CHAPTER 22
THE Japanese, after overrunning Burma, had been content for two years to remain on the defensive. They had repelled the attack organized by General Wavell from India in the autumn of 1942, against Arakan. The operation, which was encouraged from London in the hopes that it would repair British prestige, was premature and was made with inadequate force and troops insufficiently trained; the Japanese were never embarrassed by it – except that it restricted a move which they had been intending to make at the same time into North India – and, by outmanoeuvring and outflanking the British, they compelled the British to retreat.
The country between India and Burma was peculiarly difficult; communications almost did not exist; the disease-infestations required that armies, if they were to operate with any degree of efficiency, should be remarkably well organized with medical and sanitation services, which in many areas they were not until 1944. These facts, as much as any other, kept the British and Japanese apart, though great pressure was brought on British troops by Churchill to go on the offensive. In fact, the Japanese had acted on the principle that geography had contrived to give Burma the perfect scientific frontier, and calculated that they would do enough if they posted troops to guard the few practicable approaches from India.
In 1943 the adventure of General Orde Wingate in Burma took place. This strange, eccentric soldier, who had formed his ideas in Palestine and Abyssinia, and who took T. E. Lawrence and the Arab revolt in the First World War as his model, was confident that Burma would make an ideal field for guerrilla war. If it was hard for armies to make contact, he suggested that guerrillas should do their work for them; and that, once these had made a long-range penetration behind the Japanese lines, they could, by superior mobility and surprise, produce as much havoc as would be caused by a successful army invasion.
Wingate convinced the Indian Army with great difficulty, and made an expedition with just over three thousand men. The higher Japanese officers regarded him without anxiety, and said that he must starve in the jungle; the more junior officers were shocked by the boldness of his strategy, and by their inability to hunt him down. The advance of Wingate upon T. E. Lawrence was in the use of radio and of aircraft. Wingate lost a thousand men, one third of his force, and put a Burmese railway temporarily out of action. Whether his guerrilla successes came near justifying his theory was an open question; a much larger operation, employing aircraft, was planned for the next year, but it met with disaster at the outset, Wingate being killed on taking off. He is a hard man to assess. England, for prestige reasons, urgently needed a success, and it possessed at this time a propaganda machine, which could create heroes overnight. Wingate’s personality and achievement were written up and blazed across the world. It may be that Wingate demonstrated not the success of his own guerrilla strategy but the success of British propaganda. He supplied to the waiting and idle troops of the British Army, in the tedious interval of training and before they were offensively engaged, the spectacle of exciting warfare and of individual performance. Wingate believed himself to be a man of destiny and that the situation was also one of destiny.
A far more orthodox, and forceful, attack was intended by the British in the spring of 1944. The Fourth Army Corps was preparing it, using the small town of Imphal in North-East India as its base. The Japanese, who had two divisions in the region, had Intelligence that it was coming, and resolved to strike first.
The campaign inside the borders of India which resulted was interesting partly because, in it, Japan again put to the test its claim that it was fighting, not simply for itself, but for the freedom of the Asian peoples. It is true that the organized forces of allegedly ‘free India’, which it had among its troops, played only a minor part; the campaign was so interesting, so stubborn, so terrible, and the ‘free Indians’ played such a small role in it, that the history of it, and its narration by the Japanese, might well overlook their presence. Yet, symbolically, the event is important, and was certainly seen to be so by the people of India and South-East Asia. Japan had announced that it had opted out of the circle of imperial predatory powers, and that it could rightly claim to be the patron of free Asia. It had not, until this time, done anything very striking to show that it was living up to this claim. In Japan, all attention was given to the gallantry of the Japanese forces. The average Japanese subjects scarcely thought of their army as fighting Asian battles, or that their Asian Allies could be of much worth to them. The opportunity had come to show that this was a mistaken view.
Chance presented itself in the shape of the Indian leader Subhas Chandra Bose. He played at this stage an extraordinarily decisive part. By accident, and by seizing an exceptional opportunity, he was able to cut a figure which made him outstanding among the comparatively small number of men who influenced the course of the war by their individual qualities. He chanced to be available to the Japanese to lead a movement to free India, and, in retrospect, it appears that this was the last chance of saving itself with which Japan was presented.
Bose was a Bengali, the son of a comparatively high civil servant who became a judge. Bengal had a special place in the history of Indian nationalism. It stood by itself culturally, and bred a type which was peculiar in being the exponent of a classical strain of regional loyalty. Bengali patriotism was deeply devotional: it was less associated than in other parts of India with day-to-day economic interests: the Bengali really believed the singularly powerful oratory which surged over the province especially after 1905. The passionate quality of Bengali nationalism, monomaniac, hot, somnambulist, is rather like that of the Sinn Fein patriot who is heard, off-stage, as a repeated theme in Sean O’Casey’s play, Red Roses for Me, repeating his hypnotic oratory. This nationalism expressed itself, to a degree quite unknown in other parts of India, in a fascination with violence and in a cult of terrorism. The typical Bengali nationalist was quite carried away, renounced his home and the ties of ordinary business, and plunged into secret conspiratorial activity in a way which horrified the rest of India as being extravagant and an affront to domestic obligation.
