WW2: Burma to Japan with Azad Hind

[Taj_91]

And precisely for the same reason we never honour British Indian Army's achievements or soldiers but we do honour INA and Netaji. But that doesn't change the fact that the Indian people were not aloof to crimes committed by IJA.
After the Jallianwala Bagh massacre even the most racist man Winston Churchill said it was a black day and general Dyer was removed but IJA actually celebrated this sort of behavior, ask the Chinese and read Indian PoWs documents.
Yes, IJA and INA were looking for mutual benefits but it turned out far worse for Indian prisoners and people in the Japanese occupied territories.

 

[Levina]

@Lord Zen
Great thread!!!
Netaji's letter, his habit of remembering faces and names (thats a very difficult task for me) were the qualities which made him such a loved and exceptional leader. Each word in his letter made an impact.
But am definitely gonna remember a few things from this article for a long time :
1) Japanese cities and Tokyo's train service (the incident when an attack was made).
2) Kamikaze pilots.
3) The very "unfortunate" soldier, that part was really hilarious.
4) B- 29s.
5)The food offered to 'em.I'm just wondering how a vegetarian like me would 've survived.
6) Bare bodied PT.
7) Puttees.

And once again I did not get any notification despite being tagged on this thread.
@WebMaster kuch karoo.

 

[Koovie]

IJA's bonhomie with INA was superficial to say the least.
IJA's atrocities: Homfeyganj massacre,
Japanese occupation of the Andaman Islands - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
IJA was just using INA to fulfill its own imperialist ambitions, and the level of war crimes they committed had no equal. They actually ate PoWs even some from the INA.
Netaji couldn't do anything about the Japanese atrocities but he had no choice.
IJA had to be defeated otherwise India would have fallen from British colonialists to even harsher Japanese colonialists.

And IJA never provided any of the heavy machinery or even trucks for transports, all INA had were men and small arms. IJA had no intention of making INA powerful and lose control over them. Precisely for the same reason, they executed Mohan Singh who IJA thought was getting too strong.

Some good points. Especially considering the warcrimes committed by the IJA. Including those against British Indian prisoners (POW were used for bayonet practicing!).

 

[Lord ZeN]

Burma to Japan with Azad Hind-III

The story goes that the aircraft managed to land on the runway that night amidst the confusion that existed at the base with aircraft landing and taking off in streams. The commandos managed to blow up a couple of aircraft on the ground and set fire to some, but they were all, except one, killed in the attack. A question often asked is whether they achieved all that they set out to do. We do not know, but several legends grew round this saga.
By the end of July 1945, it became apparent that we were on the losing side. The bombings had become continuous day and night, and the limit was reached when one Sunday, at ten in the morning, the warning hooters sounded. This had by now become a normal thing, so we carried on walking to our air raid shelter. Some of us had just reached it and the last one was halfway there when we heard a mighty roar, and the sound of front-gun fire.

The American fighter had come at treetop level and strafed past in a straight line, just missing him. It was a very lucky escape, but what was frightening was that fighters had started attacking interior parts without any apparent opposition. From then on, we had many more fighter attacks especially by P-38 lightning aircraft. They seemed to have complete freedom of the skies over the Academy area and came and went at will. They knocked down our glider hangar and damaged all the gliders parked there. They carried out target practice on the mock-up aircraft parked at the ends of the runway and strafed the barracks whenever they felt like it. Only one of their aircrafts was damaged by ground-fire from the Academy premises, as far as I know.

P-38 lightning aircraft

Black Day- Part 1

By the first week of August, the scene of war changed rapidly in more ways than one. There were continuous bombing raids by day and night and behind-the-scene negotiations were still in progress. On 6 August 1945, a day President Truman and his country should remember with deep shame, the first atom bomb was dropped over Hiroshima by an innocuous looking B-29 christened Enola Gay. The time was 8.15 in the morning when people were on their way to work, and children were just arriving in their schools.

Enola Gay returning


The bomb-aimer in this aircraft operated his switch to release one of the most cruel and devastating bombs ever devised by humans. The bomb descended by parachute and at a preset height over the city, it started its diabolical destruction. There were two distinct balls of fire over the city and then a firestorm; temperatures of a million degrees centigrade and pressure of hundreds of thousands of pounds per square inch were manifest. All human beings in the core of the drop zone were roasted alive instantaneously. People as far away as 5 miles from the centre felt the tremendous heat, and radiation destroyed every human being within the radius of a mile and a half. Who were those that were killed so mercilessly? Mostly civilians—men, women and children.

