The Raj at War

by Yasmin Khan

  8

  An Empire Exposed

  IN FEBRUARY 1942 George Orwell reflected on ‘ten of the blackest weeks in our national and imperial history’. It is difficult to over-exaggerate how extensively the attack on Pearl Harbor by Japan and the American declaration of war rebounded in the British Empire, and how rapidly and dramatically it transformed India. In swift, uncompromising succession the Japanese toppled the British imperial presence across the arc of South-East Asia, from Hong Kong and Singapore to Burma and the Andaman Islands. ‘With the Japanese army in the Indian Ocean and the German armies in the Middle East, India becomes the centre of the war,’ Orwell continued, ‘it is hardly an exaggeration to say, the centre of the world. For a long time to come, possibly for years, it may have to act as a supply base from which men and munitions can be poured out in two directions, east and west.’1

  An extensive interconnected imperial world was now cut in two, as the eastern half of the British Empire fell under Japanese rule. The threat of invasion hovered over India for the next four months and the impact on the Indian home front was explosive. In the short term it undermined faith in the Raj’s continued existence as many felt for a short, albeit acute, moment that the end of the empire had come and that the country was about to fall to the Japanese. In the long term, and more significantly as it turned out, the eastward shift of the war brought about a step-change in wartime production, as the mounting pressure to arm, equip and supply soldiers demanded a rapid milking of every available resource. The war was no longer in far-distant Europe. It had come right to the borders, forests and beaches of the state. It is no coincidence that 1942 would be a year of extraordinary dislocation and unrest in India.

  The Japanese struck in a rapid series of manoeuvres. Landing on the northern coast of Malaya, and then pushing southward down the Malayan peninsula, they swept aside the hastily assembled defence forces. Worse still, the Japanese seemed to command not only the land but also the seas; the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse, destroyed by Japanese aircraft in the Gulf of Siam, was both strategically and symbolically conclusive. As the new year approached Britain’s grip on the East crumbled. Japan invaded Burma in December, Hong Kong had surrendered to them by Christmas and Malaya was in Japanese hands by 27 January. Britain had underestimated its rival in East Asia, a fact which was brought home most dramatically by the fall of Singapore, captured with shocking and brutal swiftness on 15 February 1942. The government was prepared for attacks, if not invasion, and believed a major attack on the east of India was likely. By mid-February the military was planning for the possibility of ‘a major landing operation in Bengal or Orissa in conjunction with a campaign to secure the whole of Burma’. The Bengal Famine Inquiry Report would later describe how Bengalis boarded up their shops and vacated their houses, and how Calcutta witnessed a flow of people out of the city in the ‘universal expectation’ of an invasion of the province. The public mood in Bengal was ‘extremely uncertain’, with people unsure if Bengal would be in the possession of the Japanese within months.2

  The army generals held their breath: ‘The Japanese are in a position to carry out naval bombardment, submarine and air attack against the coasts of India now. This attack may extend as far inland as Digboi and Jamshedpur’, surmised one military report.3They planned a demolition policy in case of invasion: all power stations would cease production, all utilities from power stations to oil refineries would be destroyed, wireless, cable and telegraph stations would be disabled and the ports of Calcutta and Chittagong dynamited. All river craft were to be collected and sunk or broken up, rolling stock and railway stock to be removed. Middle-class civilians suddenly were confronted by newspaper advertisements promising life insurance in case of death by air raid (‘Civilian lives fully insured’, the Hindustan Insurance Society promised), recruitment posters for the military and air force, advice on how to prepare first-aid kits and advertisements for air raid shelters and ARP equipment from hoses and pickaxes to shovels and stirrup-pumps. ‘Be Prepared’, one ARP publicity notice warned: ‘Is your trench or refuge room ready? In the event of an Air Raid Take Shelter.’ Advertisements called for blood donors, there was a campaign against the wastage of paper and another to dissuade civilian passengers from using the railways, accompanied by large V for Victory emblems. ‘Travel only when you must’, ordered the notices. ‘National needs must come first!’