Bengal differed so much in temperament from the other parts of India that political cooperation with it was not easy. Bose became a leader of Bengali nationalism, and was so powerful a personality that his shadow fell over the rest of India. He was in the recognizable succession to the Bengal leaders of his youth who used to be carried away by the poetical implications of ‘mother India’, Hinduism, and Indian uniqueness. Always, Bose saw himself, and conducted himself, as a man of destiny. He had a great appeal to youth, frustrated, very poor but very proud, liking rhetorical leadership, always responding enthusiastically to the idea of a solution through some act of violence. He sought to turn Indian nationalism into the kind of movement which grew in Bengal.
As a young man, Bose, who was born in 1897, had been sent by his family to England, where he studied so diligently at Cambridge that he passed the entrance examination into the Indian Civil Service. This still enjoyed so much prestige in India that a lifetime spent in it, or a resignation from it, produced equal réclame. Bose chose the latter course. By resigning even before he had been posted to any particular duty, he gained a flying start in the Bengal Congress Party. Two decades of serious attachment to Congress, and a spell of office as Mayor of Calcutta, brought him, after a term of imprisonment which he spent in Mandalay Fort in Burma, to the presidency of the All-India Congress in 1938. Though the inner springs of his being may have been poetical, he developed, during his time as Mayor, a businesslike aptitude, which won recognition from British officers.
This proved to be a parting of the ways with his non-Bengali Congress colleagues. In his struggle with them, and partly because of his temperament, he moved sharply to the left, though for him there was no special attraction in socialism, and he was not moved by the conflict between this and free enterprise. The left meant simply extremism, more determined personalities, a more congenial emotional atmosphere. He advocated ever more extreme Congress policies: and in particular he opposed Gandhi’s stubbornly held advocacy of non-violence. In this contest, Gandhi faced the blind emotional forces of Bengali nationalism, which repudiated Gandhi’s homespun philosophy of the spinning wheel and of the virtues of simple peasant life. A religious preoccupation such as Gandhi’s – a religion which dwelt on the virtues of the Sermon on the Mount which Gandhi had taken over in his version of Hinduism – was alien to Bose. Bose’s passion was summed up in his favourite slogan: ‘Give me blood and I promise you freedom.’
The year of his final breach with Gandhi was also the year of the outbreak of the war in Europe. Bose was not inclined to sit still among such events. For the attitude of Gandhi and Vallabhai Patel, the men he was opposing, it is possible to feel much admiration. They were realists, as intransigently opposed to the British as he was himself. But they accepted that military action was not the way to strike at them. They were organizing a vast, poor, ignorant, apathetic nation in the only way it could be mobilized. A military adventure was just the kind of thing the British would expect and would know how to deal with. They were helpless against this unspeakable grounds well. Subhas Bose was simply too impatient for this Himalayan wisdom.
Bose thought otherwise. The world was being changed by armies, and he was impatient to have an Indian Army. His agitation grew unrestrained of bounds. He was arrested, rather oddly for a seditious speech in connection with the agitation for the removal of a memorial to the victims of the Black Hole of Calcutta, which was thought to be hurtful to national sentiment. In prison he meditated upon the progress of the war, on the might of Germany, on the great opportunities for Indian freedom which he felt that Gandhi, with a senile attachment to non-violence (as it appeared to Bose) was at this time allowing to pass by. He was distracted when he thought of what he might be able to effect if he was at liberty. He procured his temporary release by beginning a hunger strike, and ensured that he would not thereafter be restored to jail by absconding from his home in Calcutta early on a January morning of 1941, disguised as an elderly Moslem mullah.
By a daring journey he made his way across India, through Afghanistan and through the Soviet Union, into Germany. There he found his spiritual home, and probably would have done better if he had stayed there instead of answering the call of Japan. He had alway been attracted by Germany. His temperament was Wagnerian: the Nazi grandees proved attractive personally. The colourful side of Nazism appealed to him profoundly. The heroics, the mythology, the dangerous and insidious concepts, the affected contempt for weakness and pity, the invocation of history, all seemed congenial to him. Bengali culture is strongly patriarchal, and the Nazi concept of the place of women in the warrior’s life appealed to one who, till he went to Germany and married a German, had apparently been indifferent to women. In the Siegfried cult and the heroic life, he saw a model which he found admirable. He was deficient in the sense of humour that was the best preservative against Nazi fantasy; and his Hindu education had given him a natural tendency towards a narrow concentration on whatever happened to appeal to him for intellectual reasons. Even the Nazi brutality he found brisk, salubrious and invigorating.