A total of 180,000 people were killed or maimed for life, and it was established later that even the progeny of the survivors are suffering from untold diseases today. When one thinks of it seriously, one wonders what possible difference there might be between this and the chemical warfare banned by the Geneva Convention. I believe, like many, that this was a more dastardly crime, and if the Allies hadn’t won the war, all their leaders would have been hanged publicly as war criminals.

We at the Academy read about it in the papers the next day. In the Mainichi Shinbun, a daily newspaper, the headline stated that a new kind of bomb had been dropped over Hiroshima causing inestimable casualties of a kind never-before experienced in this War. The word ‘atomic’ was not used as it was not known at that time. Over the next two days, there was a definite lull in the bombing and it indicated to us a dramatic change in the situation.

On 9 August, not content with the inhuman damage perpetrated in Hiroshima, another atomic bomb was dropped over Nagasaki. This was a more powerful bomb, but because of the uneven terrain in this part of the country, fewer people (about 40,000) were killed and an equal number maimed for life.As one priest remarked after seeing the carnage and the aftermath, the dead were luckier than the injured living.

On the 10th and 11th, there was again a lull in the bombing, but the aircraft dropped a number of leaflets in our area. This was to warn the population that Tokyo and its suburbs would be the next target for these new bombs unless Japan surrendered unconditionally.
The local authorities in our area made prompt arrangements to shelter people in the underground cells hollowed out of the hills, and provisioned them with water and food to last for weeks. Our training had virtually come to a standstill and we did not know what was happening.

It turned out that there was no need for us to go into the hill shelters after all, because on 14 August, the Tenno Heika (Emperor Hirohito) announced a cease-fire and the unconditional surrender of all Japanese forces to the Allies. It was the end of everything! That evening, the Deputy Commandant of our Academy committed harakiri (literally, cutting open the stomach) in a ritualistic fashion at the Shinto shrine next to our barracks. Many others who felt ashamed of this surrender, were reported to have done likewise, but we saw only this one. It was a gruesome sight.

Emperor Hirohito signing the document for Japan to formally surrender

Our Captain Kato called all of us together and announced the inevitable. Japan had decided to surrender unconditionally, and since Tenno Heika had given the order, all Japanese soldiers would have to lay down their arms immediately. He said that he felt very sad and sorry at the way things had turned out and apologized on behalf of the Japanese government for having let us down.

It was a strange time for us to worry about ourselves, but we wanted to know what would happen to us. It turned out that he had no authority to give us an answer. It was quiet and sad in the Academy, and all activity had ceased. An order was issued by the Commandant that all weapons should be deposited at the base armoury. We surrendered our rifles and swords. There were three or four days of indecision, though not for the Japanese staff or the cadets. The Emperor was above criticism and had the faith of the people. If he had said that they were to fight to the very end, the people would have faced death quite calmly in their futile struggle. But as the Emperor had declared unconditional surrender, they would toe the line to the letter, however degrading the act may seem to them. That was how Japan responded.

It was an extremely disciplined nation. There was not a single instance of defiance of the edict, and a proud nation, after gaining unbelievably rapid victories in the initial stages of the War, was now humbled into surrender, and that without any preconditions. In the trauma of this humiliation, the Russians played Judas by reneging the Russo–Japanese non-aggression pact, and declaring war on Japan. They marched into Manchuria and this was the unkindest cut of all. But at the time, I remember it paled into insignificance because Japan was still struggling to come to terms with itself over the abject surrender.


Going back to 16 July, after the Americans had succeeded in detonating the first atomic device in history, the results were rushed to President Truman. He was with the British Prime Minister Churchill at the Potsdam Conference, where the infamous decision to drop the two bombs was taken. The hypocrisy lay in the statement by Truman that this was necessary to shorten the war and thereby save ‘hundreds of thousands of lives, both American and Japanese’. Major General J F C Fuller, in his incisive A Strategic and Tactical History of the Second World War, has put things in the correct perspective.

