Raj

by Lawrence, James

  There is undoubtedly a regular traffic of Indian professional subversive agitators up and down the Pacific coast, and there’s definite proof that Sikh police in the Portuguese possession of Macao are affected. It is therefore reasonable to surmise that attempts to subvert the Sikh police in Shanghai, Malaya, Singapore and Burma are being made.56

  This was substantially correct. A cell of the Indian Revolutionary Block had been established under Japanese patronage at Canton, and had attracted a trickle of Indian defectors during 1939 and 1940, including a sepoy who brought with him maps of Hong Kong’s perimeter defences. These attempts to seduce sepoys were an indication that the Japanese government was already considering ways in which it might exploit Indian discontent and, once it had begun its offensive against British Asia, make an alliance with Indian nationalism. Three Ghadrite defectors, employed by Japanese Intelligence, appeared in Hong Kong immediately after its capture on Christmas Day 1941 to begin a campaign of anti-British propaganda.57

  5

  A Bad Knock: India at

  War, January–July 1942

  I

  Between February and May 1942 the Raj was stripped of what had long been considered its most precious asset, prestige. The process was painful and public. On 15 February Singapore surrendered and over 100,000 British, Indian and Australian troops laid down their arms after a 54-day struggle against a smaller Japanese army. Next, the Japanese thrust into Burma, capturing Rangoon in March and Mandalay six weeks later. India now faced an invasion by an adversary whose declared aim was to free Asians from European rule. Malays and Burmese took the Japanese at their word and welcomed them as liberators; so too did 40,000 Indian POWs who threw in their lot with the victors within a few weeks of the fall of Singapore. The balance of power in southern Asia was swinging decisively against Britain. During April a Japanese fleet cruised at will around the Indian Ocean, which had been a British waterway since 1800. Colombo was bombarded, and the threat to India’s coastline and ports was only removed when the interlopers were defeated by the United States Navy in the battle of the Coral Sea at the beginning of May.

  Nothing better illustrated the new dispensation of power in Asia or, for that matter, the rest of the world. Henceforward, India’s seaborne security depended upon the United States rather than the Royal Navy. For a time, all that the Viceroy’s advisers could come up with in the way of a defence strategy was a ‘scorched earth’ policy if Bengal was invaded. The Raj had lost one of its traditional justifications, the ability to protect India. Discredited by defeat and unable to defend itself, the Raj could no longer expect the co-operation of its subjects. Even before the disaster at Singapore, Linlithgow was aware that he and his government were facing harsh new realities. Their implication was chilling, as he explained in a cable to Leo Amery, the Secretary of State for India:

  The Cabinet will I think agree with me that India and Burma have no natural association with the Empire, from which they are alien by race, history and religion, and for which as such neither of them have any natural affection, and both are in the Empire because they are conquered countries which had been brought there by force, kept there by our controls, and which hitherto it has suited to remain under our protection. I suspect that the moment they think we may lose the war or take a bad knock, their leaders would be much more concerned to make terms with the victor at our expense than to fight for ideals to which so much lip-service is given . . .1

  The Viceroy’s mordant analysis was substantially correct. Similar conclusions were reached by the political and military experts who spent the next few months picking over the evidence which emerged from the débâcles in Malaya and Burma. High on the list of explanations was the racial hubris which clouded judgements at every level of command. ‘Eastern races [are] less able to withstand [the] strain [of] modern war,’ insisted General Harry Gordon Bennett at the start of his acerbic defence of his own and the Australian army’s exertions in Malaya.2 It was a barb aimed at the Indian army, which he blamed for the defeat, although his condescension embraced the victorious Japanese, an irony which Bennett lacked the wit to appreciate. Racial bigotry was endemic throughout European society in Malaya and, as elsewhere in the empire, was most virulent among the commercial and planter class whose members banned Indian officers from their swimming pools, tennis courts and clubs. This discourtesy was extended to men who, in India, had been treated in a warm spirit of comradeship within British army messes.3 Not surprisingly, ‘a good deal of bitterness’ was aroused by the frostiness of Malaya’s whites. One Indian officer spoke for many when he commented that he and his countrymen had travelled far to protect arrogant and pampered Europeans, ‘and he was damned if he was going to lift a little finger to do it when the time came’.4

