• First published by World War 11 Investigator, Vol. 1 No. 4, July 1988

17

Subhas Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army: Renegades or Liberators?

he rain poured down as if it would never stop. Visibility was down to twenty T yards. The group of Indian officers and men of the 1114 Punjab Regiment, with their wounded British battalion commander, Lt-Col. L.V. Fitzpatrick, peered through the driving gusts. On 11 December 1941, the Japanese blitzkrieg had torn through their defences and scattered them into the sodden jungle of northern Malaya. After four nights without sleep they were at the end of their tether, starving, exhausted, soaked in tropical mud. They had hoped to break through the Japanese to their own lines, but a report had come through that the enemy was now well to the south. Two figures came towards them through the rain, one in Japanese uniform. He was Major Iwaichi Fujiwara, and he was not unexpected. One of Fitzpatrick's Sikh captains, Mohan Slngh, had already decided that surrender was the best option, and he had contacted a fellow Sikh, Giani Pritam Singh, whose presence on the Thai­ Burma border was known to him. Pritam Singh was a leader of the Independent League of India, an organisation of Indians in Thailand sworn to rid the sub­ continent of British rule. The movement had roots in the revolutionary Ghadr organisation of Indian rebels which helped the German cause in the First World War and had been instrumental in fomenting a mutiny among Indian troops in Singapore in 1916. There were many such organisations of dissident Indians in East Asia. The founder of one of them, Rash Behari Bose, attempted to assassinate the Viceroy of India, Lord Hardinge, in 1912 and then sought refuge in Japan. The Japanese were ambivalent about giving him asylum: they were still officially allied with Britain, and in the normal course of events should have handed him over; but Bose was taken under the wing of Mitsuru Toyama, head of the Amur River Society, which was dedicated to the expulsion of the European powers from the East. Toyama arranged for Bose to marry a Japanese and to be given Japanese citizenship. As the world went to war again in September 1939, Rash Behari Bose's organisation had spread its branches into Berlin, Tokyo, Shanghai and Bangkok. During the run-up to Pearl Harbour, Bangkok was a focus of espionage activities for both sides, and Pritam Singh made contact with the head ofJapanese espionage there, the military attache

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Colonel Tamura. The Japanese saw in the Independent League of India an excellent instrument for arousing anti-British feeling in India and in the Indian communities in South-East Asia, and for sapping the morale of the Indian Army units who were manning the defences of Malaya and Singapore. To Bangkok, then, in the autumn of 1941, Japanese Imperial Headquarters, Section 8 (Intelligence) sent Major Iwaichi Fujiwara, a brilliant young field officer dedicated to the new order in East Asia and aflame with the passionate desire to sweep the British into the sea. After discussions with Pritam Singh at a series of secret rendezvous in Bangkok, Fujiwara came to an agreement with him: when the Japanese invaded Malaya, some of Pritam Singh's men would accompany Fujiwara and win over the Indian civilian population of Malaya and elements of the British Indian Army to the Japanese cause. He already had agents in the Malayan towns and villages where Indian troops were stationed. It was one of these, contacted by Mohan Singh, who brought Fujiwara to effect the surrender of the remnants of the 1114 Punjab Regiment. Fujiwara talked to the wounded battalion commander through an interpreter, 'You have done everything a soldier's honour requires of you. Your men are finished. They can never join up with your main party . Your responsibility as a British officer and as their commander is not to sacrifice them uselessly but to surrender. I promise you they will be well treated.' Colonel Fitzpatrick had expected rough treatment, not this appeal to soldierly honour. Weak from wounds and trusting to Mohan Singh's judgement, he handed over what was left of his battalion, the first sizeable group to surrender to the Japanese during the campaign in Malaya. It was 14 December, 1941, and the Punjabis were soon on their way to Japanese headquarters at Alor Star. It was the first, but by no means the last, of Fujiwara's successes. In every major action which followed, Fujiwara sent his infiltrators through the lines, sapping the will to fight of the half-trained and outfought Indian troops building up the nucleus of what was to become the 'Azad Hind Fauj', or 'India National Army', to fight against the British in East Asia. As the Japanese troops pushed on to Singapore, they became used to the odd sight of bearded Indians in jodhpurs riding unarmed round the battlefield, shepherding Indian prisoners back to the headquarters of the Independent League of India. Soon there were thousands of them, and even before Singapore was reached the nuisance value of such a force had become evident to the Japanese. On 5 February 1942, Fujiwara was ordered to send off a detachment northwards, with Pritam Singh, to repeat their success in Burma. When the end came in Singapore, on 15 February 1942, and 138,000 British, Indian and Australian troops surrendered to a numerically inferior force of three Japanese divisions, - 'the greatest military capitulation in our history', as Churchill called it - the Indians were handed over to the victorious Japanese in a brief ceremony at Farrer Park, where at least 45,000 Indian prisoners were addressed by Fujiwara and then by Mohan Singh. 'Japan is fighting for the freedom of Asia,' Fujiwara told them. 'You have been trodden down for centuries under the cruel heel of British Imperialism. Japan, your liberator and friend, is setting up a new order in Asia, of free and equal nations. The independence of India is essential to the independence of Asia and the peace of the world, and it is India's duty to free herself. Japan will do her utmost to help India.' Fujiwara then indicated Mohan Singh as the leader of the new Indian National Army which was to collaborate with the Japanese and free herself. The Indians were bewildered. It seemed as if they had not only been defeated and made prisoner, but had been abandoned by their British officers. If they joined the INA, they would at any rate avoid the unpleasant fate of remaining as POWs in

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