In politics he found the Nazi form of state entirely congenial. The rule by the Nazi Party, and the authoritarian rule of the party by a small caucus of leaders, seemed to him to provide India with a model form of government. Discipline, before all else, was what India seemed to need for overcoming its problems of the division into separate castes and communities, and for dealing with its great economic problem of poverty. The democratic type of government which it might imitate from Great Britain had the fatal weakness of permitting so much liberty that the state might fall in pieces. New vistas opened for an Indian Government which would be equipped with a Gestapo, concentration camps and an SS. On the precise details of the policy he would pursue if the war should bring him to power, he was vague. It was enough that he should proclaim the bracing virtues of authoritarianism.
Bose therefore found the situation promising. He was satisfied with his personal reception. The Germans invited him to take charge of organizing the rebellious Indians in their hands into a body which might be useful for war purposes. He was given access to the Indian prisoners captured by the Germans in North Africa. He broadcast to India over the German radio; and he took part in the controversy over the Cripps mission to India. Volunteers began to come forward to form an Indian Legion, and about two thousand men were enlisted for training. There was much ceremonial feasting and mutual compliment.
Spiritually this was probably the happiest part of Bose’s somewhat neurotic life. But after some months Bose had to recognize that his German friends had not acknowledged him as the head of an Indian Government-in-Exile. Perhaps this was due, as was explained to him, to the fact that they could as yet, while Russia remained undefeated, have brought no effective aid to an Indian rebel government; perhaps it was because Hitler could not bring himself to recognize that Indians would be equal citizens in the post-war world which he was planning. Hitler, if Germany won the war, intended to dispose of India by a diplomacy in which Indians would play no part.
Whatever the reason, the Germans put no obstacles in Bose’s way when an invitation reached him from the Indians in South-East Asia to transfer himself to this new sphere, and to take charge of the Free India movement which was being organized by the Japanese. His imagination, the dramatic part he might play, the appeal of the idea of Pan-Asianism, his calculation of how India, or at least Bengal, might respond to new situations, all impelled him to accept.
Bose sailed from Keil in a German U-boat in February 1943. He left behind some lieutenants to continue the work of organizing the available Indians, though he had failed to come to an agreement with the Nazis on precisely how they were to be used. The U-boat sailed to Madagascar, and there, off shore, it made a rendezvous with a Japanese submarine which carried him for the last half of his journey. He reached Tokyo on 13 June, after a voyage of thirteen weeks. That he was permitted to be so slow may suggest that the Japanese, at least at this time, did not found great hopes on the plan for which he had been imported.
Indeed they had been making half-hearted bids at raising the Indians in revolt against the British ever since the first days of the war; and they had suffered a series of disappointments. At first the project had been entrusted to a man named Major Fujiwara Iwaichi, of the Army General Staff, who appears to have been of some probity, with an understanding of what would appeal to Indians. He was fortunate in lighting, in the first days of the war, on a sick prisoner, Captain Mohan Singh. Singh was a man of character; he was a cousin of the Maharaja of Patiala, a great prince of the Punjab; he was a capable professional soldier, and he had become, apparently without the knowledge of the Indian Army, a convinced nationalist. With the backing of Fujiwara, and the financial aid of some of the leaders of the 800,000 Indians resident in Malaya, he undertook to raise from the Indian prisoners of war a force which might prove useful to the Japanese.
Of the total of 115,000 men who surrendered during the whole of the Malayan Campaign, Indians made up a very large number. Though at first a near-blind confidence was put in their loyalty by the Indian Government, this had an unenviable, if amiable, record, of being deceived. The inquiries which followed the Indian Mutiny of 1857, had shown that an almost insane trust had been placed in troops which had given every sign that they were preparing for rebellion.
Certainly the experience of some of the troops, in the months immediately before the surrender of Singapore, had not been such as to ensure their fidelity. Malaya was in many ways the weakest link in the British imperial chain. Among other disservices, it brought about the demoralization of many of those who served the Raj in the Indian Army. The culture and atmosphere of Malaya has been described very exactly in the stories of Somerset Maugham, and this society did not seem to most Indians as one worth dying for. Near Singapore there was a very luxurious country club with a much sought-after swimming pool. In the six months before the war, it became known in Singapore that the wives of the planters and of local white businessmen had objected to the swimming pool being used by Indian officers. British officers from the same regiments were eagerly invited, solicitously treated, and competed for assiduously. The Indians were dismayed when this action of the club was officially condoned: at least no protest against it was made from the Government or from the military command. This insult, casually offered by the Tanglin Club, did more than many other graver measures to undermine the British Empire in Asia. A dispassionate observer, surveying what was done, must have decided that the English, and especially their wives, were mad. It is not politic to insult a man mortally who is about to defend you.
The Japanese attempts at subverting the loyalty of the prisoners had as their background this resentment at the arrogance of the white society of Malaya. In spite of this preparation of the soil, the first attempts of Fujiwara and of Mohan Singh to set up the Indian National Army, which was inaugurated at Singapore on 12 February 1942, had only limited success. True, they had much to offer the Indian captives – immediate freedom, good wages, the resumption of their military careers, an apparently bright political prospect, exemption from the dreadful forced labour squads, for which Japanese prison camps soon became notorious. Yet the response was poor and Mohan Singh proved anything but an obedient tool. He laid down conditions that the Japanese were unwilling to accept; he stated plainly that if the Japanese aimed at replacing the British in India, they would, after a short time, have to face the aroused opposition of Indian nationalism. In December 1942 Mohan Singh resigned from his position and was arrested by the Japanese, and the first stage of the Japanese experiment at collaboration with Indian nationalism was over.
