86. Ibid., pp. 265–78.
17. BACK TO BURMA
1. William Slim, Defeat into Victory (Dehra Dun: Natraj Publishers, 2014; first published 1956), p. 146.
2. 7th Division Commander’s Operational Note No. 6, 15 November 1943, Messervy Papers, LHCMA.
3. Newsletter of 3 January 1944, cited in T. R. Moreman, The Jungle, the Japanese and the British Commonwealth Armies at War 1941–45: Fighting Methods, Doctrine and Training for Jungle Warfare (London: Frank Cass, 2005), p. 113.
4. Antony Brett-James, Ball of Fire: The Fifth Indian Division in the Second World War (Aldershot: Gale & Polden, 1951), ch. 20. Accessed online at http://www.ourstory.info/library/4-ww2/Ball/fire11.html.
5. Louis Allen, Burma: The Longest War (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1984), p. 154.
6. Ibid., p. 158.
7. K. K. Ghosh, The Indian National Army: Second Front of the Indian Independence Movement (Meerut: Meenakshi, 1969), p. 171.
8. Allen, Burma, p. 167.
9. ‘The Japanese Account of their Operations in Burma’, December 1945, Gracey 6/13, Gracey Papers, LHCMA.
10. V. J. Moharir, History of the Army Service Corps (1939–1946) (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1979), pp. 365–72; Raymond Callahan, Burma 1942–1945 (Newark, Del.: University of Deleware Press, 1979), p. 133.
11. ‘Unofficial History of 2/13th F.F. Rifles from January 1942 to November 1946’, Gibson 1/4, Gibson Papers, LHCMA.
12. Allen, Burma, pp. 180–81.
13. Moreman, The Jungle, p. 120.
14. ‘Unofficial History of 2/13th F.F. Rifles’, Gibson 1/4, Gibson Papers, LHCMA.
15. S. Woodburn Kirby, The War Against Japan: Volume III Decisive Battles (London: HMSO, 1961), pp. 155–9.
16. Slim, Defeat into Victory, p. 291.
17. Allen, Burma, p. 198.
18. ‘Move of the 5th Indian Division by Air’, end of May 1944, Mace Papers, LHCMA.
19. Gracey to Scoones, 26 March 1944, Gracey Papers, LHCMA.
20. For a detailed and vivid account, see Fergal Keane, Road of Bones: The Epic Siege of Kohima (London: HarperPress, 2011).
21. Slim to Smyth, 3 June 1944, cited in Moreman, The Jungle, p. 140.
22. Snelling to Rear HQ 11 Army Group, SEA, 10 August 1944, WO 203/1976, TNA.
23. Mark Harrison, Medicine & Victory: British Military Medicine in the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 215–18.
24. Indian Army Observer Report of 4 June 1944, Series 2, PRS Mani Collection, University of Technology, Sydney.
25. Indian Army Observer Report of 3 May 1944, ibid.
26. Tarak Barkawi, ‘Peoples, Homelands, and Wars? Ethnicity, the Military, and Battle among British Imperial Forces in the War against Japan’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 46, no. 1 (2004), p. 150.
27. Allen, Burma, p. 183.
28. Barkawi, ‘Peoples, Homelands, and Wars’, pp. 152, 159.
29. Indian Army Observer Report of 26 June 1944, Series 2, PRS Mani Collection, University of Technology, Sydney.
30. Indian Army Observer Report of 21 July 1944, Series 2, PRS Mani Collection, University of Technology, Sydney.
31. Moreman, The Jungle, p. 140.
32. Robert Lyman, Japan’s Last Bid for Victory: The Invasion of India 1944 (Barnsley: Praetorian Press, 2011), pp. 112–14.
33. Christoper Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2007), p. 386.
34. Chandar Sundaram, ‘A Paper Tiger: The Indian National Army in Battle, 1944–45’, War & Society, vol. 13, no. 1 (1995), pp. 42–7.
35. Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Wars, p. 374.
36. Sundaram, ‘Paper Tiger’, p. 49; Sugata Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle Against Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2011), p. 282.
