11. Gerald Douds, ‘Matters of Honour: Indian Troops in the North African and Italian Theatres’, in Time to Kill: The Soldier’s Experience of War in the West, 1939–1945, eds Deighton, Addison and Calder.
12. The Madras Presidency contributed 18.6 per cent of these new soldiers – nearly 600,000 of them – twice as many as the United Provinces, and second only to the Punjab, which raised 750,000. See Recruiting for the Defence Services in India, Combined Inter-Services Historical Section (India & Pakistan).
13. Some recruits joined regiments raised entirely from their communities. Others reinforced regiments that treasured their ethnic identity, and scorned new troops of other racial stock. Plenty of homesick eighteen-year-olds deserted, and repeated memos from GHQ pressed commanding officers to assure ‘sympathetic treatment’ to ‘hitherto unenlisted classes’ – even to the extent of expediting their promotion to the VCO ranks, making them ‘thereby competent to watch their own interests’. Regimental officers organised entertainments, or tamashas, in the lines; they let it be known that the penalty for desertion would be limited if a boy was returned to the regiment by his parents, rather than the police. When this happened, the parents were thanked in person by COs.
14. Major I. A. Anderson, a Deputy Assistant Director of Hygiene in the War Office, quoted in Recruiting for the Defence Services in India, Combined Inter-Services Historical Section (India & Pakistan), p. 117.
15. For an explanation of the Viceroy’s Commissioned Officers, see Appendix 2, Indian Ranks.
PART TWO: WEST
Chapter 9: Second Field
1. In 1914, Indian infantry formed the heart of the British invasion force of the Mesopotamian campaign. Mesopotamia was eventually taken from the Ottomans, and after the Great War, it passed into a British mandate, which yielded to an independent kingdom, Iraq, in 1932. Iraq remained a vassal state, led by a British-installed monarch and bound by treaties that guaranteed a military alliance. When the new war began, Iraq was under pressure to declare war as well, but its regent was prevented from doing so by a coup. The new prime minister, the nationalist Rashid Ali Gaylani, declared Iraq neutral. This threatened Britain’s continued use of airfields and ports, the right of passage to imperial troops, and the security of British commercial interests in Iraq’s oil wells. Moreover, the distinction between being neutral, nationalist and being pro-Axis was, as in parts of India, more and more an academic one. By the summer of 1941, it was plausible that Stalingrad might fall, and Gaylani might repay German favours by opening a fascist road to India. Churchill was not having it. In April, the 20th Indian Infantry Brigade, under sail for Malaya, was turned around and disembarked at Basra. After Gaylani precipitated a stand-off at the key RAF airbase at Habbaniya, the full invasion of southern Iraq by the Indian Army began.
2. Persia, rather than the modern name Iran, because ‘Iran’ was deemed too easy to confuse with ‘Iraq’ in communications – a problem not unknown to invading nations sixty years later.
3. The 2nd Field Company, along with 161st Indian Infantry Brigade, had reached Baghdad from the Qassassin camp on the Suez coast, after covering a thousand miles of desert in nine days, in a convoy of vehicles that extended over three miles.
Chapter 10: The Jemadars’ Story
1. Second Field Company was part of another immense transformation in the Indian Army – its mechanisation – another change bemoaned by its old establishment but forced by Auchinleck and the demands of war. In 1939, India still employed eighteen regiments of horsed cavalry. Between then and the summer of 1942, when Bobby enrolled, the Army scaled up from only 5,000 pieces of motor transport to over 60,000. By then the mules and chargers of the Bengal Sappers had been returned to the Remount Depot, and the NCOs ordered to hand over their spurs. The provision of motor transport was not as timely. The 70th Field Company, for instance, received their vehicles just a day before they departed Roorkee – giving the drivers a single night to practise driving them.
2. Like the Fifth Indian Division itself, the divisional sign was formed and deployed in haste. The original submission for it had been a boar’s head, a play on the nickname of its general, Lewis ‘Piggy’ Heath. Unit commanders protested that Muslims would not fight well beneath the sign of a pig. The chief of staff, Frank Messervy, next considered the heads of other animals, but found they’d all been taken. He settled on a simple red circle against black, which in time came to symbolise a ball of fire.
3. Ninth Indian Infantry Brigade, with battalions of 3/5th Marathas, the 2nd West Yorkshires, and 3/12th Frontier Force Rifles, joined by a machine-gun company of the Sudan Defence Force.