The Japanese had been handicapped in their efforts because of a deep-seated contempt which they had for prisoners of war, and, still more, for prisoners who were willing to be untrue to their oath of service. Nothing struck them as so contemptible as disloyalty, and they were unable to hide this. Simple-mindedly they judged their prisoners by the same exacting standards which they would have applied to their own people. This made them maladroit in the project of raising an army out of defaulters and deserters.
The decision was, however, taken to persevere in this venture. It was resolved to see whether better results could be obtained from enlisting a politician of standing to head the movement, instead of working exclusively through military men. Subhas Bose, whose mission in Germany had been favourably reported on by the Japanese Military Attaché there, seemed to be well qualified for this role.
Bose, on returning to Asia, threw himself energetically into organizing the Indian movement, and, in a short time, he gave it a life of its own, irrespective of the intentions of its Japanese sponsors. Bose was a different type from the sycophants and commercial adventurers who were usually available to support the Japanese enterprises. The qualities of action he had once displayed as Mayor of Calcutta were now directed to the preparation of a Government-in-Exile, which should be ready to replace the existing Government of India. On 21 October 1943 the Provisional Government of Free India (Azad Hind) was set up by the Japanese in Singapore and two days later Bose became its head. He bled the Indian businessmen white for funds for his enterprise, being given by the Japanese the power to levy taxes on them, and having acquired in the service of Congress the right combination of contempt for millionaires and of businesslike respect for money. Bose worked under the great handicap that adequate human material for forming a provisional administration was absent. In spite of this, the sketchy organization of Azad Hind was set up.
Though Bose, between June and October, had transformed the position of the Indians in South-East Asia, and had built them into one of the forces which had to be taken account of, yet he had not succeeded in getting Japan to the point of recognizing a full-fledged Government-in-Exile. The most that he gained was an invitation to take part as an observer, along with the puppet Governments of the Japanese system, in the Greater East Asia Conference in November 1943, although his status was certainly inflated by the oratory of those present; Japan also declared its readiness to hand over the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean to Bose’s administration. But as his organization grew in effective power, the relation with local Japanese officials deteriorated. All the vexations which Ba Maw had had to endure, also faced Subhas Bose. The Japanese Army was aware of the nuisance which an opinionated exiled government could make, and, deeply suspicious, was anxious to thwart it. However, the Japanese commanders agreed to test out what effect the Indians could bring upon a battle; and Bose glowed at the opportunity.
In the meanwhile the Japanese had made their plans for an offensive from Burma which was to be directed against India. Their position was gradually growing dangerous. Large forces were being prepared against them – potentially fourteen divisions from China in the north, three or possibly six divisions from India in the west. In the spring the Japanese in Burma were reinforced, and the decision was made. Basically, the Japanese attack on India was intended to forestall an ultimate offensive against themselves by striking at once and dispersing the gathering British force. The conception was sound, if somewhat optimistic. The Japanese threw into disorder the aggressive plans on the British side.
First the Japanese hoped to overrun the British in Arakan, and then to advance into India, taking in the Assamese towns of Imphal and Kohima. From there they would move into Bengal, though probably they intended no larger action which would have taken them beyond that province. They affected, however, to fall in with Bose’s plans for the general invasion of India, as they made stirring material for propaganda. In March 1944 they began their attack and crossed the Indian frontier. The Japanese Army employed three divisions.
Bose was determined that they should be accompanied by regiments of the Indian National Army. His Provisional Government had been transferred to Burma in January 1944. He is described by Ba Maw at the time as a ‘bold, khaki-clad figure, carrying with him everywhere the aura of his vast, fabulous country’. In what followed, Bose’s sense of reality, his strong point compared with the Indian leaders on the British side of the dividing line, deserted him. He proclaimed the slogan ‘Chalo Delhi’. (’On to Delhi’). Its Red Fort, the ancient citadel built by Shah Jahan, hypnotized him, and its occupation became an obsession. In his elation, he foresaw himself sweeping on, made master of the country by a popular upsurge; able, with the strength which this would bring him, to dictate terms to the surrendering British, and to ensure that the Japanese did not misuse their victory, or ride roughshod over the country. He calculated that a Japanese invasion of India would create a very divided feeling among Indians, and might even, the reputation of Japan being what it was, bring a mass of them to the side of the British; but the appearance on Indian soil of an Indian army of liberation would have the most rousing effect all over the country. The world would hear for the first time of the Indian National Army, and thousands of Indians would surge to it. It is strange to find a politician as practical as Bose nursing such illusions. The conversations at this time between Bose and his captains in the Indian National Army, the records of which have survived, are the proofs of his misconception.
