by Rising Sun Victorious: An Alternate History of the Pacific War
The Muslim League, with a recent claim for their own country as part of the former empire, were more open to cooperation with the British, but were concerned about the threat of Hindu domination. Marxists such as M. N. Roy advocated strong allegiance to the cause of the United Nations, which included the Soviet Union. Mahatma Gandhi promoted a policy of passive noncooperation with the Japanese as the only moral policy. In short, there was little unity that could be “operationalized,” either to rally a patriotic defense against the Japanese invasion or to rise in support of it to gain independence.
An attempt to deal with the nationalist unrest that was undercutting the defense of India led to the British dispatch of the Cripps mission in March 1942. This brought Sir Stafford Cripps, the British politician who had been most sympathetic to at least the Congress Party's approach to Indian nationalism in prewar years, to make a deal. Between the nationalists' desire to use the moment of greatest peril for maximum political leverage and Churchill's and the Viceroy's unwillingness to make concessions at such a time, there was little common ground. Psychologically and politically, May 1942 found the British Indian Empire at the weakest point in its history. The Indian population had been impressed by Japanese power. The seemingly unstoppable advance made an impact on civilian and soldier alike, similar to what was seen in France in 1940 and in North Africa at the peak of Rommel's advance. As a result of this overall assessment that no resistance could be made to Japanese landings in the Calcutta area until at least June, the Admiralty believed emphasis should be on “denial measures” such as preparation for demolitions.22 The discussions of a wide-scale “scorched earth” policy further reduced morale. No word had yet leaked out to India of Japanese atrocities in Southeast Asia, or that non-Chinese were not to be spared the full weight of Japanese rule.
Map 11. Japanese Invasion and Occupation of India
Japan Invades India
The Japanese decided to make a rapid thrust outside of what had been seen as their strategic sphere of influence and defensive perimeter only a few months before. The strike at India would have to be approved by the highest levels of both services and the government. The strategic goal was now to block access to China not by controlling airfields, but by defeating the British Indian Empire. Implementing the Clausewitzian concept of center of gravity with a vengeance, they aimed to deprive the Allies of bases from which they could both resupply China and mount an offensive to retake Southeast Asia.
The eventual plan was a variation of Operation 21 proposed by Gen. Shojhiro Iida, 15th Army commander. He favored an offensive into the plain of the Ganges.23 The final compromise was marrying the go-now approach with the amphibious component of Operation 11. It subsumed the plan, already advanced for an Indian Ocean raid by Japan's carrier strike force supported by fast battleships and oilers. This force would remain committed to the action, but after their attack on Ceylon and the installations there, would pursue any surviving British forces before covering the arrival of two slower follow-up forces, one a large invasion convoy, the other of battleships and their escorts to provide shore bombardment and to prevail against any surviving British battleships that tried to challenge the invasion force (see Map 11).
The key to this Japanese change of strategy—the decision that the strategic reserve would have the greatest value if committed against India rather than elsewhere—was improved intelligence. Japanese intelligence regarding their British opponents had been weak before the war, until the capture of French Indochina gave them a base.24 Then aerial reconnaissance over Malaya had shown them how weak the British position was. The Japanese thus came late to grasp the fact that for a numerically weaker attacker, intelligence was key, with its ability to locate the transitory advantages that an opportunistic planning process and a rapid deployment capability might exploit.
Before the war the Japanese had not achieved good intelligence coverage of the subcontinent. They greatly overestimated the size of the forces in India well into 1942, believing there were a half-million men in thirty divisions (seven British, twenty-three Indian).25 However, they may have had a general idea that the newer, high-numbered Indian army divisions were raw and insufficiently trained with the cadre of prewar officers and NCOs stretched very thin indeed. The Indian army had never planned for massive expansion, and its recruiting, training, and induction were still very much dependent on “handcrafting” by regimental officers and NCOs. Nor was there an effective program in place to bring training lessons from other fronts home to those units still forming in India.
But there were other intelligence sources that were able to convince the Japanese that a strike directly at India would work as required: the Germans, for instance. German-Japanese cooperation had remained largely illusory, but intelligence was one area where the potential payoff was the highest, when disruption to British secure cable communications through the Middle East forced a greater reliance on longer routes or, more frequently, radio messages. The Germans proved able to intercept and decode long-haul communications between India and Britain, which were then passed to the Japanese in a degree of inter-Axis cooperation that had not been previously achieved.
From these reports, the Japanese extrapolated the weakness of the forces defending India—key information, to be sure— and more important, the sense of confusion and defeatism among the British. It told them that a Japanese offensive move would be hindered more by their own limitations than the resistance of the British Indian Empire. It was clear that this was an area where the enemy was weakest in spirit—that neither Englishmen in London or Delhi nor the majority of Indians were willing to sacrifice to defeat the Japanese because of the decline in the perceived legitimacy of British imperial rule, which undercut any material advantages the British might have had.
To take advantage of this transitory crisis—before Churchill was able to provide top-down leadership or the Indian army could address the problem of the defense of India in an effective way—meant striking before the monsoon season began in mid-May.