Though to save life is laudable, it in no way justifies the employment of means which run counter to every precept of humanity and the outcome of war. Should it do so, then, on the pretexts of shortening a war and of saving lives, every imaginable atrocity can be justified. In fact, knowing as President Truman and Mr Churchill did of the powers of the new weapon, its use could have implied but one thing only, namely, “Unless surrender is immediate, the slaughter of the Japanese people will be unlimited.” This is equivalent to a gangster saying to the victim “Unless you do as I ask, I will shoot your family.”’

He further adds,

‘If the saving of lives were the true pretext, then instead of reverting to a type of war that would have disgraced Tamerlane, all President Truman and Mr Churchill needed to have done was to remove the obstacle of unconditional surrender, when the War could have been brought to an immediate end.’

The United States Strategic Survey (the Pacific War), which was carried out immediately after the War came to the conclusion that ‘by August 1945, even without direct air attack on her cities and industries, the overall level of Japanese war production would have declined below its peak level of 1944 by 40 to 50 per cent solely as a result of interdiction of overseas imports.’ Fuller rightly concludes that ‘Therefore, it would seem highly probable that had strategic bombing been centred on the destruction of Japanese merchant shipping and railways instead of on industries and cities, by August 1945, further resistance would have been impossible.’ In plain language it meant that there was no call for the inhuman incendiary bomb raids on a civilian population, and of course no possible reason for their having dropped the atom bombs that caused such untold and inhuman misery.

Our Academy was now closing down and it was not possible for us to stay there any longer. Hundreds of Japanese cadets had already been sent to their homes, and except for a skeleton staff, the others had been asked to leave. The Academy authorities paid us all the allowances that lay in our accounts. The Indian Independence League gave us 10,000 yen each from the fund meant for us, and we were told that a building would be hired for us to stay in.

The last picture of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose taken on August 18, 1945

Two days before we left our barracks, we received the wonderful news that Netaji was arriving in Tokyo. This gave us an immense sense of relief. He would tell us what we had to do under these circumstances.

The building hired for us to move into would not be ready for some days, and as we could not wait for that and stay on in the Academy, we were invited to stay with Anand Mohan Sahay, an expatriate and a great patriot who had done immense good work for India’s independence.

The day we were to move from the Academy, however, turned out to be one of the worst days of our lives. We got the news that Netaji had died in an air crash when his plane was taking off for Japan from Taihoku. This together with the fact that we had not been able to fulfil our ambitions and that our work was halted midway was too much to bear. We were numb with disbelief and could not stop crying. It was as if our own parent had died and we were abandoned all of a sudden. Our grief overwhelmed us.

News paper clipping from Japanese newspaper, published on 23 August 1945 announcing Netaji's death.


The Academy offered us transport and we made our way to Mr Sahay’s house. I remember that on the journey, each of us hoped secretly that the news was not true, and that there could have been some mistake in the transmission of facts. But when we reached the Sahay home, our hopes were dashed to the ground. A number of Indian friends had gathered there and the scene was pathetic. All eyes were red with tears and each face expressed profound shock. No one would answer questions as we joined the group of mourners. No one knew quite what to do as the blow dealt by fate was staggering, that too, so soon after the calamity of the Japanese surrender.

.

 

[Lord ZeN]

Black Day- Part 1

The next day, we were told that Colonel Habibur Rehman, who was travelling with Netaji in the ill-fated aircraft, was arriving by a relief plane, and that he was in a serious condition and had sustained severe burns on his face and body. A delegation was dispatched to the airport to receive him, and he was brought to Mr Sahay’s house. He was indeed in a very bad condition with burns on one side of his face, and a large burn patch on his body.

Two days later, Mr Tatsuo Hayashida, a Japanese officer, arrived from Taihoku with Netaji’s ashes. The cube-shaped urn was covered in white cloth. Mr SA Ayer who was the Minister of Publicity in the Azad Hind Government and a right-hand man of Netaji was in Tokyo then, and it was decided that the ashes be kept in the safe custody of one of Tokyo’s shrines. The place decided upon was the Renkoji Temple in the city centre of Tokyo.

We gathered there one night and in a simple ceremony performed by the head priest of the Renkoji Temple, the ashes were kept in a place of honour with a photograph of Netaji in full INA uniform in front of the urn. The ashes are still there. Neither the Indian government nor Netaji’s close relations have deemed it fit to bring them over to India, even after all these years. The government’s reluctance to do so was an aspect of politics, but the family clearly believed that he could not have died.