The Japanese took a cooler view of his prospects. They wanted to divide the INA (Indian National Army) up into units of 250 men, who would act as liaison troops, guides and spies, and who would each be attached to a Japanese force. In the end a compromise was arrived at. The IN A had three organized divisions in the expedition, each of two thousand men. The remainder moved as auxiliaries. It became known that the Japanese Army had reserved for itself the right of gaining the first victory on Indian soil, and looked forward to offering Imphal as a birthday present to the Emperor, which would be the more welcome because the war was going badly on other fronts.
The Army against which it moved, the Fourteenth Army, was like British armies in the Middle East, a joint Anglo-Indian one. Battalions were either British, Indian or Gurkha, but the battalions were mixed up, and the brigade, and still more the division, were heterogeneous. Throughout the war, there was general good feeling and cooperation between the British and Indians. Whatever the grievances, they did not show themselves on the battlefield. This Army, by the reorganization of command which took place in 1943, had passed under the supreme direction of Lord Louis Mountbatten, Commander-in-Chief in South-East Asia, with the ultimate command post at Colombo.
The Army which was about to receive its first campaigning experience represented, at least in part, a new kind of India in arms. Its old pre-war armies had been drawn from a relatively few districts and, among Hindus, from a few chosen castes. Now, under wartime necessity, the Army had very much widened its intake of recruits: and with surprising results. For example, Madrasis, who had formed an important part of the armies of Lord Wellesley at the Battle of Assaye, had not been recruited for many years. Now they were offered employment, and the Madrasis celebrated their readmission by supplying the most decorated Air Force pilots that came from any region of India.
The Army undoubtedly gained from opening its ranks; and in so doing the Government met a long-standing grievance of the people. The economic benefits of supplying troops were very considerable, and these accounted in part for the prosperity of such regions as the Punjab. It had seemed unjust to favour some parts of the country and to withhold benefits from the others. The lot was cast by a theory, largely arbitrary and false, that some of the people were naturally martial, others not; in fact the distinction dated from the Indian Mutiny, and it operated chiefly on the principle of rewarding the classes which had not joined the Mutiny and of discriminating against those which had. At last the Army shook itself free from baleful memories, and thereafter it recruited itself on a more national basis.
This new Army began to reflect the new interests of India. Whereas the old Army had been entirely non-political, the new entries inevitably brought in with them something of their political interests. The attempt to debar contacts with political leaders had to be given up: the brightest of the recruits, especially for the officer corps, were the most political: the pride in being above politics had to give way. These new recruits thought it unnatural and absurd to volunteer their lives for use in a war in which they had no say. The mess rooms became forums where every aspect of the world and of government action was under constant scrutiny. This was reflected in the concern of the Government in seeing that the reading rooms of the Army were well stocked with propaganda. The older generation of thoroughly professional Army officers and of Indian NCOs looked on disapprovingly, but they could do nothing to stem this constant debate. Increasingly the Government was compelled to open the barrack-room gates, so the Army became less cloistered. In these months of the war, the old life of India was talked away in the heroic and mock bravura of undergraduate politics conducted by an Army of civilians in uniform.
In the campaign which was about to begin, many of the regular Indian officers, whose admission to the Army had been the great event in its history during the 1930s, were to be for the first time in action. Soldiers who afterwards became well-known, such as Ayub Khan, later to become President of Pakistan, were tested in this fighting.
About the British soldiers in this Army, the main fact was that they began the campaign by being war-weary. They had many of them been on duty for a long time, in an unhealthy climate. They were unsettled by the separation from their families. They were bored by inactivity. They, too, regarded themselves as true professional soldiers, but they complained – with some reason – that they were the ‘forgotten Army’: an Army which had lain in preparation too long and had not the bracing experience of coming into action. It did not take to the poisonous atmosphere of the country it was to fight in, to the jungles and the eerie silences, to the leeches and snakes: its medical services were inadequate, and, before the introduction of mepacrin, it was always decimated by malaria.
The Japanese advance became bogged down in the siege of Imphal. For over eight weeks, beginning on 8 March 1944, a terrible contest, perhaps the most primitive of the war with the exception of the struggle for the Pacific atolls, took place for the possession of the city: there was resolute hand-to-hand fighting.
At the beginning of the siege, the Japanese, at the start of their offensive, looked very likely to succeed. But the expedition was doomed when the Japanese found it impossible, because of the nature of the country and the blockage of supply routes from the air, to reinforce it with men and materials to overcome the defence. For days the Japanese were convinced that a final effort by them would deliver the city into their hands: but always they were disappointed. They beat off British and Indian sorties, but their own attacks were repulsed. There was great carnage, the more intense because the Japanese had to be killed at their posts, in the bunkers and wherever they had found cover. A similar struggle took place a little to the north of Imphal for Kohima, where a gigantic battle was waged over the possession of a tennis-court in the garden of the Commissioner’s house.