  * * *

  The first of numerous hammer blows soon fell on the peasants of Bengal. The shorthand descriptions used, ‘denial policy’ or even ‘scorched earth’, do little justice to the realities of what this intervention meant for Bengali cultivators or fishermen. In Soviet Russia, retreating troops had been ordered to burn stores or supplies to prevent their use by the advancing enemy armies, and a similar, although not identical, tactic was decided upon by the War Office should eastern India and Burma fall to the Japanese. The military planners were mindful of how Singapore’s resources had fallen into the lap of the enemy but took little note of the fragility of the Bengali economy and ecosystem. The demolition policy was planned for Assam, Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, but, ultimately, Bengal’s experience of denial was the most extensive and pernicious. Why this scorched earth policy was initiated in late 1941 before signs of a definite Japanese invasion began is unclear, as is the decision to focus on two of the most prized essentials necessary to the life of the subsistence cultivators in East India – namely, rice stocks and boats. By contrast, large privately owned industrial plants escaped demolition or dismantling.4

  ‘To deprive the people in East Bengal of their boats is like cutting off a vital limb’, Gandhi declared in 1942, intuitively understanding the ways in which for East Bengalis their landscape and livelihoods interlocked.5 In the densely populated Bengali delta, where richly fertile alluvial land was criss-crossed by waterways, boats were the principal source of transport for people and the goods that they produced. Fishermen relied on river craft to make their living but agriculturalists also relied on the waterways as the chief way for their produce to be moved on and sold. Rivers and their tributaries stretched across the delta like vital capillaries.

  By the close of March 1942 the decision had been taken by the Governor of Bengal (under the pressure of military authorities who would have liked to see the policy more fully extended) to initiate the removal or destruction of boats in southern Bengal, below a line stretching from Chandpur to Kharagpur. Boats that could carry ten or more people were targeted and by the end of 1942, more than 20,000 of these country craft had been sunk, burned, requisitioned for military use or taken to ‘reception’ stations where many decayed and fell into disrepair. Some 20,000 other craft may have been hidden, while some owners chose to burn or sink their own boats rather than hand them over to government agents. At every stage the government was aware of the implications of this policy on cultivators. Gandhi sent his dedicated follower, Mira Behn, the British daughter of a naval rear-admiral – she had been following Gandhi since the 1920s – to report on the conditions along the coastal waterways of Orissa. She wrote back that the villagers were ‘in despair … even for answering the calls of nature it is necessary to go in a boat’.6 The Governor soon reported on the difficulties caused to local people once boats had been seized from fifty miles of coastline: trade in goods such as mustard oil and kerosene had ‘virtually ceased’, potters and craftsmen could not sell their wares onward downstream, fishermen could not set out their nets or sail out to the Bay of Bengal. In add-ition, the removal of carts and bicycles prevented even rudimentary land travel for some. ‘Many fishermen have lost their livelihood altogether’, Governor Herbert told Linlithgow, ‘at a time of year when they normally expect to make their main annual profit from the hilsa season.’7 On the other hand, rent-collectors soon had special dispensation and were issued permits so that they could move by boat. The pecking orders of the state were inscribed in wartime policy.

  Denial policies created another lethal policy step towards man-made f
amine. The causes of the later famine in 1943 are still controversial and the role of these denial policies is still disputed. The Famine Inquiry Commission later made a direct and unequivocal link between the lack of available boats and the starvation of some river folk: ‘the fishermen who had been deprived of their boats suffered severely during the famine. If it had been possible to provide them with boats from the reception stations they would have been less affected by the famine and the number of deaths amongst them would have been smaller.’8 As one official, Alok Jha, who was working as an ICS officer in the district of Munshiganj in the heart of the river delta, recalled in his memoir:

  I hardly ever saw a large balam boat on the Padma or Meghna during my entire stay in Munshiganj in 1942–4 … No argument to the contrary will shake from me the conviction that it was this two pronged policy of denial – denial of rice and paddy by forcible seizure, destruction and removal; denial of movement of supplies by forcible destruction of boats and indigenous road transport – that caused the famine in Munshiganj.9

  To many in Bengal it appeared that war was bringing devastation with or without a new foreign occupier, and that the incursion of an occupying force could not be more destructive than the defensive actions already being taken.