The first stage of the operation was opened in mid-March, with the invasion of the Andaman Islands (evacuated by their limited British garrison) as the Japanese navy entered the Indian Ocean in earnest. In the first two weeks, Vice Adm. Chuichi Nagumo's 1st Air Fleet operations failed to sink the British battle fleet, which retired out of range, but sank the carrier Hermes, the cruisers Dorsetshire and Cornwall, and large numbers of smaller warships and merchant ships throughout the Indian Ocean. Once the British air and naval threat had been reduced, the Japanese inflicted heavy damage to the port at Trincomalee, including the tank farm and the dockyard. The carriers then ranged northward and inflicted the same treatment against Bengal, striking airfields and military installations around Calcutta and Chittagong. This time, however, the port installations were not hit.
So far, this was consistent with the original plan for an Indian Ocean raid, although a few weeks in advance of it. But among the effects of concentrating Japan's carrier strength was preventing long-range reconnaissance aircraft from shadowing the troop convoy and the battle squadron as they entered the Indian Ocean under radio silence. The British, however, through U.S.-supplied decryptions and other intelligence sources, soon realized that this was not simply a carrier raid. But whether Ceylon or India would be the target remained uncertain. Ceylon nevertheless received most of the reinforcements.
Thus it came as a surprise when, in early April, the Japanese seaborne invasion of India commenced with the main thrust, utilizing two divisions, coming ashore southwest of Calcutta at Balasore in the state of Orissa. Other, smaller forces came ashore between Chittagong and the right flank of the beachhead. It was a small invasion, the logistics improvised and run on a shoestring even by Japanese standards. It was weeks before the first follow-up divisions were able to come ashore.
But while the Japanese were at risk from an immediate counterattack, they were strong enough to secure their beachhead from the immediate local counterattacks the British were
able to launch. In early 1942 the British lacked a central reserve in India, their ability to move reserve formations down from the Northwest Frontier and the interior limited by civil unrest, which affected movement on the railroads and created problems with the infrastructure. These actions were not widespread, and the increasing civil unrest did not amount to a general uprising, but the cutting of rail lines and destruction of telegraph lines at key moments prevented the British from shifting reserves against the Japanese beachhead.26 The British responded by arresting the Congress Party leadership, Gandhi, and many other leading Indian nationalists.
As a result, they were unable to launch a large-scale counterattack that could have pushed back the overstretched Japanese invasion. While to the British this appeared the proverbial “stab in the back,” it was in fact the lack of reserves and British planning itself that prevented such an operation. The counterattacks launched were those envisioned by GHQ India in their initial defense plan, not a single hammer blow, but multiple blows by uncoordinated, reduced-strength brigade forces.27 In a series of battles in the initial weeks of the campaign, both before and after the Japanese capture of Calcutta, the British launched a number of counterattacks, which, because of the problems experienced by British commanders, ended up operating independently.
These counterattacks over the crucial weeks of the campaign were often marked by great heroism by British and Indian troops alike, and often tactically proficient or clever, but in the end they were operationally futile. In this way, they resembled the offensive operations of the combined arms “jock columns” in the North African desert at the same time.
The initial Japanese carrier air attacks had defeated the limited British airpower in Ceylon and Bengal—the latter a numerically inferior force of Hawker Hurricanes and Curtiss Mohawks—and ensured that there would be little air opposition to the invasion. Japanese bomber aircraft had been able to move forward to the airfields at Mandalay and Rangoon soon after they were taken, and these now launched a series of attacks on the cities of Bengal, especially Calcutta. As in Burma, the shock of the air attacks was much greater than the damage inflicted and led to the British decision not to try and defend Calcutta.
What happened after the Japanese flag was raised in Calcutta was exactly what had been envisioned by the India Command's Joint Planning Staff in their assessment of March 14, 1942.28 This included “(a) a big refugee problem; (b) a serious internal security problem; (c) the probability of fifth column activities in Bengal; (d) large scale desertion of labor from threatened areas, paralyzing all industrial and transport activities; (e) a breakdown in civil administration; (f) large scale looting; and (g) general loss of morale throughout the population of India, which could not escape having an effect on the Indian forces.”
The arrival of the monsoon in mid-May was accompanied by the end of the British retreat from Burma, adding an overland threat to Bengal in addition to that from the expanding Japanese beachhead. The British thought the monsoon would bring a halt to military operations. What it actually did was impede the logistically light Japanese a great deal less than the British. As in Malaya and the Philippines, the Japanese demonstrated in India that they were able to function despite a limited and frayed supply line. They operated on appropriated food— causing starvation in the areas through which they advanced— and on impressed transport.
By May the Japanese threat to India was achieving the proportions the British Joint Planning Staff had estimated two months earlier: eleven divisions by sea and two more advancing over the border from Burma.29 Once Calcutta had been captured the Japanese were faced with their next decision, of a main advance. The ultimate decision was for a drive westward with Bombay as the ultimate objective.