A tactical innovation which deprived the Japanese of one of their habitual means of securing advantage was made during the campaign. In their drive through Malaya and Burma two years before, they had, using their superior mobility, habitually surrounded British forces; and, when this took place, the British habitually withdrew. This time the British did not retreat; and, though surrounded, relied on being supplied by air. An elaborate organization of the RAF flew in large amounts of food and ammunition. Without this airlift Imphal would have fallen. This change in tactics, which was due to the improved strength of the RAF in the area, changed the situation. The Japanese plans went awry when the troops, whom they thought they had trapped, stayed to fight it out instead of retiring in disorder. They misjudged profoundly the quality of the troops they opposed. They had formed so low an opinion of the British in the Malayan fighting that this betrayed them; the extent to which British troops under British command were underrated turned out to be one of their principal assets.
Another important, significant, hopeful change was that, for the first time in the war the Japanese began to surrender. Not in large numbers: the majority were still faithful to the idea that defeated Japanese are killed or commit suicide. But that some at least, when wounded, depressed, cut off and cold, acted as other soldiers similarly placed were accustomed to do, was a cheering fact.
The action took place in the country of the Nagas. Some spectacular achievements brought the Naga tribesmen into the light of world publicity. Much more has happened since to these attractive people. Their activities in Intelligence, and as porters, played an unexpected part. A monument erected on the battlefield recalls how two Nagas, disguised as mess servants, stole the Japanese plans of their future lines of advance, passed these to the British, and enabled them to be frustrated.
One Japanese newspaper reporter wrote: ‘These fierce battles are comparable with Verdun in the last war.’ Finally, logistics were decisive. There was an utter failure of communications, and the Japanese Air Force was too weak to emulate the British in air transport. The Japanese could bring in neither rice, nor medical supplies, nor essential equipment. The Japanese, who always travelled light, had relied on capturing stores and living on stocks of rice which they might seize; but in this they had failed. The Japanese troop commander issued the following order: ‘A decisive battle is the only battle known to a Japanese soldier, or fitting to the Japanese spirit, but now other methods may have to be adopted.’ By this he meant a strategic withdrawal. On 4 July the Japanese lifted the siege, and, on their way back, their retreat became a disaster.
They began the campaign with an army of 85,000 men; in it they lost 53,000. British and Indian casualties amounted to 16,700. The result of the campaign was a terrible, wasteful, ignominious defeat. It was one of the worst disasters that the Japanese Army suffered in the whole war; comparable in disgrace, if not in magnitude, to that of the Japanese Navy at the Battle of Midway Island. Primarily, when all due allowance had been made for the performance of the Fourteenth Army, it had been due to ineffective staff work by an Army which was not familiar with campaigning in the tropics. It must be remembered that the war in Malaya had been before this the only large-scale operation of this kind which the Japanese Army had fought, and, on balance, its training was still for temperate climates. The higher officers would not cooperate with one another. Perhaps because of this, the Japanese G H Q demanded a rigid obedience to orders and thus checked initiative from the officers in the field, which could often have turned defeat into victory. Another cause of the rout was the numerical weakness of the Japanese Army Air Force.
But that the Japanese soldiers had fought like tigers cannot be denied. A quotation may be given from the book on the campaign by Colonel Barker entitled The March on Delhi:
Recruits in the Japanese Army were subjected to an intense three-month course of indoctrination which changed them into fanatics, ready to die for their Emperor, their country and the honour of their regiments. The slogan ‘Our highest hope is to die for the Emperor’ was chanted until it became a positive obsession. The indoctrination of their families was not forgotten either; soon after the new recruit was called up, his relatives received a letter from his commanding officer asking them to be careful not to block his road to an honourable death. The effectiveness of the propaganda may be judged from the fact that there were cases of wives killing their children and committing suicide so that their husbands would not be reluctant to die. Many officers and men even had their funeral rites performed before leaving for the front to show their intention of dying for their country…∗
Yet, impressive as their military behaviour was, it was undoubtedly an aberration. There was madness in it, as well as remarkable self-discipline. For, as the war dragged on to its close, and as the Japanese position grew steadily worse, so did the Japanese military behaviour become more ferocious. Its extreme cult of death was a new thing of this century, as least in the form which it took at the time. Early in this century, the Russo-Japanese War had not been particularly savage. And the new sternness was only to be found in the Japanese overseas. As long as they were in the homeland, they did not seem to be possessed, as were the troops in Burma, in the Philippines and in China. It was as if the Japanese Army, once it had had battle experience, succeeded in passing its furor Japonicus to all the reinforcements which came to it from Japan. The madness came out in some of the battle orders which were captured:
You men have got to be fully in the picture as to what the present position is. Regarding death as something lighter than a feather you men must tackle the task of capturing Imphal. You must accept that the division will be almost annihilated. I have confidence in your courage but should any delinquency occur, I shall take the necessary action. In order to keep the honour of his unit bright, a commander may have to use his sword as a weapon of punishment, shameful though it is to have to shed one’s own soldiers’ blood on the battlefield.†
Some of the men who were the victims of this military discipline, some of the officers who enforced it, are now living quietly in Japan, and they must look back on their wartime experience with surprise and almost with disbelief.
