India's War

Over the past few weeks two different authors launching two very similar sounding books: "India's War" by Srinath Raghavan and "India's Wars" by Arjun Subramaniam. Except for the pudgy looking elephant on the Srinath's book, both would have had similar covers too.

I picked the author was more familiar - Srinath. There are already a lot of glowing book reviews in the magazines and newspapers so let me just stick to the points that I found interesting or fascinating.

"India's War" makes a very interesting start with the author's curiosity getting piqued at the Indian Military Academy. At IMA, officer cadets were divided into groups named after distant, strange-sounding places in foreign lands. Battlefields where Indian units fought - and won - many significant victories.

Victories and defeats. The book does not attempt to whitewash battles where the British Indian Army suffered significant defeats. I liked that. I also liked the way in which the Germans and Japanese were given due credit for adopting significantly better strategies and tactics. Details of the logistics and costs involved in ramping up an army from 50,000 to 2.5 million, and the travails of moving the divisions from one corner of the world to another, makes fassinating reading.

It was also good to know that the supposedly "progressive" princely state of Travancore, under Divan Sir CP Ramaswamy Aiyer, fared no better than British Bengal when it came to providing foodgrains for its citizens. While the former starved for the want of imported rice from Burma, the latter just shipped off whatever it as reserve-stocks for British soldiers in Europe. During the Famine in Travancore (1941-43), a sack of rice cost Rs. 65. An Indian soldier fighting in North Africa or Southern Europe received a monthly salary of Rs. 17 while the British tommies in the adjascent trenches got Rs.67 - three times the salary for the same work.

Unknown names also came to the fore: Maruyama Daisaburo, the spy who lived in Gandhi's Wardha ashram in the 1930s went on to set up a superb school for espionage in Penang. And then there was Lt Gen Mutaguchi Renya, Commander of the 15th Army in Northern Burma. If it were not for the misclculation he made for for the main offensive "Operation U-Go (8 march 1944) and  Op Ha-Go (to stop and destroy the 5th and 7th Indian Division along the Mayu Ridge), the war could have turned out very differently indeed!

WW2: Eye of the Beholder

This has been the most interesting book I've read in 2016.

Raghu Karnad's "Farthest Field - Indian Story of the Second World War" skillfully weaves history around lives of a bunch of cousins and friends in South India, who venture out into Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, Eritrea, and then across the sub-continent to Burma and North East India.

As a boy growing up in India of the 1970s and 80s, the WWs were already dim, distant memories that nobody talked about. We had a great-grandfather who served the British Indian Army in Mesopotamia, and his son served the RIAF on the Arakan Peninsula. Neither of them left any notes or records. So my own view of the wars were built on "commando comics" where the British were invariably the intrepid heroes, Germans were always screaming "Mein Gott!", the Russians wandered in the periphery, and the Indians, of course,  were nowhere to be seen.

It is only now that I realise the sheer scale of India's involvement. Once the British realised that the allies just did not have the numbers to face the the Germans, Japanese and Italians, the Indian Army was expanded from 450 Indian officers to 12,000 between 1939-1945. Similarly, the personnel below officer rank had increased from 1.5 lakh to 2.2 million!

Another great revelation has been on the role of the Japanese. Unlike most western authors, Karnad takes care to give credit where it is due. The book gives you a glimpse of the astounding levels of training and preparation that went into the Japanese offensive that swept scross the Asia-Pacific in the early 1940s.

If it were not for a few errors of judgement history would have most certainly been written by a different set of victors. The Japanese, for instance, only crippled Pearl Harbor because they forgot to destroy the fuel and repair depots. Had it been completely knocked out, the Pacific War and t he Battle of Midway, would not have taken place at all. They also failed to realise that their codes had been cracked.

The Japanese also made a big gamble by sending across an army of 65,000 soldiers across the forests of Burma, hoping to grab the storage depots set up by the British in Dimapur. In the end barely 10,000 managed to retreat back home.

WW2, it turns out, was a much closer fight that we are willing to admit.

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REFERENCES & LINKS

The INA and Independence - http://www.asianage.com/columnists/ina-and-independence-367