Sixty-four years ago today, Japan kicked off its Pacific Ocean campaign by attacking Pearl Harbor. The Pacific war led to the starvation of three million Bengalis by the British and the bombing of Calcutta. It also paved the way for Indian independence.
The Japanese raided the Howrah Bridge in Calcutta, attacked British ships in the Indian Ocean, and occupied parts of Assam and the Andaman Islands. Indian forces under British command fought back in Burma, and British bombers based in Bengal raided Japan.
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Mitsubishi Zero: Suicide bomber |
Several areas in India anticipated Japanese bombing:
Their air force bombers had already dropped a few bombs on Calcutta, the biggest city of India at that time, and on the naval station at Vishakapatnam on the east coast. There was a bomb scare in Madras city which was to the south of Vishakapatnam on the east coast. There were blackouts and air raid practices in all the big cities of India, including Bangalore City, where an aircraft factory was being built up with the help of the Americans… [Link]
A survivor recalls the bombing of Calcutta:
I remember the bombing of Calcutta by the Japanese, the target being Howrah Bridge. That morning had been a lovely clear and breezy day and we were flying kites…Our hero was an Indian Air Force Hurricane pilot who, night after night, shot down Zeros
We all had duties to perform when the siren would sound, such as putting a small bag with a piece of black rubber, Vaseline and bandages around our shoulders. We had no fridge in those days and drinking water was stored in earthen jars on the veranda. When the siren sounded that day, my parents brought in the water jars and my sisters and I ran downstairs to the ground floor and hid in the air raid shelter… When the “all clear” siren sounded we would leave the shelters and look at the damage… The bombing of Calcutta led to an exodus of residents – Howrah and Sealdah Stations being packed with people trying to get out. [Link]
Another Calcutta resident wrote:
During these many regular air-raids we usually listened to All-India Radio. The reception was not good as commentary was frequently interupted by pops, shrieks and whistles caused by atmospherics. Our hero was an Indian Air Force Hurricane pilot by the name of Pring. He was a squadron leader who, night after night, shot down Zeros in fierce combat. We used to listen to his exploits with baited breath; we became an integral part of this man who was up there fighting our battles for us. It was rather like listening to a soccer match in the sky. We reacted to his every valiant move and kill with rapturous joy. ‘Churchill believed that the Indians were the next worst people to the Germans’
He became the focal point of a Zero attack in the early hours of one morning. As we sat in the flickering glow of a lamp, we stared at one another in utter disbelief -through the static came the unmistakable whining of Pring’s death dive – the end of our friend . There was a silence that seemed to last for a eternity. We all cried unashamedly…The wide road… was cordoned off and converted into a temporary landing strip for fighters. It was known as ‘Red Road’ and became home to Hurricanes, Spitfires, Typhoons, Lysanders and the like. It became a favourite haunt of mine and I used to take a sketch pad and make drawings of these aircraft from the perimeter fencing… [Link]
A book called Forgotten Armies discusses the Bengal famine:
… the Indian famine of summer 1943 [was] a consequence of a cyclone and flooding, the British scorched-earth policy after the fall of Burma, as well as British indifference and bloody-mindedness. Just a year earlier there had been a massive, largely spontaneous movement against the British Raj (the Quit India Movement) that was brutally suppressed with shootings, mass whippings, torture and the burning of villages.Churchill let 3 million people die of starvation. Some have suggested this constituted a war crime parallel to the starving of Jews under HitlerThe war cabinet in London was deeply hostile to India. Churchill believed that the Indians were the next worst people to the Germans. As far as he was concerned, the Indians could starve to death as a result of their folly. And this they did, in their thousands. By mid-October, the death rate in Calcutta alone reached 2,000 a month. The journalist Wilfred Burchett wrote that “each morning the trucks rolled around the suburbs of Calcutta like the plague carts of 17th-century England… by September and October, they were picking them up… at the rate of 100 a day…”
On June 15, Lord Mountbatten, supreme allied commander, South East Asia Command, toasted the victorious powers. “He raised his glass to ‘the King, the President [United States], the Generalissimo [Chiang Kai Shek], Queen Wilhelmina [of the Netherlands] and France!'” Less than a decade later, every single European power had been driven out of the region by military insurrection. [Link]
Lord Mountbatten, the British commander in Southeast Asia, and Lord Wavell, the Viceroy of India at the time, both endeavoured to draw attention to and provide food aid to citizens in the famine-stricken regions. However, British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill was opposed to any changes in the Bengal policy and let approximately 3 million people die of starvation. Some have suggested this constituted a War Crime parallel to the starving of jews under Hitler or the starving of Ukraine under Stalin but Churchill the hero of World War 2 like Stalin was never charged with a crime.
