruction of war, including the loss of coastal shipping. In response, the Japanese attempted to build and repair infrastructure. Their efforts at building air bases and railroads were more intense than those the British had tried to put in place before they were defeated. The Japanese made massive use of prisoner and conscript labor, as in Southeast Asia.
Despite the declaration of the nominal independence of India in these efforts, the Japanese did not invest heavily in building Indian institutions or forces that they could use. They showed no real interest in respecting either the traditional cultures of the subcontinent or in the modernized and educated classes and their capabilities. The Indian National Army was rebuilt after its December 1942 collapse, but while its manpower strength was considerable, it had little real effectiveness. Like the puppet forces in Japanese-occupied China and Manchuria, it was used primarily for internal security.
This approach to occupation led to the Japanese becoming increasingly familiar with the indigenous tradition of revolt in the subcontinent, which had been focused against foreign rule since long before the British appeared and was now reflected in increasing, if disorganized, opposition to Japanese rule. This was combined with the view of educated Indians that the Japanese offered all of the oppressive features of British rule without any of its enlightenment. Throughout Indian society, there was a hatred of the Japanese military police. This was compounded by widespread Japanese use of mass executions and torture, especially where espionage or sabotage was suspected. Gratuitous executions became a mark of Japanese rule.
Japan Loses the Empire
The fate of Japan's Indian empire was not determined by events in the subcontinent itself, but by the decisive battles fought against the United States in the Pacific. The Japanese also found that they could no more complete the military occupation of the subcontinent than they could that of China. They could hold most of what was militarily and economically valuable, but occupying the frontiers of British India or even, beyond that, the passes of the Hindu Kush that provide a natural forward defense, was far beyond their capability.
In the long term, the subcontinent was peripheral to both Britain and Japan. The British, short on resources, were so absorbed by the struggle for Europe and the Mediterranean that the preservation of an Indian empire that would almost inevitably end or be transformed soon after the conflict was a distant third priority.
The British defeat in India accelerated the inevitable process of their move to junior partner in the Anglo-American alliance. This forced them to adjust their policies to U.S. requirements if they wanted to receive the necessary resources to continue the conflict. It was among the motivating reasons behind the British grant of independence, in the form of “dominion status,” to the remaining four British-occupied provinces of western India— Punjab, Sind, Baluchistan, and the Northwest Frontier—in 1943. There was considerable unrest at this. The Sikhs of the Punjab were particularly reluctant to become part of the new state, so were given autonomy and the chance to opt out after the war.
With most of India occupied by the Japanese, the British had to also give greater weight to the Muslim population of the west, with the new dominion being a Muslim-majority area. But they realized that the Muslim League, under Ali Jinnah, had already been diverging on a course toward partition. This had been opposed by the Congress Party and the Hindu majority, but as they were now under Japanese occupation, they had to be content with promises of their own dominion after being liberated.
In the new dominion, named “Pakistan,” the British established a government-in-exile of an independent India. The need to have at least a nominally Indian government involved also forced them to transfer back almost all of the seven Indian army divisions that were overseas at the time of the Japanese invasion. Along with newly formed Pakistani divisions (equipped by the United States, though still trained by the British) and U.S. and British divisions, these forces would have to eject the Japanese from India.
This new Indian government was not built around Indian nationalist leaders—since these were already in Japanese custody— but was drawn from major landowners in the Punjab and refugees, including a number of the native rulers of prewar “non-British” India. Whenever possible, the British made sure that leaders linked with the Indian army and the “martial races” of India received the political power.
This series of changes reflected U.S. political pressure. Since U.S. airpower and extensive ground troops had been deployed into Karachi and up into the Punjab, American domestic political concerns insisted that this had to be seen as a battle for liberation, not as a battle to reestablish the British Indian Empire. There was little even the most stalwart empire loyalists in London could do about the situation.
The period between late 1942 and 1944, the two years prior to the Anglo-American move back into India, included limited grand offensives toward Bombay and Delhi and moves to secure control of the air and sea around Japanese-controlled India. This involved the buildup of strategic bombers in and around Karachi, to hit targets throughout South Asia. Ceylon, which previously had been reinforced only by means of hard-fought Malta-style convoy battles, was now turned into a jumping off point for air and naval operations that severed the Japanese logistic lifeline except for a trickle flowing in overland from Thailand.