The prospect of an advance across the subcontinent, with open flanks and a tortuous supply line leading back to Japan, was a daunting one. Ceylon-based submarines had already started to exact losses from Japanese troop and supply convoys. But there was no strong resistance that could have crumpled the overstretched Japanese advance. The key to this was the British view—in Delhi, though not in London—that the situation was hopeless.30 As with the French in 1940, this enhanced the potential that even limited operational and tactical defeats would have strategic results, and prevented available depth and resources from being effectively utilized. The fall of the Indian empire resembled in many ways the fall of France. It was unable to recover from tactical and operational defeats because the national will and ability to resist was low, and many of the Indian divisions proved to be as untrained and underequipped as French reservists were in 1940.
There was no mass rising of Indians to meet the Japanese, though the unrest did greatly hinder British military efforts. It did not matter that only a minority of the educated classes in the Indian empire would say “Better the Japanese than the British” or, in the case of many Muslims, “Better the Japanese than the Hindu-dominated Congress Party,” just as only a minority of Frenchmen actually did say “Better Hitler than Leon Blum” in the years before their defeat in 1940. These attitudes, rather, showed that they did not have the will to be mobilized for a war effort involving all of society and its economy the way Stalin was able to mobilize the Soviet Union in 1941 and— without the use of secret police—Churchill mobilized Britain in 1940.
The Indian empire was also suffering from a crisis of legitimacy in 1942. In some ways it was not the educated Indians who wanted independence who were important. The British had devised the military elements of the Indian empire so that they did not matter, the manpower being provided by those groups that had traditionally been associated with the British army. Resources for the war effort were, as required, to be provided by a top-down command economy. But increasingly, not the Indians, but the British leadership (and the Anglicized Indians who were also part of the leadership classes of British India) did not believe in the empire. They were unwilling to fight and die for the maintenance of British rule in India.
This led to the collapse of resistance throughout the subcontinent. The Japanese largely advanced into a vacuum. The advance was slowed by no more than the summer heat and the general anarchy as British rule collapsed. The British held on in Ceylon, in the south—the Japanese did not think it worthwhile advancing there—and in the Punjab and Sind, with the port of Karachi providing a haven for reinforcements. Additional British divisions arrived in May and June,31and U.S. aircraft arrived to provide air cover. This reflected the decision to go with Operation 21 rather than Operation 11 as the model for the invasion, which limited the Japanese ability to move against British lines of communication running to those areas they still held. While Ceylon would become increasingly isolated as the Japanese expanded southward they were unable to pull together the additional resources that would have been required for an invasion.
Attempting an Occupation
The most immediate result of the fall of Delhi and the flight of the vice regal government to Karachi was its benefits for the Japanese position in China. Without the logistics and communications support that came from bases in India, Allied airpower in China largely eroded away. The Japanese ability to make advances in China was limited only by the increasing shortage of their own resources, which in turn was compounded by the invasion of India.
As the Japanese occupation of the vast majority of the subcontinent began, the first reaction of the Indian populace was curiosity.32 They had been totally unarmed as a result of British policy, whose intent was to prevent active resistance as well as to create feelings of powerlessness. So they could not have offered active resistance even had they been so motivated. The Indian population was also faced with the more immediate problems of a nonfunctional economy. There was widespread destruction of infrastructure and industry, as there had been in Burma and the Andaman Islands.33 This meant that the potential for widespread food shortages soon became very real.
In the aftermath of their occupation of major objectives in India, the Japanese repeated their practice—as in Hong
Kong, Singapore, and Rangoon—of having British prisoners sweep streets, perceiving this to be a ritualized act of public humiliation. However, as in the previous incidents, this had the effect of increasing respect for the British military among the population, who saw them maintaining discipline under difficult conditions. This, along with the immediate economic disruption, led to the now-departed British rule quickly being recalled with nostalgia by many Indians.
Ill prepared to control much of India at the same time as it was trying to do so in China, the Japanese took over the British system of administration, including its non-European personnel, wherever feasible. As a result, it appeared to be a continuation of the Raj under a new, more brutal and less effective leadership. Effectively, the administration was rooted in the hands of a relatively few Japanese military officers, with the army proving considerably more brutal and repressive in practice than the navy.
Indian nationalists, while happy to be relieved of British rule, did not find the Japanese sympathetic to their demands for self-determination. To the Japanese, the Congress Party leadership was not seen as fit material for collaboration. The Japanese may have used the rhetoric of removing a dying imperialism from Asia and reviving Asia for the Asians, but presented with the leadership the British had jailed earlier in 1942, they left them in jail, deciding that they were basically no more than brown Englishmen, and if they had resisted the rule of a distant British emperor, were even more likely to resist the rule of a Japanese one.
Gandhi, despite his worldwide stature, was subject to continued confinement. When his followers in Orissa tried to meet Japanese extraction of in-kind food taxes with nonviolent resistance, they were met with heavy firepower and Gandhi himself was threatened with summary beheading. Fortunately for the Japanese, calmer heads in Tokyo prevented this, but it was a clear demonstration of the rapidly developing tensions between the occupiers and the occupied. Throughout India the general attitude toward the Japanese followed that of the Andaman islanders who first experienced their occupation: impressed by their energy, efficiency, and discipline, but horrified by their atrocities and the brutality inherent in their system.