American author Mike Davis and Indian author Amartya Sen specifically linked the 1943 famine and its predecessors in the region to British policies in the state of Bengal. Sen was awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998 for his studies of the Bengal and other famines in Asia and Africa. [Link]Less than a decade later, every single European power had been driven out of the region by military insurrectionFood was scarce everywhere, and even other goods were scarce, because everything was commandeered by the British army to take care of the British army. One of the worst famines, called the Bengal Famine, struck the state of Bengal, and hundreds and thousands of poor people died of starvation on the streets of the capital city of Calcutta, because most of the food was taken away to feed the British army, and no rice was coming from Burma, which used to supply India before it was taken over by the Japanese. [Link]
I was 9 year years old and living in Sylhet, India at the time… The British government took all the food for the war effort. This had a bad effect on us prices were very high and people couldn’t buy food and I saw many people dying in the streets. [Link]
After reading of the starvation of Bengal by the British and the rape of Bangladesh by the Pakistani army, perhaps the least known mass atrocities of the last century, I can’t imagine why Bengalis don’t have the same sense of historical grievance as Jews. The Japanese military was even more barbaric:
As anti-colonial movements flourished in India and southeast Asia, nationalists flocked to Tokyo. The Japanese deliberately cast their imperial ambitions – which were driven, above all, by a desire for natural resources – in the rhetoric of pan-Asiatic solidarity. However their treatment of the various races differed widely: towards the Chinese they were generally brutal, likewise the Indians, while initially they were more hospitable towards the Burmese, though not the Malays.
The nadir of Japanese behaviour was on the Thailand-Burma railway in 1944. Western accounts have concentrated on the suffering of the British, Americans and Australians, around 14,000 of whom died. In fact, 10 – perhaps 20 – times as many Burmese, Indians, Chinese and Malays were to perish. Of the 78,204 sent from Malaya, a staggering 29,638 died. [Link]… 14,000 Allied prisoners of war died as slave laborers on the Thailand-Burma railway (an ordeal made famous in ”The Bridge on the River Kwai”), along with possibly 20 times as many Indians, Burmese, Chinese and Malays, who were starved and worked to death. [Link]
One Bengali thanks the U.S. for ending the war:
… it is the Americans’ landing in the Asia Pacific which saved our mothers and sisters from mass rapes, saved us from loss of lives of our countrymen and from destruction of our country. I say, “Thank you America…” [for dropping the Bomb]. [Link]The Japanese were advancing very fast and it was thought they would sweep through India, luckily this didn’t happen. [Link]
The Quit India movement began a few months after Pearl Harbor. War pressures on the overstretched British forces eventually forced Indian independence:
The British government knew that it had tremendous material resources in India, as well as the Indian officers and soldiers of the British Indian Armed Forces in India… Bangalore city being a big army center for British troops, was full of Tommies. Many available big buildings were taken over by them…The country was put on an emergency and all efforts were to be geared to war effort… The leaders of the National Independence movement, led by Mahatma Gandhi, protested, but realizing the seriousness of the world situation, told the British government that they would support their war effort, if Britain could agree for independence for India at once!