All those who kept up the pretense that Netaji was alive, even after the Government of India’s enquiry committees had disproved the theory, had some purpose to their plan. However, no one realised that they were insulting the memory of a great revolutionary who, in the heat and turmoil of a world war, managed to travel secretly from Germany to Malaya in a submarine and then galvanized the entire southeast Asian Indian community into forming the Azad Hind government and the Indian National Army. Would such a great man, if he were alive, stay in hiding?I believe that if Netaji had been alive and not killed in the air crash, he would have returned to India after the British left its shores. And if he had come in at that time, he might have stolen the hearts of the populace and taken the place that other leaders took. Netaji was shrewd and far-sighted, and he made the national language Hindustani, not Hindi, and the language of common people. The script was democratically roman.

Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, more than being a born leader, was an able commander who could, and more importantly, did take decisions. There was no vacillation in his demeanor or actions. He was strong-willed, like the immortal Sardar Vallabhai Patel, and if both these men had been alive at this time, they would have done great things for the country, but that was not to be. Netaji died at a very inopportune juncture of the nation’s birth.

Coming back to our story in Japan, a building was hired for us and we shifted into it. We were five to a room, as the 35 from the erstwhile Army Academy now joined us. Money was no problem, as apart from the large sum we had been given earlier, we were getting a monthly allowance. The only snag was that there was almost nothing for sale and we had no boarding facilities. We had to fend for ourselves. Somehow, we managed quite comfortably. We used to send foraging parties to the farms in the suburbs of Tokyo, and get fresh vegetables, fruit and other foodstuff. In fact we were doing better than the Japanese authorities had managed to in the last two years.

Consequent to the Emperor’s declaration of unconditional surrender, the Japanese envoys signed the Instrument of Surrender aboard the US battleship USS Missouri, and the Second World War came to an official end. We waited apprehensively for the Americans to land in Tokyo. It was certain that the Japanese would receive them with discipline and decorum, since the Emperor willed it, but we were not too sure of the kind of reception we would receive when they found out about us.

Japanese envoy signs the surrender document aboard the battleship U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay

Under American Occupation

The day and the manner in which the Americans landed was memorable. Transport planes escorted by hordes of fighter- and bomber-aircraft appeared over the Tokyo landscape. People may at first have misunderstood this and thought that the War was on again and an attack imminent. But this was not the case. The Americans had probably done this with a dual purpose. Clearly, they wanted to display their awesome might. This was also a preemptive measure.

As the planes landed one by one on the runway, the fighters hovered overhead on guard. As the troops disembarked, they deployed and boarded trucks and jeeps that were to take them in a victory procession through the streets of Tokyo. There were no disturbances and not a single hand was raised against them. Instead, the public had lined up in the streets and children waved to them. It was typical of American diplomacy that they made friends, especially with the children by giving them chewing gum and chocolates.

The start of the occupation of Japan went like clockwork, with the full cooperation of the vanquished. Many of the American officers and others we met later told us that they had landed with apprehension, expecting that the Japanese would take revenge on them for the bombing.
They too wanted to take revenge on the citizens for Japan’s having waged such an expensive war—expensive in terms of the number of American dead and wounded.
But when they actually saw the civilian population, they could not believe that the polite, disciplined and friendly people were of the same stock as the brutal hard-fighting front-line soldiers they had faced earlier. This was exactly how we felt when we first came to Japan from the war-torn areas of Burma, Malaya and the Philippines.

The 2nd Battalion 5th Royal Gurkha Rifles march through Kure


Within days, everything was back to peacetime conditions. Of course, some of the GIs made a lot of money by selling American cigarettes and chocolates to the half-starved civilians, and the US Military Police had a hard time trying to block this. However, both sides profited from the deal. The Japanese civilians, who hadn’t tasted chocolates or smoked a cigarette since the War began, were quite happy to pay for such a luxury, and the GIs made some local spending money over and above their comparatively substantial pay packets.

After a few days of occupation, our representative met the American authorities. They did not know what to do with us. One of the officers said that they had nothing against us and went on to joke that the Americans had also fought the same British for their Independence. They also premised that in due course they would be able to repatriate us to India if we so wished. We were very relieved when we heard this, and to crown our happiness, they even supplied us with their ‘K’ rations and group packs.