37. Slim, Defeat into Victory, p. 382.
38. S. Woodburn Kirby, The War Against Japan: Volume IV The Reconquest of Burma (London: HMSO, 1965), p. 7.
39. Graham Dunlop, Military Economics, Culture and Logistics in the Burma Campaign (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), ch. 7.
40. ‘The India Base’, January 1945, WO 203/5626, TNA.
41. Woodburn Kirby, Reconquest of Burma, pp. 25–6.
42. Alan Jeffreys, The British Army in the Far East 1941–45 (London: Ospreys, 2013), p. 20.
43. Gul Hassan Khan, Memoirs of Lt. Gen. Gul Hassan Khan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 25.
44. Woodburn Kirby, Reconquest of Burma, pp. 165–6.
45. Letter to Major R. Shaw, 22 February 1945, J. H. Hovell Papers, IWM.
46. H. E. Bates, An Autobiography (London: Methuen, 2006), pp. 451–2.
47. ‘The Japanese Account of their Operations in Burma’, December 1945, Gracey 6/13, Gracey Papers, LHCMA.
48. Robin Schlaef li, Emergency Sahib: Of Queen’s, Sikhs and The Dagger Division (London: R J Leach, 1992), cited in Moreman, The Jungle, p. 186.
49. Slim, Defeat into Victory, p. 472.
50. Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent, pp. 290–306.
51. Army Observer Report, 14 August 1945, Series 4, PRS Mani Collection, University of Technology, Sydney.
52. John Masters, The Road Past Mandalay (London: Cassell, 2002), pp. 312–13.
18. POST-WAR
1. Fortnightly Censor Summary, 22 September to 5 October 1943, L/P&J/12/655, AAC.
2. Medha Kudaisya, ‘ “The Promise of Partnership”: Indian Business, the State and the Bombay Plan of 1944’, Business History Review, vol. 88 (2014), pp. 97–131.
3. Aditya Balasubramanian, ‘From Swarajya to Swatantra: Economic Liberalism in India, 1943–70’, BA thesis, Harvard University, 2012, pp. 23–40.
4. D. S. Nag, A Study of Economic Plans for India (Bombay: Hind Kitabs, 1949), pp. 44–8.
5. Cited in Raghabendra Chattopadhyaya, ‘The Idea of Planning in India, 1930–1951’, PhD thesis, Australian National University, 1985, pp. 174–80.
6. Tata to Commerce Member, 26 April 1944, in Arvind Mambro (ed.), Letters: J. R. D. Tata (New Delhi: Rupa, 2004), pp. 99–100.
7. Chattopadhyaya, ‘The Idea of Planning in India’, pp. 186–9; Benjamin Zachariah, Developing India: An Intellectual and Social History c. 1930–1950 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 99–109.
8. The best account is Robert Hildebrand, Dumbarton Oaks: The Origins of the United Nations and the Search for Postwar Security (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
9. Statement to the Press, 17 April 1945, CWMG, vol. 86, pp. 188–90.
10. Marika Sherwood, ‘India at the Founding of the United Nations’, International Studies, vol. 33, no. 4 (1996), pp. 408–12.
11. Manu Bhagavan, The Peacemakers: India and the Quest for One World (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2012), p. 54.
12. For excellent new accounts, see Benn Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Eric Helleiner, Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods: International Development and the Making of the Postwar Order (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014).
13. Talk on the Bretton Woods Meetings, 3 October 1944, Subject File 43 (5), First Instalment, C. D. Deshmukh Papers, NMML.
14. Kurt Schuler and Andrew Rosenberg (eds.), The Bretton Woods Transcripts (New York: Center for Financial Stability, 2012), Kindle locations 1504–23, 1523–43.
15. Anand Chandavarkar, Keynes and India: A Study in Economics and Biography (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 125.
16. S. L. N. Simha, The Reserve Bank of India Volume 1: 1935–1951 (Bombay: Reserve Bank of India, 1970), pp. 431–3. Also see, C. D. Deshmukh, The Course of My Life (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1974), p. 128.
17. Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, Volume III: Fighting for Freedom, 1937–1946 (New York: Viking, 2001), pp. 351–2.