  The crassness of the European community in Malaya was a bonus for Japan. It gave a convincing edge to propaganda which announced that a Japanese victory would overturn the old Asian racial pecking order. A new era was promised in one leaflet distributed as the Japanese advanced on Singapore:

  Malays, we are your friends, and intend to drive out the Europeans, who have enslaved you, also kill off the Chinese who have taken the wealth of your country. So that we can identify you at all times wear your hats. ASIA FOR THE ASIATICS.5

  The slogan was repeated in Burma and its resonances were soon picked up in India. From September 1941, intelligence staff of the Japanese Army’s Imperial General Headquarters (IGHQ) had been devising a propaganda offensive that emphasised Asian brotherhood and Japan’s liberating mission. Delivering this message to Indians was the task of a former teacher with a special knowledge of Burma, Major Iwaichi Fujiwara, who had gathered around him a band of Sikh separatist and Indian nationalist exiles. Their objective was strategic rather than political: by undermining the morale of the Indian soldier, Fujiwara’s agents would seriously damage Britain’s capacity to defend Malaya and Hong Kong. The seditionists moved quickly. On 11 December 1941, two days after the landings at Ipoh, a Sikh civilian approached some Gurkha POWs and asked them to return to their lines and distribute leaflets which called on Indian troops to desert. Similar material was circulating among the Indian garrison in Hong Kong by 14 December.6

  It is hard to assess the initial impact of either leaflets or Japanese broadcasts directed at Indians in Malaya. By 29 January 1942 at least 200 Indians had defected and, under the command of Captain Mohan Singh, who had turned his coat at the very beginning of the campaign, were serving as ammunition carriers in the Japanese army. 7 This trickle of deserters hardly supported Gordon Bennett’s claim that sepoy morale had disintegrated. He drew a bleak picture of bored, homesick men, often placed in unfamiliar deep jungle for weeks on end, under an inexperienced and sclerotic command, which had succumbed to a ‘retreat complex’ at the beginning of operations.8 His diatribe was vigorously rebutted and counter-charges were levelled against the Australians. ‘General Gordon Bennett naturally does not mention the shortcomings of the Australians, of which there is much evidence from other sources,’ one staff officer tartly minuted.9 These ‘other sources’, some of them mere hearsay, revealed allegations of halfhearted resistance, malingering, theft, maltreatment of natives and mass desertion.10 The last seems to have been true, but was perhaps excusable in the light of the Australian commander’s example. Gordon Bennett cut and ran to get a ship out of Singapore the moment it appeared that surrender was imminent. Thereafter, Australian servicemen called their running shoes ‘Gordon Bennetts’.11

  General Sir Archibald Wavell, overall commander in Malaya and commander-in-chief in India, added his voice to the acrimonious post mortem. He avoided allocating guilt to individuals and armies, although candidly admitting that he and other officers had grossly underestimated the fighting capacity of the Japanese.12 He stuck up for the Indians whose fighting spirit had been ‘good’ even during the 400-mile retirement through the jungle.

  What he failed to understand was the cumulative effect of enemy propaganda, reverses and retreat. The I
ndian soldier was exposed to a sequence of severe psychological shocks which upset his view of the world and his place in it. Traditional respect and admiration for the white soldier were jolted by a series of disgraceful incidents of panic and cowardice. Unnerved by the flight of Royal Australian Air Force personnel from Khota Baharu airfield, a Hyderabad state battalion followed suit, murdering their colonel when he tried to turn them back. The helter-skelter rush of Australian airmen from Kuantan horrified a Sikh, who asked a British officer, ‘How is this possible? They are all sahibs.’ ‘They are not sahibs, they are Australians,’ was the reply.13 Such incidents and the experience of seeing European soldiers running away from and then surrendering to Asians shook the Indian soldier’s faith in his rulers and their power.14