The British government did not agree to this proposition. Dialogue continued more than one year. When Mahatma Gandhi and his supporters saw that there was no hope of obtaining independence for the country, Mahatma Gandhi launched the ‘Quit India’ movement in 1942… [Link]
The Beeb published many other reminiscences of the war in India by both desis and Brits. Here’s a story about ditching a massive bomber in the jungle swamp of the Sundarbans:
He decided to crash-land. From his rear cockpit my father could see the Sunderbans below him as the pilot tried to follow the river course at about 20 feet above the water. As the pilot tried to put the aircraft down onto the river bed a sharp bend appeared. and despite trying to turn sharply they hit a high bank and the plane somersaulted into the trees. It broke into two and my father’s rear turret was torn off…
Vickers Wellington bomber
When he finally managed to get out of his cockpit he saw that the navigator, front gunner and the second pilot had managed to get out too, but the main aircraft was now on fire and was well alight. Hearing shouts from the flames they soon located the wireless operator and were able to drag him out through the astro-hatch. The pilot then seemed to appear from nowhere, looking dazed and muttering about being trapped under the wreckage. The planes ammunition then began to explode and despite their injuries and burns they had to move away quickly, carrying the wireless operator because he had damaged his ankle and was unable to walk…
They slept again that night in the jungle and heard a lot of animals moving about.- knowing they were in an area that contained Bengal tigers. Early the next day they spotted a group of nine Indians in a sampan, and although they did not understand English they took them all on board. They travelled for quite a distance before they realised they were going in the wrong direction but managed to make the Indians understand that they wanted to go towards Calcutta. [Link]
Here’s a tale about the Chindits
, guerrilla forces in Burma named after the winged lions you see outside Buddhist shrines:
The Chindits were the largest of the allied Special Forces of the 2nd World War. They were formed and lead by Major General Orde Wingate DSO. The Chindits operated deep behind enemy lines in North Burma in the War against Japan. For many months they lived in and fought the enemy in the jungles of Japanese occupied Burma, totally relying on airdrops for their supplies…The Chindits were very much an international force, which include British, Burma Rifles, Hong Kong Volunteers, Gurkhas and West African Serviceman. The R.A.F. and First Air Commando, U.S.A.A.F. provided air support. The Chindit badge… illustrates a Chinthe, a symbolic guardian of Burmese temples, a mythical beast, half lion, half-flying griffin. [Link]
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p>One Brit recalls a hypochondriac veteran complaining about what is now an everyday Bombay neighborhood:
He was posted to India and found himself in a transit camp at a place called Worli, just outside Bombay… “Bert had an uncle that had served in the Indian army during the early part of the century… ‘It’s a filthy country. It’s alive with bugs and germs and things that creep and crawl and they all do their damnedest to get their teeth into you. Some part of your anatomy is always available…
‘Uncle knew somebody who got smallpox and recovered but his face was so disfigured that his fiancee wouldn’t have anything to do with him when he got back home… We could get… bitten by a small snake called a silver krait which was nearly always fatal… or we could be attacked by a cobra which could be fatal… We would get dhobi itch, no doubt about that…’ [Link]
I dunno about you, but I’ll take dhobi itch over a krait bite any day:
Krait have neurotoxic venom many times more potent than cobra venom. The bite of the krait is very serious and causes respiratory failure in the victim. Before effective antivenin was developed, there was a 75 percent mortality rate among victims… Kraits mainly prey upon other snakes (including venomous varieties) and are cannibalistic, feeding in other kraits. [Link]
No story is complete without a mutiny:
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HMS Hindustan |
Early in 1946 a part of the Royal Indian Navy mutinied, including a ship in Karachi harbour, the HMS Hindustan. [Link]
The crew didn’t succeed, but Hindustan did.
I canÂ’t imagine why Bengalis donÂ’t have the same sense of historical grievance as Jews
manish, this is a complex question. as a third party observor, i would say that it is because 2/3 of the european jewry (by my count) went up in smokes, and the geographical core of askhenazi life, galicia & lithuania, were hollowed out. in absolute numbers what happened in bengal/bangladesh can compare, but not in relative numbers. and that last part is key, and here i can offer personal observations. the last time i went to bangladesh a cousin-in-law (?) whose family has long been involved in film and the arts for decades confided that most of the best thinkers in his family had been shot by the pakistanis in ’71 (“they killed our brains” were his exact words). my own broader family, that sort of thing only happened to a few hindu acquaintances and friends (my mother was shot by mistake in a raid, luckily her father was a doctor and the damage was minimal). but i suspect now in hindsight that is because there weren’t too many artistic intellectuals who were plausible foci of bengali nationalism, most of my extended family tends to focus on the sciences, business or religion, so they didn’t need to be liquidated (in the case of the religious professionals the literature would tell me to bet that they almost certainly supported pakistan, and i know my maternal grandfather did). additionally, they were all muslim. i think the religious selectivity is a big reason for the ‘amnesia’ of many bangladeshis, the skew was so strong toward hindus that many bangladeshis whose families had few bengali cultural notables came through with some scares but not of the experience systematic genocide. many of the hindus who officially are citizens or bangladesh or have residence there actually don’t from what i gather, it has become common practice for non-muslims in my father’s home town to simply make an arrangment with a local muslim family to keep their ghost residence going while they live in india (there are issues with property, etc.).
anyway, like i said, it is a complex topic, and i’m sure the primitives will come out of the woodwork to argue numbers and take their caveman clubs and start smashing each other over the heads with their “99% correct facts” or whatever. but that is what i am thinking right now about what happened in ’71.