18. Bakhtiar K. Dadbhoy, Barons of Banking: Glim
pses of Indian Banking History (New Delhi: Random House India, 2013), p. 224.
19. For details, see TP, vol. 5; Penderel Moon (ed.), Wavell: The Viceroy’s Journal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).
20. John Darwin, Britain and Decolonisation: The Retreat from Empire in the Post-War World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), pp. 67–166; Anita Inder Singh, The Limits of British Influence: South Asia and the Anglo-American Relationship, 1947–56 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), pp. 16–21; R. J. Moore, Escape from Empire: The Attlee Government and the Indian Problem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 61–5.
21. Sanjoy Bhattacharya and Benjamin Zachariah, ‘ “A Great Destiny”: The British Colonial State and the Advertisement of Post-War Reconstruction in India, 1942–45’, South Asia Research, vol. 19, no. 1 (1999), pp. 71–100.
22. Anirudh Deshpande, ‘Hopes and Disillusionment: Recruitment, Demobilization and the Emergence of Discontent in the Indian Armed Forces after the Second World War’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 33 (1996), pp. 175–207.
23. Fortnightly Censor Summary, 2 June to 15 June 1943, L/P&J/12/655, AAC.
24. Malcolm Darling, At Freedom’s Door (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), p. 17.
25. ‘Traitors or Heroes’, TS memoir, f. 58, J. A. E. Heard Papers, LHCMA.
26. Report from Deputy Director of Public Relations, enclosed in Richard O’Connor to Auchinleck, 29 November 1945, Mace Papers, LHCMA.
27. My account draws on Daniel Marston, The Indian Army and the End of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 116–50.
28. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2007).
29. My account draws on Biswanath Bose, RIN Mutiny, 1946 (Delhi: Northern Book Centre, 1988); Sumit Sarkar, Modern India 1885–1947 (Delhi: Macmillan, 1983), pp. 363–6.
30. Anirudh Deshpande, ‘Sailors and Crowds: Popular Protests in Karachi, 1946’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 26 (1989), pp. 1–28.
31. Extracts from India Command Fortnightly Security Intelligence Summary, 1 and 15 March 1946, Tuker Papers, IWM.
32. S. M. Nanda, The Man Who Bombed Karachi (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2004), p. 54.
33. For details, see TP, vol. 6. Also see Anita Inder Singh, The Origins of the Partition of India, 1936–1947 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987); Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
34. Cf. Venkat Dhulipala, Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
35. Jalal, Sole Spokesman.
36. Cited in Moore, Escape from Empire, p. 183.
37. Indian Labour Yearbook 1946 (Delhi: Government of India, 1948), p. 125.
38. See the excellent survey in Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, From Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern India (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2004).
39. Asok Majumdar, Peasant Protest in Indian Politics: Tebhaga Movement in Bengal 1946–1950 (Delhi: South Asia Books, 1993); D. N. Dhanagare, ‘Peasant Protest and Politics: The Tebhaga Movement in Bengal (India), 1946–47’, Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 3, no. 3 (1976).
EPILOGUE
1. Note, 5 September 1946, SWJN, second series, vol. 1, pp. 438–42.
2. Ibid., p. 441.
3. Daniel Marston, The Indian Army and the End of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 242–7.
4. Ian Talbot, Khizr Tiwana: The Punjab Unionist Party and the Partition of India (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2002).
5. Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition 1932–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
6. Figures from P. S. Lokanathan, India’s Post-War Reconstruction and Its International Aspects (New Delhi: Indian Council of World Affairs, 1946), p. 20.
7. Saumitra Jha and Steven Wilkinson, ‘Does Combat Experience Foster Organizational Skill? Evidence from Ethnic Cleansing during the Partition of South Asia’, American Political Science Review, vol. 106, no. 4 (2012), pp. 883–907 (Morrison quote on p. 905).
8. Srinath Raghavan, War and Peace in Modern India (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
9. On the use of the sterling balances, see Alfred Martin Wainwright, ‘The Role of South Asia in British Strategic Policy, 1939–50’, PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1989, pp. 469–86.