  Exhausted, separated from their officers, disorientated and with confidence in their rulers in shreds, many Indian fighting men easily succumbed to Japanese pressure. They were exhorted to align themselves with the new Asian order and help emancipate India at a mass rally on 17 February. Within days, recruits were flooding in to the Indian National Army (INA), a title chosen by Mohan Singh, its first commander.15 The scale of the defection stunned the Indian military authorities, who at first imagined that every Indian and Burmese prisoner had become a Japanese soldier. Wild estimates put the total of renegades at 89,000 and, by September, details of their training and eventual purpose were trickling through to Simla. The volunteers were being assured that Japan had no plans to occupy India and were promised a part in the forthcoming Japanese offensive against eastern Bengal. They would enter India as liberators.16 This was how the Japanese had arrived in Burma and the Burmese had believed them, justifying Linlithgow’s estimate of their loyalty to Britain. An American observer attributed Burmese perfidy to dissatisfaction with an unloved and distant administration. ‘Unless the same decadent and unintelligent course in India is corrected,’ he predicted, ‘India may be expected to collapse under attack as Burma did.’17 By midsummer the Japanese had installed a Quisling régime in Burma under a nationalist politician, Ba Maw. The new government was entirely Burmese and was soon persecuting the Karens, who were driven into the arms of the British.

  The early history of the INA suggests that its Japanese godfathers were as astonished by its size as the British high command. No one had been prepared for such a rush of volunteers and, therefore, no plans had been made for their organisation, training and future employment. Nor, at the time of their initial offensives, had the Japanese contemplated the inclusion of India in their projected South-East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Events in Malaya had created what neither Fujiwara nor his superiors had expected: an army of Indian deserters, some of whom believed they were patriots. What was to become of them, and what, if any, part would they play in Japanese strategy? Liaison was difficult; Fujiwara spoke little Hindustani or English, and his successor, Colonel Hideo Iwakuro, was similiarly ill-equipped for everyday contact with his country’s protégés. There was a shortage of translators to instruct the Burma Independence Army (BIA), who were forced to learn their drill by sign language.18 To begin with, arms were in short supply, and what was delivered was either out of date or in poor condition.19 As yet unaware of the INA’s defects, the British feared that it would be deployed on the Arakan front in September in readiness for an invasion of Assam.20 In fact, the INA and the BIA had not yet been assigned any definite military role. In April the Japanese Prime Minister, Admiral Hideki Tojo, had announced on the wireless that Japan would drive the British from India, but no date had been set for the invasion.

  For the time being, Colonel Iwakuro was ordered to treat Indian and Burmese collaborators as a source of agents for behind-the-lines sabotage and espionage. During the summer of 1942 the Japanese opened two schools in Rangoon and Penang, where mainly young, civilian volunteers were taught how to operate wireless transmitters, blow up railway lines, spread sedition and collect military information. According to some agents who fell into British hands, their training had been inadequate, and at least one Indian instructor fell out with the Japanese after they had peremptorily removed twenty pupils from his class for a mission in India.21 This clash was a reminder that the Japanese high command saw the INA as an instrument of imperial policy, whereas its more fervent members imagined themselves to be equal partners in an enterprise to liberate India. INA soldiers wore Congress colours on their uniforms and eventually would be mustered in brigades named after Gandhi and Nehru. And yet all their activities were strictly controlled by the Japanese, who did not hesitate to arrest anyone who showed the slightest signs of obstructiveness.

  The INA’s political wing was the Indian Independence League, a lustreless band of extremist exiles based in Bangkok and far removed from mainstream Indian politics. Its only big name was Rash Behari Bose, an ageing and tubercular Bengali terrorist who had organised the attempted assassination of Lord Hardinge in 1912 and afterwards fled to Japan. He offered little inspiration. Moderates initially seduced by the Japanese were soon disillusioned. Ten nationalists, including H. M. Parwani, a prominent Hong Kong Congressman who had recruited men for the INA, escaped from Burma to India in September 1942.22 During the next twelve months INA deserters followed. They brought with them heartening stories of how a substantial number of its rank and file had joined not out of nationalist fervour, but out of terror or an understandable desire to secure decent treatment and better rations. There were also reports that many officers and other ranks had stayed true to their salt, even in the face of torture by Japanese and former Indian officers, who had quickly adopted their new masters’ vicious habits.23 Among the photographs discovered when Singapore was liberated in 1945 were pictures of Indian prisoners being shot and then bayoneted by Japanese soldiers. Such brutality and the mass murder of Chinese civilians and British and Australian prisoners in the days after Singapore had fallen drove many Indians to seek safety in the ranks of the INA.

