4. Auchinleck papers cited in Daniel Marston, The Indian Army and the End of the Raj: Decolonising the Subcontinent, p. 75.
5. ‘200,000 on the move’, The Times, 19 Sept 1947 and ‘AICC Report on the Disturbances in Punjab, March–April 1947’, both quoted in Steven Wilkinson and Saumitra Jha, ‘Does Combat Experience Foster Organizational Skill? Evidence from Ethnic Cleansing during the Partition of South Asia’.
6. Wilkinson and Jha’s quantitative study (ibid.) demonstrated this correlation, between the fact and the duration of Indian battalions’ combat experience and the outcomes in terms of lethal and non-lethal ethnic cleansing in their home districts. Combat in the war, they concluded, imbued veterans with ‘organizational skill’. Such skill – ‘at private organization of defense, offense and mobility’ – was greatly visible in the ethnic violence that forced minority emigration, but also in fostering of ‘co-ethnic immigration’ in home districts during Partition. The effect was the opposite, naturally, in districts where it was the minority community that was recruited for combat roles, as was usually the case with Sikhs.
7. Madhushree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War, p. 36.
8. Donny Gluckstein, A People’s History of the Second World War: Resistance Versus Empire, New York, 2012, p. 189.
9. ‘Mr Nehru May Go to Java’, Times of India, 29 October 1945.
10. The peak of that battle, on 10 November, is still commemorated in Indonesia as ‘Heroes’ Day’.
11. In the phrase of Arjun Appadurai, a leading scholar of post-colonial nationalism, reflecting on his experience growing up in the 1950s, after his father had been the Minister for Publicity and Propaganda in the provisional government of Azad Hind. From Arjun Appadurai’s article ‘Patriotism and its Futures’, Public Culture, 1993, 5:411-429.
Appendix 1
Timeline
1939
Sept: Kosh and Manek marry in Madras
1 Sept: Germany invades Poland; Britain and France declare war
3 Sept: Viceroy Lord Linlithgow unilaterally commits India to Britain’s declared war
14 Sept: Indian National Congress demands self-determination in exchange for cooperation in the war
29 Oct: Congress provincial ministries begin resigning in protest of India’s entry into the war
1940
10 Jun: Italy declares war on Britain, and prepares to invade Egypt, Sudan, Kenya and British Somaliland
17 Jun: Government declares all units of Indian Army open to emergency commissioned Indian officers
23 Sept: Second Field Company arrives in Port Sudan to join the newly raised 5th Indian Infantry Division
1941
19 Jan: Subhas Chandra Bose escapes Calcutta to make for Germany
15 Mar: Fifth Indian Division begins the attack on Fort Dologorodoc in Eritrea
27 Mar: The fall of Keren to British Indian forces
1 Apr: No 2 Squadron, Indian Air Force, is raised at Peshawar
18 May: After the defeat at Amba Alagi, Italian forces in East Africa surrender
Jun: Eighth Indian Division, followed by 10th Indian Division, invade Iraq
1 Jun: Manek commissioned into No 2 Squadron, Indian Air Force
22 Jun: Operation Barbarossa begins, as Axis troops invade the Soviet Union
Sept: Manek posted to Kohat, prior to Miranshah
15 Nov: John Walker Wright commissioned into the Indian Army
7–8 Dec: Japan bombs Pearl Harbor and invades Kota Bahru in British Malaya, opening the war in Asia and the Pacific
1942
Feb: No 2 Squadron IAF returns to South India for Army cooperation exercises
15 Feb: Surrender of Singapore
8 Mar: Fall of Rangoon
23 Mar: Japanese troops begin the occupation of India’s Andaman Islands
23 Mar: Stafford Cripps arrives in India
End Mar: Bobby graduates from College of Engineering, Guindy
5–9 Apr: Japanese carrier aircraft bomb naval bases in Ceylon and South India
13 Apr: Evacuation of Madras ordered
27 May: Battle of ‘the Cauldron’ begins, leading to the collapse of the Eighth Army back to Egypt
5 Jun: Ganny commissioned into the Indian Medical Service
20 Jun: Surrender of the Tobruk fortress; 30,000 Allied troops, mainly Indian and South African, captured
July: John Walker Wright joins 2nd Field Company at El Alamein