10. Cf. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2007).
Acknowledgements
I should like to thank the staff at the following archives and libraries: National Archives of India; Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, New Delhi; The National Archives, Kew; British Library, London; Imperial War Museum, London; Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London; School of Oriental and African Studies Library, London; University of Technology, Sydney; Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania; and the Library of Congress, Washington D.C. My debt to the scholars upon whose work I have relied is recorded in the notes to this book. But I would like particularly to express my gratitude to the authors of the 25-volume Indian official history of the Second World War – an unfortunately neglected series of books that remains an indispensable mine of information.
In researching this book I had stellar assistance at various times from Sandeep Bhardwaj, Vipul Dutta, Sarah Khan and Swetha Murali. Several other friends and colleagues sent me materials that were difficult to access: Rakesh Ankit, Rohit Chandra, Alan Jeffreys, Madhav Khosla and Kaushik Roy. I am especially grateful to A. R. Venkatachalapathy and Heather Goodall for drawing my attention to sources of whose existence I was entirely unaware. Aditya Balasubramanian and Avinash Celestine not only shared their excellent, unpublished work on the economic history of the period but spent long hours discussing their ideas and mine.
I owe a huge debt to Pratap Bhanu Mehta and other colleagues at the Centre for Policy Research. They have not only encouraged my interest in the history of India’s global engagements but have taught me fresh ways of thinking about the subject. It is a matter of deep regret that three remarkable senior colleagues – Ramaswami Iyer, K. C. Sivaramakrishnan and B. G. Verghese – are no longer around to see this book. While writing this book, I was also affiliated with the India Institute at King’s College, London. I am extremely grateful to Sunil Khilnani for his encouragement and support over the years.
Thanks are also due to Mahesh Rangarajan, Rudra Chaudhuri, Venu Madhav Govindu, Jahnavi Phalkey, Pallavi Raghavan and Pranay Sharma for indulging my interest in India’s role in the Second World War. For opportunities to present the arguments of this book and receive useful feedback, I am grateful to: David Edgerton at the Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War, King’s College, London; Devesh Kapur at the Center for Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania; Karuna Mantena at the South Asia Studies Colloquium, Yale University.
The manuscript in draft was read by David Gilmour, Ramachandra Guha and Nandini Mehta. Their detailed and perceptive comments on substance and style immensely improved the book. The penultimate draft was read closely by Keshava Guha, and his suggestions were extremely useful in knocking the text into final shape. I am most grateful to all of them for taking the time out of their own projects to help me with this book.
My agent, Gill Coleridge, was instrumental in persuading me to embark on this work. Her tact, patience and advice have been indispensable during the course of writing it. Gill’s colleague, Melanie Jackson, was very helpful in placing the book in North America. My thanks also go to Cara Jones of Rogers, Coleridge and White.
It was a huge privilege to work with my editors Simon Winder at Penguin Books and Lara Heimart at Basic Books. Their formidable knowledge of the Second World War helped me frame India’s experience in a wide context and their suggestions were incredibl
y useful in thinking through and presenting my arguments. Meru Gokhale at Penguin Random House India came to the book in its later stages but with a burst of enthusiasm.
Richard Duguid was marvellously efficient in keeping the various parts of the book together. Charlotte Ridings did a superb job as copy-editor. Octavia Lamb was untiring in her research for the pictures. Jeff Edwards drew the maps. The index was compiled by Dave Cradduck. For their varied contributions to the making of this book, I am also grateful to Emma Bal and Maria Bedford at Penguin, and Leah Stecher and Alia Massoud at Basic.
As ever, this book could not have been written without the love and support of my family. My wife, Pritha, has been magnificently supportive of my obsession with yet another war. Our children, Kavya and Dhruv, have been cheerful despite my long absences. My parents, Geetha and K. S. Raghavan, provided much needed support at home during a crucial phase in the writing of this book. My mother-in-law, Sukanya Venkatachalam, has been a quiet source of encouragement for nearly fifteen years now. None of my books would have been written but for her solidarity, and this one is no exception. This book is for her – as a token of my gratitude and affection.
THE BEGINNING
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