  II

  Not yet fully aware of the INA’s exact nature and the circumstances of its creation, the British regarded it as a potential source of enormous mischief inside India. There were two, closely connected dangers. The first was infiltration by expert saboteurs and seditionists, who would simultaneously disrupt communications, spread defeatism and foment unrest. And then there was the possibility that a Fifth Column already existed within India, waiting to assist the partisans and co-operate with a Japanese invasion. Intelligence analysts had concluded that a similar underground organisation had been in place before the Japanese attack on Malaya, and had done untold harm.24

  There was anxiety too about German and Italian plans to launch diversionary, partisan operations on the North-West Frontier. The spectre of a fresh bout of trouble on the frontier gained substance during the summer of 1941, when the Wehrmacht thrust into southern Russia. Army Group A secured a foothold in the Caucasus by September and in July 1942 occupied Rostov. There was no way of knowing which way the developing struggle for Stalingrad would swing; if it went against the Russians, the Germans would be free to push eastwards into Central Asia. An advance in this direction would make it possible to airlift men and supplies to Afghanistan.

  The Axis powers had been meddling in Afghan affairs since at least 1937. Their objective had been to unseat the British-inclining amir, Zahur Shah, and replace him by the deposed Ammanullah, who was a refugee in Rome, where he had acquired an Italian mistress and the attentions of Mussolini’s foreign ministry.25 His and his new friends’ activities were closely watched, for the Foreign Office suspected that the Italian government intended to foment unrest among the border tribes as a device to distract British attention prior to a move against the Sudan or Egypt.26 As in the heyday of the Great Game, Britain’s international rivals recognised the value of the frontier as a means to divert troops. And with good reason; the 1936–37 campaign against Mirza Ali Khan, the Faqir of Ipi, had involved 54,000 men and RAF squadrons which were urgently required in the Middle and Far East.27 A far greater effort would be needed if the
faqir united all the tribes; there were just under half a million modern rifles distributed among them. During the next two years, Pietro Quanoni, the Italian minister in Kabul, made a number of clandestine approaches to the Faqir of Ipi, who was also being courted by agents of Ammanullah.28 The faqir was a useful ally. His piety and supernatural powers made him widely revered among the Pathans – he had once promised to turn the RAF’s bombs to paper, and when aircraft dropped the usual warning leaflets, his followers acclaimed a miracle! But the frontier messiah was also canny, cautious and not over-enthusiastic about an alliance with Fascism and Nazism, which he considered godless.

  The German government was also meddling in Afghan affairs. In March 1938 it asked for landing facilities at Kabul for Lufthansa airliners, a request which was repeated in the spring of 1941.29 By then, if not earlier, the Abwehr (Wehrmacht Intelligence) was concocting an audacious plan for a frontier campaign that would combine a mass tribal insurrection with cross-border sabotage. It was codenamed ‘Operation Tiger’ and was scheduled to commence in September. The groundwork was already in hand. Two agents, Lieutenant Dietrich Winckel (codenamed ‘Pathan’) and ‘Rass-muss’ were sent to Kabul, where they made contact with Indian members of the Forward Bloc and extended feelers towards the Faqir of Ipi. He set a high price on his co-operation: £25,000 a month for raising Waziristan and twice that amount if he could extend the uprising. In June, Enrico Anzoliti, a secretary at the Italian legation, disguised as a Pathan secretly visited the faqir, who asked him for a wireless set. A month later, two German agents, Professor Manfred Oberdorffer, an expert in tropical medicine, and Friedrich Brandt, a lepidopterist, attempted the perilous journey to the faqir, but were intercepted by Aghan troops. The physician was killed and his companion wounded.30