  The Japanese forces came closest to India in April 1942 when Japan raided Colombo and Trincomalee in Ceylon on 5 April, aiming at the Eastern Fleet stationed there and causing damage to the port and the shipping supply route. By this point, in readiness for attack, Churchill had placed Ceylon under direct military control; the civil government, the Governor and Whitehall’s Secretary of State for the Colonies were all put under military command. Forces including British and Australian brigades, Indian and East African divisions and aircraft carriers, cruisers and destroyers had all rushed to Ceylon, at the southern tip of the subcontinent.10 India’s eastern harbours were being bombed from the air and the Bay of Bengal was encircled by Japanese ships, cutting the vital links that sustained shipping and severing ties to South-East Asia. On 6 April Cocanada and Vizagapatam were bombed and along the eastern coast twenty-three merchant ships were destroyed. Corpses were washed up on Indian beaches and the widespread belief, both among the civilian populations and the military, was that Madras would be next. Troops, previously all moving westward towards the war in North Africa and the Mediterranean (quarter of a million had already been sent out of India), were now pulled back eastwards towards India.

  India’s defences were vulnerable. In late March and early April 1942, for a few critical weeks, it looked as though India would suffer an incursion by the Japanese. ‘We passed full days and some anxious nights when scares of invasion called us from our beds’, remembered the British General Bill Slim, then stationed in Calcutta. ‘We know now that the Japanese never seriously contemplated a seaborne invasion of India, but at the time it loomed constantly over us.’11 By 1942, Gandhi, according to the senior Congressman Abdul Kalam Azad, ‘inclined more and more to the view that the Allies could not win the war’.12 As far away as Bombay, some families decided to evacuate and the government advised people to stockpile enough food for a week. The American Consulate advised American civilians to move to the west of the country. The Government of India and a number of provincial governments cancelled their annual retreat north to the cooler climes of Simla for the summer months and ordered the ICS to stay in Delhi and to forgo leave. Newspapers carried long lists of names of European evacuees from Rangoon and Singapore, about whom more information was requested.

  Assaults further inland were not considered a serious possibility, as the Japanese supply lines would have been over-extended and the number of troops within India was already enough to provide significant resistance. Despite this, some officials panicked or gave voice to their own alarmist fears, sometimes in an attempt to galvanise the recalcitrant population into action. The Director of Civil Defence in the United Provinces even suggested in a public speech that inland towns such as Benares and Allahabad could face aerial attack.13

  But the first crisis would not be in the south around Ceylon, as originally feared, but much further north in the inhospitable borderlands of Burma. The strategists had perhaps placed too much emphasis on sea power and underestimated the Japanese ability to wage war on land. The assumption that the Japanese would not be able to keep supply lines linked together over vast distances was proved wrong when two weak divisions of troops in Burma faced a Japanese onslaught.

  Burma was an abundant source of timber, rice and cash crops and had gem, metal and mineral mines. Culturally and socially, it was linked to India in a number of ways. The last complete census in 1931 had recorded just over a million Indians living in Burma, about half of whom had been born in India, and the two economies were entwined and interdependent, with exports flowing in both directions and labour migration and capital investment coming from India. Despite these links Burma was also surrounded by natural barriers, with no railways, no metalled roads and only three routes connecting it to India. It had scarcely been factored into the calculations of military strategists (with perhaps Wavell as one exception), and had its own peculiarities of history and governance that made it difficult to defend. Ruled as part of British India until 1937, it had recently become a separate colony administered by Burmese politicians under the direct control of Whitehall and, the system still in flux, fell outside the orders of New Delhi and was outside India Command, which was responsible for the protection of the rest of the subcontinent. As India Command tried to scramble ships and men back to India in early 1942, many of the Indian troops who had remained in India had had their units ‘milked’ and been deprived of officers and men for overseas service. The troops who were sent into Burma lacked training and equipment for jungle warfare, and had to mobilise rapidly and unexpectedly. ‘No trained soldiers were left in India, only tattered remnants who often needed time in hospital, and always needed rest, retraining, new equipment.’14 They were padded out with raw recruits of only four or five months’ service.