The Japanese were unable to put in place a system of indirect rule that might have secured their Indian empire, for as the Allies advanced, the Indians looked to them increasingly as liberators. The Allied offensive was a slow and deliberate one compared to Japan's lightning victory, but in the end it was inevitable that Japan was unable to hold its Indian empire. The Japanese flag was hauled down—in Delhi, Calcutta, and throughout India— and replaced with the flag of an independent Dominion of India that had been created expressly to defeat it
It is readily apparent that Japanese occupation transformed the Indian movement toward independence. While prewar Indian nationalists such as Nehru had shown sympathy for a policy of nonalignment with prewar great power com
petition, the effects of the Japanese occupation were to burn the necessity for collective security into the postwar Indian consciousness as effectively as it did that of the French in Europe. Postwar India was shaped by the need to reconcile this requirement with the nationalist impetus of many of their policies. This prevented the move toward international isolation that the Japanese occupation had on Burma.
After the war, India took a different course than it would have if the prewar nationalists had led the movement to independence. As it was, independence came with liberation. Those few prewar leaders who survived Japanese captivity—Gandhi had starved himself to death in a fruitless hunger strike—were seen as irrelevant. The leaders of the Dominion of India were landowners, native princes, and men thrust forward from the Indian army, conservative pragmatists. While strong nationalists, they realized India's future would lie primarily with the United States and secondarily with Britain, much as the leaders of Australia and New Zealand did. This included membership in U.S.-led regional defense organizations.
The Dominion of India's pragmatic focus extended to the Dominion of Pakistan. While regretting partition, they saw this as reflecting necessity and removing the potential irritant of the Northwest Frontier. Relations between the two countries, within the Commonwealth, were cordial. The Dominion of Pakistan also joined postwar U.S.-organized regional security organizations. Ceylon's wartime British occupation was reflected in its remaining a colony for many years thereafter.
The Japanese occupation of India, even where brief, left lasting resentment. On the positive side, they had a passion for building and public works, where the Western colonial powers had tended to leave well enough alone when they had not benefited from control or from the economy. In the Andaman Islands, for instance, the Japanese built roads and airfields and port facilities, where the British had been content to have the minimal amount that the islands' plantation-and-prison economy required.
The ephemeral Japanese Raj had however, been a strategic success. Despite defeats in the Pacific and eventual defeat in India, the Japanese blocked the resupply routes to China long enough for the rotten Nationalist government to finally fall apart in late 1944. Much of the Japanese army in China was transferred to Indochina, where its mass was able to slow the Allied advance to a crawl along the Mekong River. The badly wounded Soviet Union, whose forces had met the American General Patton in eastern Poland decided to honor its treaty of neutrality with Japan, freeing more divisions from the Kwangtung army in Manchuria. Exhausted in Europe, Britain's Atlee government had no more taste for war, especially after Singapore was recovered. Even the remorseless Americans were brought around with the quiet Japanese offer to evacuate the Philippines. The Treaty of Lima in 1946 left Japan with most of Indochina and China and a couple of small problems named Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse-Tung.
The Reality
The changing Japanese options and plans regarding India were actually considered. As it was, the Japanese settled for the “Indian Ocean Adventure” of spring 1942 to support their invasion of Burma. It was 1944 before they tried an overland invasion of India, which was defeated.
The British plans for the defense of India are genuine. The events once the Japanese invade are taken from British appreciation of the “worst possible case” of a Japanese invasion, which Japan could have used an intelligence advantage to achieve.
The British failure in the invasion is assumed. Initial British defensive plans collapsed in both the 1941 invasion of Malaya and the 1944 invasion of India. In the latter case, there were enough resources, space, and time to compensate for the initial Japanese success. That was unlikely to be the case in spring 1942.
The Indian unrest and the arrest of nationalist leaders actually took place in August 1942, brought forward in this version by a few months. Today's India was shaped by the emergence of the Japanese threat in 1942, transforming the independence movement.
The conduct of the Japanese occupation is taken from that in China and Southeast Asia, with India-specific information taken from their occupation of the Andaman Islands. Unlike the Germans in the Channel Islands, the Japanese did not set out to make the Andamans a model occupation. The eventual Japanese defeat in India is what they experienced in Burma writ large.
Bibliography
Boyd, Carl, Hitler's Japanese Confidant: General Oshima Hiroshi and MAGIC Intelligence, 1941-1945 (University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 1993).
Broomfield, J. M., Elite Conflict in a Plural Society (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1968).
Chatterjee, A. C, India's Struggle For Freedom (Chuckerbutly & Chatterjee, Calcutta, 1947).
Drea, Edward J., In the Service of the Emperor (University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1999).
Ellsbree, W., Japan's Role in Southeast Asian National Movements 1940-45 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1953).
Fay, Peter Ward, The Forgotten Army: India's Armed Struggle for Independence, 1942—45 (University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1993).
Goldstein, Donald M., and Dillon, Katherine V. (eds.), Fading Victory: The Diary of Admiral Matome Ugaki, 1941—45 (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 1991).