4 Aug: Nugs and Ganny marry in Kohat
8 Aug: Quit India resolution passed in Bombay
20 Aug: Ganny reaches Officer Training School in Mhow
26 Aug: Legion Freies Indien formed by Bose in Berlin
23 Oct–11 Nov: Second Battle of El Alamein
28 Nov: Bobby commissioned into KGVO Bengal Sappers & Miners
Dec: Manek flies to Ranchi to train at low-level flying in Hurricane aircraft
10 Dec: Ganny dies of asthma bronchitis in Thal
1943
1 Jan: Nugs’s daughter born in Madras
14 Feb: The first Chindit expedition crosses the Chinwin River into Burma
21 Feb: General von Paulus’s army surrenders and siege of Stalingrad is lifted
17 Mar: Bobby joins 2nd Field Company in Iraq
7 Apr: Six pilots of No 2 Squadron IAF fly to Imphal to aid the Chindit campaign
27 Apr: Bose is transferred from a German to a Japanese submarine to be taken to Tokyo
1 May: Second Field Company embarks from Basra for Bombay
13 May: Remains of Rommel’s army defeated in Tunisia, ending the war in North Africa
25 May: Manek killed in a plane crash in Burma
20 Jun: Auchinleck appointed Commander-in-Chief India for the second time
25 Aug: Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten appointed Supreme Allied Commander for South-East Asia
Sept: Eighth Indian Division, followed later by the 4th and 10th, join the Italian campaign
Sept: Second Field Company assembles at Monghyr, Bihar, to begin training
Dec: Second Field Company arrives at Chittagong
20 Dec: Edul Dadabhoy, Manek’s brother, joins No 7 Squadron, IAF
30 Dec: Fifth Indian Division begins ‘Operation Jericho’ in the Arakan, launching attack towards Razabil fortress
1944
Jan: Fifth Division conducts ‘Operation Jonathan’, the assault on Razabil
8 Feb: Siege of the ‘Admin Box’ in the Arakan
1 Apr: Edul Dadabhoy killed in a plane crash in Burma
6 Apr: Siege of Kohima begins
18 Apr: Siege of Kohima ends with reinforcement by 1/1st Punjab
6 Jun: ‘D-Day’ – Allied troops invade the beaches of Normandy
22 Jun: Imphal–Kohima road is opened, ending the three-month siege of Imphal
23 Aug: Liberation of Paris
9 Nov: Bobby’s death recorded
End Nov: Fifth Indian Division airlifted from Kalemyo back to India
1945
2 May: Berlin falls to the Soviet Army. Within a week, the war in Europe is over
6 Aug: The United States drops the atomic bomb on Hiroshima
15 Aug: Japanese surrender ends the war in Asia
10 Nov: Peak of the battle of Surabaya, fought between Indonesian nationalists and the 5th Indian Division
Appendix 2
The Army in India consisted of two separate services: the British Army in India, and the Indian Army. The units and personnel of the British Army in India were entirely British and were controlled by the Secretary of State for War at Whitehall. The Indian Army was led by a commander-in-chief, who reported to the Viceroy and thus to the Secretary of State for India. It did, however, include British troops. Its battalions were generally one third Indian, one third Gurkha and one third British, at first commanded exclusively by British officers, though Indian and Nepali officers slowly gained admission after 1919. Thus a typical Indian Army brigade consisted of one Indian battalion, one
Gurkha battalion and one British battalion. These proportions tilted toward Indian units as the Second World War progressed.
The Army division, the formation generally considered for strategic planning, consisted of three infantry brigades, supported by ancillary arms. Divisional engineers included an independent bridging platoon, besides a field park company consisting of a stores platoon, a workshops platoon and a field platoon for non-infantry troop support. Each brigade was a basic formation containing ‘all arms’: three infantry battalions, supported by one regiment of artillery, a sapper field company, and units of Signals, Service, Ordnance, Medical and other support corps.
Indian ranks
Officers
The Indian Army officer corps comprised regular commissioned officers, as well as emergency or wartime commissioned officers, holding ranks identical to those in the British Army.