  Still, it took the Japanese from January to May to take the whole of Burma. It was a time of great indecision and anxiety among Burmese Indians, who sometimes hesitated before leaving, weighing up their options or listening to their managers who urged them to stay working in mines and plantations. At one point, 100,000 refugees were in the refugee camps at Mandalay, diverted from heading towards the escape route to India via Tamu. On 7 March Japanese troops marched on Rangoon and its defence was abandoned. On 29 March, the Japanese cut the Burma Road, the most important line of defence, which essentially meant the closure of access to China for the Allies. Once the Burma Road was cut and supply lines had been destroyed, it was clear that Burma would fall and the only option was retreat. On 12 May 1942 the monsoon burst, and as General Bill Slim recalled, ‘from then on the retreat was pure misery … on the last day of that nine-hundred-mile retreat I stood on a bank beside the road and watched the rearguard march into India. All of them, British, Indian and Gurkha, were gaunt and ragged as scarecrows.’15

  The chaotic retreat from Burma and the sufferings of refugees, especially those who left by foot over high northern passes, left indelible stains on the imperial reputation. For many people in the patchwork of complicated communities in Burma, people of Indian, British and Chinese descent, there had been difficult choices and painful journeys. Desperation cruelly showed up the differences between the wealthy and the very poor as bribes could not be paid, passages on the precious ships out of Rangoon could not be afforded, and cars and petrol could not be procured. At Magwe, Ramesh Benegal, an affluent Indian in Burma whose uncle was a tin mine manager, recalled, ‘The scene at the airport was chaotic. The Japanese advance had been unexpectedly swift, and they were now only a few miles away, within field gun range and of course within fighter aircraft range.’16 His mother and their eighty-year-old retainer and companion Madiman Datta managed to scramble onto a plane but the boys and men stayed behind. The poor did not have the resources to escape by plane, or to
hire porters or to carry extra supplies when escaping on foot. Some Indian tea-pickers, silver miners, road builders and rice-mill workers, who already scraped by on subsistence wages, tried to blend into the Burmese countryside but for others the only hope was return to villages in India, often many hundred of miles away. Managers’ attempts to keep labourers at work until the bitter end meant that many were discouraged from leaving at an earlier moment. Administrative confusion worsened their plight, and at one exit, local police charged a fee to let people onto their escape route.

  British and Indians moved up from Rangoon into central Burma, with refugees often making multi-stage journeys, drawing on friends and family where they could, planning a route from the fragments of information and rumours around them, then moving up into the daunting mountains above. On the road out to Manipur, on mountains 5,000 to 8,000 feet high, barely clad and barefooted refugees straggled and died. Benegal Dinker Rao, a twenty-four-year-old graduate, and his friend, Mainmath, working in government service in Rangoon, plotted their escape carefully and managed to get their families away to safety earlier in the year than many others. But even so they still spent days of hunger in a trench:

  plodding in torrential rain, we came to an abandoned cattle shelter with a half-torn thatch roof. We were too exhausted to walk any more. When we lay down in the slush, we realized that there was a half-bare woman and a naked child lying there moaning. But we were so tired that we fell asleep. When I woke up, I could not move because the child had its arms around my feet. To my horror, the child was dead. Both mother and child had smallpox. Somehow, God saved me from the contagion.17