The news of the defeat on 4 July arrived in Tokyo at the same time as the news of the loss of Paris by Germany. It was hard to say which of them faced the blacker prospects, Germany or Japan. The disaster increased the bad relations between the Army and the Navy: this came, said the Navy, of the Army ‘taking walks’ in Asia, and entering on unnecessary adventures instead of concentrating on the problems of the defence of the homeland.
The adventures were nearly at an end. The Army would be needed in the Japanese islands. This campaign was nearly the finish of the Japanese in Burma. For a time they were saved from effective pursuit by the monsoon, which put an end to all war. But when the monsoon ended, the Fourteenth Army moved forward. The offensive had already been joined by a bitterly fought advance of Americans and American-trained Chinese troops (who had fallen back on India in 1942) led by General Stilwell; a thrust from Arakan for which the prelude was the taking of Akyab from the sea; and by four Chinese divisions reluctantly introduced by Chiang Kai-shek from Yunnan. This time the offensive progressed. The Allies had clear air supremacy, and this was decisive, particularly because it enabled them to keep their armies fully supplied. The Japanese had stirred up opposition from all corners of the world; they must however have felt somewhat surprised at finding among their pursuers divisions of West African and East African troops. They had been raised by the British, and the war in Burma in tropical conditions offered them appropriate employment. That the African people had no quarrel with Japan, that Japan had no significance to them except as the exporter of textiles which were prized by them, did not seem to cause any comment.
As the British slowly reoccupied Burma, they felt the imperial itch reviving. An Imperial Army in advance bred different sentiments from an Imperial Army in retreat. ‘By English bones the English flag is stayed.’ This old line of poetry took on a new meaning.
On 2 May 1945 the Japanese lost Rangoon to the British forces. It fell actually to the advance from Akyab, which beat by a few hours the advance from the north. The Japanese soldiers continued to fight savagely, but they were the victims of the bad strategy of their generals. Soon all Burma was clear. The end was made more certain because most of the Burmese Army, which had been raised and trained by the Japanese, revolted and changed sides at a critical moment.
In the course of this campaign, there had taken place a sharp revision of the complacency of the Japanese about the demerits of the British soldier. Soon after the start of the war, the Japanese had met with such success, and the morale of the white troops they had encountered had been so low that they had supposed that the prestige the British had enjoyed during the previous century had been the result of a confidence trick. Caution towards the British was succeeded by extreme scorn. They could not have held them in lower esteem, and this probably accounted for their over-confidence in the Kohima operations, which otherwise appeared light-headed. They preferred to have British troops to deal with rather than Indian, since, in the new reckoning of the Japanese Army, white troops were less tenacious than Asian troops. In the vicissitudes of this campaign, however, they learnt, very expensively, that they had made a wrong assessment. The British troops put on their laurels again, and their recent campaign gave the Japanese new respect for their adversary.
In the battle, the Indian National Army had proved useless. In nearly all the fighting, it had disgraced itself. Its largest losses were from desertion. Its heart was not in combat with the Government to which it had formerly owed allegiance. Its performance had a depressing effect on the hopes of seeing the war turn into an Asian defensive operation against the western counter-attack. Subhas Chandra Bose sustained himself in his disappointment, and against the contempt which the Japanese military did not bother to hide, by putting out an account of near-treachery by the Japanese. Imphal, according to him, had been helpless before the Indo-Japanese force, but the Japanese had held back the Indian advance which would have taken it. They were unwilling that the Indians should have the great prize of the campaign; they wished to present Imphal as a Japanese conquest to the Emperor on his birthday. An Indian governor had been ready to take possession, but the Indian troops were forestalled from inducting him.
The tale was too inaccurate to be effective. Subhas Bose lost nearly all his magical appeal. In despair, he turned away from his concern with the Indian National Army to the political regimentation of the million Indians living in South-East Asia. But his fortunes sank with those of the Japanese. When these were finally overwhelmed, and had surrendered, he prevailed on a local officer to let him try to escape by air to Russia. It was a move consonant with his daring and his obstinate opportunism. He foresaw that relations between the West and Russia would be bad, and hoped that Moscow would see the opportunity of letting him set up in Russia his provisional Government of India. But the aeroplane in which he was flying crashed on take-off from Taipei Airfield in Formosa, on 18 August 1945, and Bose ended his melodramatic life. In spite of his failure, he had, by his daring, so much caught the imagination of the Indians who had been in touch with him, that they refused to believe that he had really been killed. The rumour spread that he had gone underground and had become a Sadhu (there is some evidence that some of the defeated rebels did this in 1858 after the failure of the Indian Mutiny), and that he would emerge again to lead a triumphant rising against the British. The legend was firmly believed in by his brother, Sarat Chandra Bose, a leading, and apparently hard-headed, Congressman of Bengal.