Hayashi, Saburo, and Coox, Alvin D, Kogun: The Japanese Army in the Pacific War (Marine Corps Association, Quantico, 1959).
James, Robert Rhode (ed.), Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, vol. 6 (Cassell, London, 1974).
Lebra, Joyce (ed.), Japan's Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Oxford University Press, Kuala Lumpur, 1975).
Ohmae, Toshikazu, “Japanese Operations in the Indian Ocean,” in David C. Evans (ed.), The Japanese Navy in World War II in the Words of Former Japanese Naval Officers (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 1986).
Prasad Bisheshwar, Defense of India: Policy and Plans (Orient Longmans, Delhi, 1963).
Sudata, Deb Chaudbury, Japanese Imperialism and the Indian National Movement: A Study of the Political and Psychological Impact of Possible Invasion and Actual Occupation (University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana. Ph.D. dissertation [UM1 9236439], 1992).
Takushiro, Hattori, The Complete History of the Greater East Asia War, vol. 2 (500th Military Intelligence Service Group, Tokyo, 1953).
Toland, John, The Rising Sun (Random House, New York, 1970).
Voigt, Johannes H., India in the Second World War (Arnold-Heinemann, Delhi, 1987).
Notes
1. See generally W. Ellsbree, Japan's Role in Southeast Asian National Movements 1940-45 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1953), and Joyce Lebra (ed.), Japan's Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Oxford University Press, Kuala Lumpur, 1975).
2. Lebra, op.cit., x.
3. Johannes H. Voigt, India in the Second World War (Arnold-Heinemann, Delhi, 1987), 86.
4. Carl Boyd,Hitler's Japanese Confidant (University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 1993), 38.
5. John Toland, The Rising Sun (Random House, New York, 1970), 245.
6. Ibid.
7. John Toland, Saburo Hayashi and Alvin D. Coox, Kogun: The Japanese Army in the Pacific War (Marine Corps Association, Quantico, 1959), 42-43.
8. Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon (eds.), Fading Victory: The Diary of Admiral Matome Ugaki, 1941–45 (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 1991), 128.
9. Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Document No. 4076, Translated Records (University Publications of America).
10. A. C. Chatterjee, India s Struggle For Freedom (Chuckerbutly & Chatterjee, Calcutta, 1947).
11. Ibid.
12. Edward J. Drea, In the Service of the Emperor (University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1999), 34–36.
13. Ibid., 36.
14. Hattori Takushiro, The Complete History of the Greater East Asia War, vol. 2 (500th Military Intelligence Service Group, Tokyo, 1953), 156.
15. On naval planning for the Indian Ocean, see Toshikazu Ohmae, “Japanese Operations in the Indian Ocean,” in David C. Evans (ed.), The Japanese Navy in World War II in the Words of Former Japanese
Naval Officers (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 1986), 106–110.
16. Bisheshwar Prasad, Defense of India: Policy and Plans (Orient Longmans, Delhi, 1963), 136–39.
17. Ibid., 139.
18. On April 23, 1942. Robert Rhode James (ed.), Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, vol. 6 (Cassell, London, 1974), 6,618.
19. Voigt, op.cit, 106
20. J. M. Broomfield, Elite Conflict in a Plural Society (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1968), 305.
21. Voigt. op.cit, 107.
22. Ibid., 107.
23. Ibid., 183.
24. See generally Hayashi and Coox, op.cit., 31–36.
25. Ibid., 44.
26. This is what actually happened in August 1942, when India historically was in danger from a postmonsoon Japanese advance.
27. Prasad, op.cit, 170–83.
28. Ibid., 153–155.
29. Ibid., 160.
30. Voigt, op.cit., 144.
31. Ibid, 168.
32. Deb Chaudbury Sudata, Japanese Imperialism and the Indian National Movement: A Study of the Political and Psychological Impact of Possible Invasion and Actual Occupation (University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana, Ph.D. dissertation [UMI 9236439], 1992), 228.
33. Ibid., 229–32.
34. See generally Peter Ward Fay, The Forgotten Army: India's Armed Struggle for Independence, 1942-45 (University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1993).
35. Ibid, 201.
CHAPTER 8
Guadalcanal
The Broken Shoestring
John D. Burtt
There was anger in the man's eyes, anger as he watched his men—unbeaten in battle, unbowed by lack of supply or sleep, undaunted by debilitating terrain or fanatical enemy—load landing craft to leave the island they had defended for two months. Everything in his personality and training told him to stay and keep the island and its valuable airfield out of the hands of his enemy. But his superior feared disaster and ordered him to evacuate. So Maj. Gen. Alexander Vandegrift watched in anger as his 1st Marine Division withdrew from Guadalcanal.