That’s a great read Manish, thanks. And Anna was right, you ARE a serial re-writer!
Razib it’s an interesting theory. I don’t have one of my own to be quite frank. I have personally made it a mission to try and educate as many people as I can about the reality of Churchill, but have never strayed into out-and-out demonising, for then I think my message would be ignored as insane. You fellas seem to have a more accurate picture of the man as you don’t have the bullshit glorification to contend with every time his name is brought up. Sorry to hear your mum was shot mate – but glad she was ok.
can someone please explain:
what on earth do you do with a piece of black rubber and Vaseline and bandages?
do you make a torch? i mean all three of those things are flammable…
Sounds like a med kit (rubber for a tourniquet).
Hello! I am Japanese. Each country has sad history.
I would like to know what you think of MahathirÂ’s speech. Can I request to post that in your blog or my blog commentÂ’s column?
Mahathir Mohamad’s Speech
Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,
AMU, Vaseline isn’t flammable.
I think Manish is right, rubber tubing was often used for tourniquets as you don’t need to knot it (say…if your fingers have been blown off). Vaseline has so many uses (stop sniggering at the back), sealing moisture in, helping make a bandage air tight and lubrication (I said stop sniggering). What a great invention.
…as the old saying goes, aside from fascism, communism, genocide, ethnic cleansing, slavery, and oppression, War has never solved anything.
That’s a little selective 🙂 Aren’t at least half of those things caused, or don’t they occur, by and because of war?
Totally random, but Vaseline can also make you go blind if you get it in your eye.
Regardless of what questions might be “settled” in the end, I’ll free grant that at the outset, wars are started for both “good” and “bad” reasons…. And while it involves 2 people, wars need only be started by one.
Sorry to hear your mum was shot mate
well, my mom is kind of proud of it actually. if i recall correctly she was hiding a bathroom and they just sprayed the whole house, a bullet went straight through her hip. luckily nothing vital or septic-potential was hit. while this was going on i think they took her nanny, who was bitching about the ruckus, and stuck a gun in her mouth and blew her brains out. ah, muslim brotherhood! didn’t they ever hear that sand nigger must not kill sandier nigger?
Fuji I read throught the Mahathir Mohammeds speech and its interesting. He asks Japan China East asia to create an Asian alliance that can be used to standup to US and EU in political,military and economical spheres. Do you think it was directed at Japan specificaly b/c of the role japanese military played in Iraq ?
I took a class with Mike Davis last year. The guy is an awesome social and urban historian. Besides his book Late Victorian Holocausts, he also wrote City of Quartz, which basically predicted the 1993 Rodney King riots. Here is his wikipedia profile.
Sorry, I made a typo. I meant to say 1992 Rodney King riots
Manish
Great post – really informative and interesting.
Razib
I have found that if the issue of 1971 is raised, many Pakistanis go crazy – denial, anger, rage. I think there is a lot of repressed guilt going on there, alot of shamelessness too. That same army is in charge of the country and if they are capable of doing that in Bengal imagine what depths they will imagine and what they’d like to do to anyone else who is ‘beneath’ them.
Anyway, the reaction of some Pakistanis is exacerbated because of the whole Ummah thing – they dont want that bubble burst.
It was the Pakistani army that went into Jordan and helped the King there massacre thousands and thousands of Palestinians too, I believe – truly amazing. What an institution.
Razib, I have often thought that what 1971 needs is a book, something like Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking, to bring the story back to life and get it known – one million dead Muslims and Hindus in a 6 month killing spree is something that should be remembered. You should think about putting together a proposal and approaching some publishers to see if they might be interested.
Razib, I have often thought that what 1971 needs is a book
Well the British novelist Robert Payne wrote a novel called the Tortured and the Damned, which is about ’71, Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, the extermination of Bangladeshi intellectuals, the Pakistani army, etc. I recall it being an engaging read, though unfortunately its out of print.
Actually its not out of print, its available on Amazon.
great material manish. you have a way of getting so much in your posts, i sort of wish you’d break them up, as there is so much to consider and respond to.
the testimonials of the bombing of calcutta bring to mind my father’s childhood memories. he was born in 1938 so he was but a wee lad, but remembers the air raids. at some point the families with the means to do so sent the women, old folk and kids out of the city. being of the then-upper class my relatives went to hazaribagh in bihar (not jharkand) where such folk had country properties. the adult men stayed in calcutta to work — stiff upper lip and all; no doubt some of them were quietly sympathetic to netaji’s INA — and traveled back and forth. i believe it was during this period that my grandfather was called on to shoot a tiger that had gotten into the bathroom… perhaps apocryphal.
peace
Wow !! Great material and great comments!!