4. Tenth Indian Infantry Brigade, with battalions of 2nd Battalion Highland Light Infantry, the 4/10th Baluch and the 2/4th Gurkha Rifles.
5. As the 4th Gurkhas’ history records of that day: ‘It was some time before we realised that no one who left our position ever did return.’
6. Captain M. L. Katju, MC, also recounted his experience with the Baluchi battalion in the Cauldron. He described how ‘breakers of dust rose and fell with the blast of the shells … The gun teams, stripped to the waist, disappeared in fountains of sand, and whenever the dust broke, men would be seen bandaging each other.’ Only five officers and 190 men of the 4/10th Baluch ultimately escaped the battle. From Tiger Kills, p 125.
7. The 161st had not been in Egypt two weeks, but it had to replace two battalions after fighting on the Ridge. The fighting to stop the Axis advance, later called the First Battle of El Alamein, cost the 5th Division alone 3,000 casualties. At the end of the battle, the brigade comprised the 4/7th Rajputs, the 1/1st Punjab Regiment and the 1st Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, which would shortly be replaced by the 4th Battalion Queen’s Own Royal West Kents.
Chapter 11: The Lieutenant’s Story
1. The unit was the 31st Field Squadron, Bengal Sappers, attached to the 3rd Indian Motor Brigade which was destroyed at Bir Hakeim.
2. From the recollections of Lieutenant Ivory of the 2nd Field Company, in Cooper and Alexander, The Bengal Sappers 1803–2003; the date of this attack is recorded differently in other sources.
Chapter 12: Kings of Persia
1. The film partially described here is The Road to Russia, produced by Ministry of Information, Middle East, accessed at the Imperial War Museum, London, IWM/CVN232.
2. Troops in Baghdad were still spared the worst of it. In Andimeshk, Iran, at the end of the double pipeline from the Abadan refinery, it was said that most soldiers’ hands were bandaged, burnt on parked vehicles or canteens left lying in the sun. They joked that men who died in Andimeshk went straight to hell and found the weather there nice and cool. South of that was Dizful, the city of the blind, where the natives allegedly lived in caves under ground, never emerging, and gradually losing their sight. The wealthy lived deepest of all, and it was an Arab saying that ‘in Dizful, the robes of the rich rest on Noah’s waters’.
3. Douglas Alexander Pringles, 5th Indian Divisional Signals, courtesy of Imperial War Museum, London, accession no. 7368.
4. At Habbaniya they worked at the base of the plateau from which Rashid Ali Gaylani’s guns had ranged in on the RAF bastion in 1941, challenging the British military presence in Iraq, and providing justification for the invasion two years before.
5. ‘The confusion reigning on that night can scarcely be imagined,’ Rommel wrote of the attack on Mersa Matruh. ‘It was impossible to see one’s hand before one’s eyes. The RAF bombed their own troops. German units fired on each other.’ Quoted in Desmond Young’s Rommel: The Desert Fox.
PART THREE: EAST
Chapter 13: Enter the Hurricane
1. See Friedman, ‘Axis and Allied Propaganda to Indian Troops’.
2. ‘In Their Jungle Home: IAF on the Eastern Front’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 13 June 1943.
3. This story is found in multiple sources on No. 2 Squadron IAF, including Rana Chhina, The Eagle Strikes: The Royal Indian Air Force, 1932–50. However, the true iden
tity of the two pilots is not established.
Chapter 14: No Heroes
1. Later in 1943, the tank caravan of General Von Arnim would be put on display in Delhi’s Connaught Circus.
2. The full citation reads: ‘For continuous courage and disregard of personal danger during the operation on the FALAJA PASS at AMBA ALAGI in April 1941, this officer was recommended for an immediate award of the I.O.M. for conspicuous gallantry at CHEREN, and was outstanding throughout the ERITREAN operations but has received no recognition.’ Accessed at UK National Archives, reference WO/373/29.
3. Madras was, however, bombed in a single, mysterious Japanese sortie on 12 October 1943. Shrapnel from that attack is on display at the Fort St George Museum in the city.