Bose’s idea of corrupting the Indian Army, and of leading it back in triumph against the British in Delhi, though it turned out to be a fiasco, could have been a formidable threat to Britain. Its concept was sound: it was fortunate for Britain that the morale of the INA was such as to make the plan unworkable. For months the news of the INA caused very deep anxiety among the Army Staff and the informed civilians in Delhi, and their failure in action was received with intense relief. The enterprise had been kept reasonably secret from the public in India. It was not entirely unknown, for the information about it was contained in the monitoring report which had a fairly wide circulation; moreover, Bose’s radio was listened to fairly extensively. But the public was surprised when it learned later from the press how wide the conspiracy had been.
Of 70,000 Indians who had been captives, over half resisted all the lures to serve either Japan direct or else rebel India. They had nothing very much to induce them to remain loyal beyond their oath of service and their regimental pride. These ties held; and their strength was an important factor in determining the history of the war in Asia. For this the main credit goes to the regimental commanders of the previous two or three generations who, by and large, were trusted by their men to stand up for their interests, for fair treatment, and for an honourable status. These men built up the ties which between 1942 and 1945 bore the great strain.
This left the problem of what to do with the soldiers who had been less loyal. Most of those who had enlisted in the INA had passed into British hands, and for the second time had become prisoners of war. Technically they were all of them guilty of an internationally agreed crime of the darkest nature. For desertion, treason, rebellion and levying war against the King, a harsh penalty was likely to be exacted. Actually, no drumhead court-martials were held on any of the prisoners upon capture. They were kept in captivity, and what to do about them became a political case which was hotly debated.
It was not decided until the war ended. The Congress leaders, on coming out of their own wartime captivity, saw in it an ideal means of attacking the Government. The INA were presented as the true heroes of the Indian nation, and, if harshly dealt with, would become revered martyrs. The British were impressed by this danger. They were inclined to act in the spirit of Winston Churchill, who advising clemency on another occasion, had said: ‘The grass grows quickly over the battlefield. Over the scaffold, never.’ They decided to release the undistinguished mass of the prisoners. But they hesitated at the ring-leaders, and those who, in the course of the campaign, had been guilty of war crimes, or had tortured their former comrades because these had stood firm against the allurements of the Japanese. They had to keep it in mind that those who felt most bitterly against the Indian National Army were the officers and men of the Indian Army who had remained loyal. For the sake of the morale of this Army, it was scarcely possible to release without some punishment at least the more spectacular of the prisoners. Therefore, after much indecision, and much discussion which became involved with the renewed negotiations between the Government and Congress, the decision was made to limit prosecution to a few cases, ultimately restricted to three.
The trials were held in the Red Fort of Delhi in 1946. A more peculiarly inept setting could not have been chosen. The Red Fort had become, in Indian national mythology, the shrine of Indian national hopes. It had been built as a citadel and palace by the Moghul Emperors, and symbolized the time before the British conquest, when all that Britain meant had been individual merchants coming to beg for patronage from the great ones of India. The trials gave so much publicity to the Congress lawyers, who were able to defend the prisoners, and to Jawaharhal Nehru who, having once been a barrister, could appear before the courts, that the Government was glad to call them off quickly. It was content with the simple dismissal from further service of the great majority of officers and men. Such dismissal was punishment in itself, since service in the Army brought with it economic privilege; and, by confiscating this advantage from the disaffected, it was thought that the loyal part of the Indian Army would be at ease.
Burma had been freed as the result of a sustained thrust of the British and the Americans against the Japanese Army, which had worn itself out by the offensive at Imphal and Kohima. From recovered Burma, the victors prepared to move afresh. Singapore and Malaya were the next targets: and Japan had there, and elsewhere in South-East Asia, a very large Army, as yet unscathed, its morale untouched by Allied propaganda, with vast supplies of arms and ammunition. The prospect which this opened up, and the length of time which would be taken in ejecting Japan from one well-defended post to another, caused a great upsurge of criticism of British strategy. Had the drive on Burma, even though it was ultimately successful, really been justified? Were there not better ways of using British power than in following the withdrawal of Japan? Could Britain, using its recovered naval supremacy, not strike at some vital ports, less protected?
There is a notable passage in Tolstoy’s War and Peace describing men’s behaviour on the battlefield. When he is stricken on the field of Austerlitz, Prince Andrei sees two opposing men, French and Russian, both seizing hold of a ramrod, and struggling for its possession. Each would have done better to release his hold of it, and to free himself to use his musket. But they were too much hypnotized by the struggle to let go. So they continued to tussle. In the circumstances of the war in Asia, it was asked whether the British and Japanese really did any good for themselves, or brought the war nearer to an end, by remaining locked in conflict.
In fact, the decisive fighting was going on in the Pacific. Britain was denied a role in this: it could supply no adequate force, and the American commanders were under pressure to distance themselves from allies who put their cause in such an imperialist colour. Keeping the British at arm’s length was held to improve the American image with the national parties of South Asia. The future of that part of the world was held to lie with them.