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.

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]

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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 Hitler

The 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 insurrection

Food 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]

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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]

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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]

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]
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No story is complete without a mutiny:

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.