4. Indivar Kamtekar, ‘A Different War Dance’, pp. 197–8.
5. US and British troops consigned to the rear echelon were encouraged to view their own passive lifestyle with a good sense of humour. The Americans called Delhi ‘Per Diem Hill’, and their spending there did in fact bring the first flush of commercial life to the recently built capital. The number of American soldiers sauntering around had already, a year before, made Gandhi nervous that British domination might be succeeded by US control. But Gandhi was in jail now, and the ‘Queensway commandos’ were having the time of their lives. The SEAC composed a poem, ‘Sticking It Out in Delhi’, which nicely captured the mood on Per Diem Hill: ‘Fighting the Nazis from Delhi,/Fighting the Japs from Kashmir,/Exiled from England, we feel you should know,/The way we are taking it here./Sticking it out at the Cecil,/Doing our bit for the War,/Going through hell at the Maiden’s Hotel,/Where they stop serving lunch at four,’ cited in Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia 1941– 45, p. 376.
6. The Germans and Japanese did also have one safe harbour on the west coast of India: at the ports of Goa, then a colony of neutral Portugal. One of the better-remembered events of India’s Second World War, thanks to a Hollywood movie made about it, was the secret operation by British commandos to sink the MS Ehrenfels anchored in Mormugao Bay in May 1942. Over a year later, a more public event drew the world’s attention to Mormugao: the exchange of 3,000 civilian prisoners between Japan and the USA.
7. Japan Varuvaana? (‘Will the Japanese Come?’) was a Tamil pamphlet written by the intellectual V. Ramaswamy Iyengar, who wrote as VaRaa. It was published in 1943 as part of the series Thamizh Sudar (‘Tamil Flame’), which aimed to inform the Tamil-reading public on topics of current importance. The pamphlet surveyed Japan’s rise and its imperial exploits since the Russo-Japanese war of 1905, and described its victories against Britain since 1941. However, VaRaa assured his readers that there was nothing to fear: that given its engagement in the Pacific theatre and the daunting size of the Indian subcontinent, Japan remained unlikely to attack Madras.
Chapter 15: Fascines and Gabions
1. William Slim quoted in Philip Warner, Auchinleck: The Lonely Soldier, p. 183.
2. Quoted in Philip Warner, Auchinleck: The Lonely Soldier, p. 138.
3. This accusation was thrown at, and later recorded by, Lord Wavell, the previous C-in-C and now Viceroy of India.
4. Antony Brett-James, The Ball of Fire: The Fifth Indian Division in the Second World War, p. 259.
5. Fascines and gabions were devices of classical military engineering. A fascine was a bundle of wooden sticks bound together, used to ramp up light defences or to fill moats and ditches and aid crossing. Gabions, in military usage, were wicker cages that could be staked down and filled with rocks or soil to create defensive bulwarks, around field artillery for example. Shako hats were tall, cylindrical military hats with short visors, commonly used in the nineteenth century by European armies, including in the Corps of Royal Engineers.
6. The Army consumed 800 million tablets of mepacrine during the Second World War.
7. Naresh Fernandes, ‘Goering Had Two (But Very Small)’, on www.tajmahalfoxtrot.in
8. Editorial in Harijan, 31 May 1942.
9. Bose was transported in a German U-boat to the Indian Ocean south-east of Madagascar, where on 27 April he was transferred to a Japanese submarine, a journey that is now legend. It is less known that Allied intelligence was tracking his movement, and was aware of the identity of the passenger whom the crew called ‘Indian Adolf’. The Free Indian Legion remained under German command, and would be deployed on the Dutch coast and finally, under command of the Waffen-SS, in France to resist the Allied landings.
10. The provisional government of Azad Hind was immediately recognised by the governments of Japan, Germany, Italy, Croatia, the Philippines, Nanking China, Manchukuo, Burma and Siam.
Chapter 16: The Jungle Book
1. In December, the division received a visit from Lord Mountbatten; two platoons of 2nd Field Company paraded for the Supreme Allied Commander of South-East Asia, and he worked his magic on them all. ‘A’ platoon was called on to ferry the Admiral across the Pruma Chaung, after which crossing, he turned to John Wright and told him, ‘Bloody good – try a bit harder, and you’ll be almost as good as the Navy.’
2. William Slim, Defeat Into Victory, p. 260.
3. Julian Thompson, The Imperial War Museum Book of the War in Burma 1942–1945, London, 2012, p. 102.
4. Barkawi, ‘Culture and Combat in the Colonies’.
5. Elephant Bill, quoted in foreword, Jilly Cooper, Animals at War, p. 110. The Corps of Indian Engineers even had a No. 1 Elephant Company, well occupied in the Kabaw Valley.