Viceroy’s Commissioned Officers (VCOs)
Ever since the East India Company began to absorb Indian forces, three ranks were preserved to maintain the best native officers in charge: in ascending order, jemadars, subedars and subedars-major. (In the cavalry, the rank equivalent to subedar was risaldar.) These became the Viceroy’s Commissioned Officers, the archangels of the British Indian Army, and intermediaries for the European sahibs. Promoted from the ranks, they were the best, most experienced soldiers in any unit, and the keystones of regimental order. Their authority was respected nearly as much by the British officers above as by the enlisted ranks below. As a second lieutenant, Bobby’s rank was superior to the VCOs, although they were men often twice his age and with immeasurably greater service experience.
Non-Commissioned Officers (NCOs) and other ranks
havildar (sergeant)
naik (corporal)
lance-naik (lance corporal)
sepoy (private)
Engineering field companies
An engineering field company was typically commanded by a major, with a captain as second-in-command in charge of a headquarters group of about forty sappers. Three lieutenants commanded separate platoons of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, each comprising about seventy sappers. Other officers included an attached medical officer, British warrant officers and Indian VCOs.
Sapper platoon:
In the field, platoons were often self-contained, operating on their own sectors, and receiving orders from company headquarters. A platoon was led by a lieutenant, with a jemadar as second-in-command and a havildar as senior NCO. Each platoon typically received three non-enlisted personnel (a cook, a bhisti, and a sweeper) along with twelve trucks, two anti-tank projectors, four Bren guns, and ten Thompson sub-machine guns.
Sapper section:
A sapper platoon was divided as five sections of twelve men: four rifle sections and one driver section for the platoon’s vehicles. Each section was led by a naik, a rank equivalent to the British rank of corporal. Naiks and their seconds, lance-naiks, carried Thompson SMGs. One team of two men worked a Bren gun, and the others carried rifles.
Second Field Company, KGVO BS&M in October 1944
1 (acting) major: Williams
4 lieutenants: Reid, Wright, Mantle, Rayner and Mugaseth
5 VCOs
1 warrant officer
12 havildars
14 naiks
237 lance-naiks and sappers
7 NCSEs (Non-combatant enrolled)
Select Bibliography
I was lucky to be able to reconstruct the journey of a field company, a miniscule unit in the scale of a world war. I detailed the career of 2nd Field Company by triangulating (or pentangulating) from five sources concerned with different levels of their formation: division, brigade, regiment, company and individual.
I relied enormously on the divisional history, The Ball of Fire: The Fifth Indian Division in the Second World War, by Anthony Brett-James (London, 1951), as well as the history of a 161st Brigade infantry battalion: Road of Bones, The Epic Siege of Kohima, by Fergal Keane (London, 2010), which follows the 4th Battalion Royal West Kents. My description of the fighting in Kohima owes a great deal to his powerful and exhaustive account.
I also used the official history of the sapper regiment (Brief History of the KGV’s Own Bengal Sappers and Miners Group, August 1939–July 1946), the war diary of the company (preserved at the Ministry of Defence History Division in New Delhi) and a personal account from inside the unit (interview with Lieutenant John Walker Wright at the Imperial War Museum, London).
Where Manek’s air force squadron was concerned, the operations record books survive at the National Archives in London and the Ministry of Defence History Division in Delhi. The Indian Air Force has been favoured with a devoted community of veterans and civilian experts, so its war history is relatively well documented. However the operations record books of No 2 Squadron are missing their pages between September 1942 and September 1943 – thus no official details of the Imphal detachment are recorded, and all we know of their experience is from press reports and anecdotes. On the IAF generally, I relied mainly on the The Eagle Strikes by Squadron Leader Rana Chhina, and the website Bharat Rakshak.
A few other books were integral to my account of the war in India’s perspective. Foremost among these was the superb Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia 1941–45, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (London, 2004). The research of Indivar Kamtekar provided the social and economic vista of civilian India in 1942–43.