We experienced abundance, American style. The ‘K’ ration packet was a meal in itself and contained all the necessary items including a packet of three cigarettes for an after-dinner smoke. The group pack was a regular Christmas hamper as far as we were concerned. It contained cocoa, tea, coffee, biscuits, cakes, meat-loaves, corned beef, soup, chocolates and many other things. The large cardboard container was meant for eight to ten people, but we managed to send it round to many more persons than that. With such an abundance of good food that we had not had for years, life for us became an eating binge, perhaps as a reaction to the two years of starvation diet that we had been forced to maintain.

Somehow, just when everything seemed to be going well, the proverbial fly in the ointment appeared. A rude and offensive officer, Colonel Figges, a senior member of the British counterpart of the Allied Occupation Forces Authority, took charge. This man went after us. He ordered that our representative should report to his headquarters immediately. We sensed trouble and tried to delay the confrontation, but in the end we were forced to comply.


A few of us representing the 45-strong contingent reported to his office one morning. To put it mildly, we were given a hostile reception. He began by saying that we were all traitors and that if had he had his way, we would all be shot. We politely but firmly told him that we were not traitors as we never owed allegiance to the British, and that we were very proud to have served and taken part in the INA in the fight for the independence of India.
These were brave words for us and should have been applauded, but the Englishman was inflamed, and what infuriated him even further was that he could not mete out severe punishment at this stage. He did not have the power or the facilities to arrest and detain us, and the Americans were too busy to cooperate with him in this venture. He finally said he would ensure that we were all rounded up and moved to India for just retribution. We walked out of his office in protest.

Colonel Figges did manage to force the American authorities to put us in the Fourth Repatriation Centre of the US Occupation Forces. This was the start of our incarceration, but a really mild one as I will relate.

The Fourth Repatriation Centre happened to be located in the same Japanese Army Academy premises where our 35 Army cadets had been training until recently. When we moved here, we were given a part of the barracks for our stay. Although we were not allowed to leave camp, we had freedom within the premises. The good thing was that we were given the same food and other rations that the GIs were given. This meant that we were supplied coupons for our daily ration of beer. Not one of us drank at the time, so we exchanged these coupons with some hard-drinking GIs for more chocolate and chewing gum.

Chow-time was a revelation to us. The queues for breakfast, lunch and dinner were the same for officers and men. Each of us was given a mess plate which had compartments in it, and when we reached the serving counter, we were given very large portions of corned beef, cabbage, beans in tomato sauce, slices of fresh bread, a sweet and a mug full of hot milk to which we could add coffee or cocoa and sugar. Our stomachs had probably shrunk. One such serving could easily have fed about four of us, so the first two days we did waste a lot of food.

We were also witness to criminal waste in the kitchen. Large canisters of milk from the cold storage would be opened, and when the meal was over for the day, the leftover milk would be up-ended from the canisters into the gutter alongside the camp kitchen. What a wicked waste this seemed when so many children outside the camp starved. It was the same with the rest of the food leftovers. It showed two things—the callousness with which food was wasted, and the fact that the Americans produced an abundance of food for their troops. An American officer told us that if their government wanted their men to fight a war, they had better see to it that corned-beef got to the frontline before the troops did as their army literally marched on its stomach.

Although we were told that black people were treated badly in America at that time, there seemed to be no discrimination between the few black soldiers and the white GIs in the camp as far as food and facilities were concerned. There were practically no black officers, though.

We were detenues and our freedom was restricted in that we could not leave camp, but the stay here was such a change from our earlier existence—almost like a holiday—that none of us minded the delay in our repatriation. Every evening, they showed us a film at the NAAFI centre, with free snacks served in the interval. We must all have put on a few pounds in our short stay there. We were supplied with the GI gabardine shirts and trousers, and all the basic necessities such toothpaste, shaving kits, jackets and kit bags. We were told that as soon as the rush on their aircraft receded, we would be sent to Singapore via Manila on their US Air Force Skymaster aircraft.

We now went on a buying spree. We knew that all the Japanese money we had would be worthless once we left the country, so we bought what we could and whatever was easily available—wrist watches, especially the waterproof kind issued to the GIs, rolls of Japanese silk smuggled into the camp, silk kimonos for both men and women and anything else which would serve as presents for our family and friends when and if we were finally reunited with them. Even after we had bought there things, we were left with huge sums of money. This amount, together with the autographed photo of Netaji, which we thought would be safer here and could be collected at a later date, was left with our Captain Kato. Unfortunately, we never got our things back. @levina

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