Even the Malaysian leaders speech was a good read.
Dear Guru, Thank you for your response. Yes, Japanese government has sent the Japanese Self-Defense Forces to Iraq, although there were many controversies. If you want to know our governmentÂ’s explanation, may be the following e-mail service would help forward.
Koizumi Cabinet E-mail Magazine
Of course, my opinion and our government’s policy are not always same. I think Japan obey US too much. By the way, what is the meaning of “b/c”? And one more, if I mistake English, please tell me. Sincerely,
P.S. Thank you, RC!
I have found that if the issue of 1971 is raised, many Pakistanis go crazy – denial, anger, rage.
A lot of Pakistanis are just plain ignorant of the atrocity as well. Maybe the surrender to India overshadows the actual massacre in the minds of the Pakistanis.
Its a shorthand for “because”. http://www.netlingo.com/emailsh.cfm
Somebody has to start the caveman bashing, it might as well be me. 😐
Re 1971, the Mutiny had a nice post on the Indira-Nixon telegrams here. It contained links to several documents released by the US including these at GWU:
Document 16: In point #8, “[Jha] said that even though there was guerrilla activity here and there, scale of fighting was not such as to create continued refugee flow of present magnitude, i.e., 45,000-50,000 per day. Cause of refugee flow was not fighting but fact that Hindus were being driven out selectively by Pak army from East Pakistan.”
Document 22: In page 1, Indira Gandhi says that there were more than 7 million refugees in India, of which only 1 million were Muslims, i.e., 6m out of the 7m refugees were Hindus.
There is corroboration from other sources such as RJ Rummel’s site: In table 8.2, lines 43 and 44 show a low estimate of Hindus killed at 1m and a high estimate of 3m.
Yeah, I roomed with a guy who was from NWFP, and one day the discussion veered to this particular topic. The discussion went down hill so fast, I was shocked. Definitely a taboo subject.
re: the killing. it seems that millions implies a lot of bullets. i wonder, is it perhaps starvation and migration that did a lot of the killing? anyway, i should read a book. tx for the info everyone.
Manish,
This was an incredible post. I am amazed at how well researched your posts are and how much ground they cover. Thank you so very much!
anyone explore the racial dimensions of 1971 independence war? the pakistanis back then have always used epithets to denote a sort of superiority over bengalis, (ie: bengalis being shorter or darker)
brutish punjabis from orthodox muslim pakistan who resented the artistic, profound, intellectual cultural achievements of bengal and its forwardthinkingness ? today i cannot look at any punjabi the same again be they hindu, sikh, muslim or whatever, since the pakistani ones have destroyed the intellectual culture and secular nature of the bengali hinterlands.
razib, do you harbor this in your heart often?
Unfortunately there was no indian Air force pilot who shot down zeros day after day (or night after night). It was probably an RAF Fighter pilot . There were many including some like Frank ‘Chota’ Carey, who have kills over calcutta.
canÂ’t imagine why Bengalis donÂ’t have the same sense of historical grievance as Jews
Is it plausible to imagine, in a fight started on 26 March 1971 against five thousand odd troops stationed in 5 different garrisions armed with old moded chinese rifles and few tanks and armoured vehicles to guard a country area of 54 thousand square miles crisscrossed with hundreds of mighty rivers, thousands of canals, wetland and also some hilly terrain ( troops strength gradually raised upto 90 thousand by Dec 1971 to defend 1400 miles border with India) 3 million peoles were killed by army? After liberation, the then Pro-Indian AL Govt. set up a fact finding committee to unearth the actual figure of casualty, when the figure didn’t touch even one hundred thousand including those killed by the other side also, the committee was scrapped. The figure was just passed in the assemply overwhelmingly dominated by AL who took refuge in India during war.
It is worthwhile to note that History always speaks for victors. Victors are always right.
PJ O’Rorke mentions the 1943 Indian famine in his book All the Troubles in the World. He lays blame at merchants who hoarded huge quantities of rice to artificially raise the price, starving millions when food was indeed available. He claimed by the mid 20th century all famines were caused by politics rather than true lack of food at a given locale. Witness the continuous importation and availability of kaat in Ethopia while millions starved during their famines of recent times.