Bobby’s family:
Khanduri, C. B., Thimayya: An Amazing Life, Delhi, 2006
‘Remembering GP, the gentle colossus’, The Hindu, 7 July 2012
Sahgal, Lakshmi, A Revolutionary Life: Memoirs of a Political Activist, New Delhi, 1999
Sankaran Nair, K., Inside I. B. and R. A. W.: A Rolling Stone that Gathered Moss, New Delhi, 2008
Sharada Prasad, H. Y., (ed), GP, The Man and His Work: A Volume in Memory of G. Parthasarathi, New Delhi, 1998
The Indian Air Force:
Chhina, Rana, The Eagle Strikes: The Royal Indian Air Force, 1932–50, New Delhi, 2006
‘In Their Jungle Home: IAF on Eastern Front’, The Illustrated Weekly of India, 13 June 1943
Lindqvist, Sven, A History of Bombing, London, 2002
Ramunny, Wing Commander Murkot, The Sky was the Limit, New Delhi, 1997
Sapru, Somnath, Combat Lore, The Indian Air Force, 1930–45, New Delhi, 2014
Singh, Jasjit, The Icon: Marshal of the Indian Air Force, Arjan Singh, DFC, New Delhi, 2009
——— Defence from the Skies: 80 Years of the Indian Air Force, New Delhi, 2013
Singh, Pushpindar, The Battle Axes: No 7 Squadron IAF, 1942–92, New Delhi, 1993
Omissi, David E., Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force 1919–39, Manchester, 1990
The Indian Army:
Ahmad, Mustasad, Heritage: The History of the Rajput Regiment 1778–1947, Delhi, 1989
‘Army in India Training Memoranda: War Series Omnibus’, Simla, 1945
Barkawi, Tarak, ‘Peoples, Homelands, and Wars? Ethnicity, the Military, and Battle among British Imperial Forces in the War against Japan’, Society for Comparative Study of Society and History, 2004
——— ‘Culture and Combat in the Colonies: The Indian Army in the Second World War’ in Journal of Contemporary History; 41: 325 (2006)
Barua, Pradeep P., Gentlemen of the Raj: The Indian Army Officer Corps 1817–1949, Westport, 2003
Churchill, Winston, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, online at www.gutenberg.org
The Fighting Fifth: The History of the 5th Indian Division, New Delhi, 1948
Guy, Alan J., and Boyden, Peter B., Soldiers of the Raj: The British Army 1600–1947, London, 1997
Jeffreys, Alan, ‘The Officer Corps and the Training of the Indian Army with Specific Reference to Lt Gen. Francis Tuker’, in History of Warfare, Vol. 70 (2011)
Kaushik, Roy, (ed.), The Indian Army in the Two Wor
ld Wars, Leiden, 2011
Kipling, Rudyard, ‘Her Majesty’s Servants’ in The Jungle Book, London, (first published 1894), 2011
MacKenzie, Compton, Eastern Epic, Vol. I, September 1939–March 1943, London, 1951
Marston, Daniel, The Indian Army and the End of the Raj: Decolonising the Subcontinent, Cambridge, 2014
Prasad, Bisheshwar, (ed.), Official History of the Indian Armed Forces in the Second World War, New Delhi, 1953–60
Qureshi, Major Mohammed Ibrahim, The History of the First Punjab Regiment: 1759–1956, New Delhi, 1958
Recruiting for the Defence Services in India, Combined Inter-Services Historical Section (India & Pakistan), Delhi, 1950
Tully, Mark, ‘Stand at East’, BBC Radio 4, June 2005
Warner, Philip, Auchinleck: The Lonely Soldier, London, 1981
The Indian Medical Service:
Palit, D. K., Saga of an Indian IMS Officer: The Life and Times of Lt Col. Anand Nath Palit, OBE, New Delhi, 2006
Thapar, D. R., The Morale Builders, Forty Years with the Indian Medical Services of India, London, 1965
King George V’s Own Bengal Sappers and Miners:
Brief History of the KGV’s Own Bengal Sappers and Miners Group (August 1939–July 1946), Roorkee, 1947
Cooper, General Sir George, and Alexander, Major David, The Bengal Sappers 1803–2003, Chatham, 2003
Khanna, Colonel R. B., God’s Own Bengal Sappers, New Delhi, 2003
Manual of Field Engineering, Vols I, II & III (RE), War Office, London 1936 (held at the Imperial War Museum, London, ref: WO 1208)
Verma, Major S., and Anand, V. K., The Corps of Indian Engineers: 1939–1947, Delhi, 1974
Africa and the Middle East:
Barnett, Correlli, The Desert Generals, London, 1983
Douds, Gerald, ‘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 Len Deighton, Paul Addison and Angus Calder, London, 1997
Paiforce: The Official Story of the Persia and Iraq Command, 1941–46, London, 1948
The Tiger Kills: The History of the Indian Divisions in the North Africa Campaign, with a foreword by Field-Marshal Claude Auchinleck, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, Government of India, Delhi, 1944.