Chapter 17: Fight with Your Ghost
1. Fergal Keane, Road of Bones, p. 177.
2. The Anglo-American air group flew 758 sorties to transport the entire 5th Indian Division to Imphal and Kohima – one of the largest military airlifts until that date.
3. The cause of this costly vacillation was laid out by General Slim in his memoir: ‘Kohima Ridge was an infinitely preferable defensive position to Dimapur, which it covered. If we had not enough troops to hold Kohima, we certainly had not enough to hold Dimapur and, as long as we clung to the ridge, we had some chance of concentrating our reinforcements as they arrived, without too much hostile interference.’ Yet Slim had emphasised to Major-General Ranking, the rear-area commander in Assam, that their main task was to safeguard the vital Dimapur base. When Ranking heard ‘reports and rumours of Japanese units within striking distance of Dimapur’, he ordered the 161st Brigade back from Kohima into Dimapur’s outskirts. The reports proved untrue. From William Slim’s Defeat Into Victory, pp. 356–7.
4. See Arthur Campbell, The Siege: A story from Kohima, p167. Campbell quotes a conversation between Colonel Laverty, the commander of 4th Bn. Royal West Kents, and his adjutant about the single Rajput company attached to their battalion inside Kohima. ‘Of course it must be hell for them, fighting among strangers who can’t speak their language,’ the adjutant said.
‘I don’t reckon we’re strangers,’ Laverty replied. ‘The men aren’t, anyway. They talk to them like long-lost brothers – language or no.’
During the siege, Captain Mitchell of the Rajput company was killed by a shell, leaving the command to his 53-year-old Subedar, Multan Singh.
Chapter 18: The Cremation Ground
1. The British-Indian administration had banned the import of barbed wire into the Naga Hills, as a gesture to the area’s reserved status. The failure to provide barbed wire before the Japanese arrival was typical of the neglect and oversights on the Burma front.
Chapter 19: The Elephant
1. Officers, identifiable by their hip holsters, were special targets in the fighting, and a hint of its intimate nature is that one British brigade lost two brigadiers while fighting for Kohima.
2. From an account of Captain Dickie Davies of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Norfolk Regiment, FVB. Quoted in Julian Thompson, in association with the Imperial War Museum, The Forgotten Voices of Burma: The Second World War’s Forgotten Conflict, p. 238.
3. In his war memoir, Leaves from a War Rep
orter’s Diary, the Reuters journalist D. R. Mankekar gave a close account of his struggle to send any despatches about the situation at Kohima and Imphal. ‘My own scoop on the Japanese invasion of Assam was just a reward for sheer patience with the censors and experimentation with phraseology, plus a very large element of luck,’ he wrote. Having managed to peek at the censor order from New Delhi, which stated that no story could mention the Japanese invasion of India, he typed the following flash – ‘Dateline Imphal: For first time in 120 years there is war on Indian soil’ – then browbeat the officer-on-duty into clearing it.
The censors were more rigorous about denying the news that nearly all of Kohima had fallen into Japanese hands. After the 2nd British Division had arrived to counter the Japanese 31st Division, Mankekar wrote, ‘I was in difficulties to explain to my readers why British troops were attacking a British-held town!’
4. ‘Operation Chawal’ was conducted specifically in the areas ceded on the Imphal Plain, between Bishenupur and Moirang, by the 70th Field Company Bengal Sappers and Miners.
5. William Slim, Defeat Into Victory, p. 414.
6. Jehan Dad, the jemadar of ‘A’ platoon, would receive the George Medal for his rescue.
Chapter 20: The Road Ahead
1. K. Sankaran Nair, Inside IB and RAW: A Rolling Stone that Gathered Moss, p. 46.
Afterword
1. Mark Tully, Stand at East, BBC Radio 4, accessed at Imperial War Museum, London, cat. 28317/9.
2. Indivar Kamtekar, ‘A Different War Dance’, p198.
3. The Corps of Indian Engineers would itself grow from a strength of 200 officers and less than 11,000 other ranks in September 1939 to 7,000 officers and a quarter of a million men. During the war it built 1600 miles of major new road within India, most of that in the North-East Frontier, as well as 34 miles of bridging. See The Corps of Indian Engineers: 1939–1947 by Majors S. Verma and V. K. Anand, p. 107.
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