CHAPTER 7

 

The Japanese Raj

The Conquest of India

David C Isby

 

 

 

The Japanese conquest of the British Indian Empire was one of the most dramatic successes of World War II. It was not a goal of Japan's opening offensive against the Allies in 1941–42 but it followed domino-fashion, from the military success that this offensive achieved. The Empire's fall was the direct result of decades of unrest preceding the outbreak of war, which had undercut the legitimacy of British rule in many eyes, not only in the subcontinent, but also in Britain. It was also made possible by Japan's willingness to use intelligence of this weakness to commit much of their strategic reserve—in ships, divisions, and fuel oil—that had been intended to maintain the defensive perimeter, to an offensive against India instead.

Throughout history, empire has succeeded empire. The British Indian Empire would surely have lasted but a scant few years more had it not been itself defeated and replaced by a Japanese successor as part of the tide of conquest that swept all Asia in 1942. Yet the same forces that doomed the British Raj turned out also to make sure that the Japanese Indian Empire, and its impact on India and the subcontinent, would be even briefer than its predecessor.

Overstretch That Succeeded

The British Indian Empire had been generally peripheral in prewar Japanese strategic thinking, including the issue of how its independence movement could best be used to Japanese advantage.1 However, as the Japanese strategy moved toward one of confrontation with Western imperialism and economic presence in Asia, India took on additional importance.

The Japanese prewar strategic reassessment of India initially saw it as the base of support of hostile forces in the Nan-yo, the resource-rich areas of Southeast Asia that were the Japanese strategic focus. They did not apply much of their limited planning resources to how this base function could be attacked, interdicted, or disrupted, or even what Japan's overall policy should be toward Indian nationalism and anti-imperialism. Yet the absence of planning and long-range thinking was easier to reconcile in the case of Japan than for the other combatants. This was because of the tendency, as strategic options became narrower, to optimistically believe that if enough spirit and guts imbued the leadership, the way would become clear. Thus, rather than a specific plan, or even a commitment to a particular purpose, the Japanese approach to India would be guided by an ability to respond to opportunities. More rationally, the Japanese stressed the achievement of what today would be called a “rapid reaction” capability, or “proactive” behavior. Realizing they were unlikely to prevail in a major battle of attrition, the Japanese made a point of being able to decide, plan, and act quickly to take advantage of transitory advantages. This was a goal of Japanese military thinking at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels alike.

So it was not a great stretch or a violation of precepts when, in the opening stages of the war, Japan realized that India would become a key member of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, even though prewar strategy had looked to Burma to provide its western perimeter.² Even Burma was a late addition, and Japanese operations there were originally intended only to cut off the Burma Road to China rather than opening a major front against the Allies.

The liaison conferences held in Tokyo in November 1941 had stressed the use of political and indirect penetration against India rather than direct military conquest.³ This reflected Japanese caution at the potential for an open-ended ground war in Asia, as in China. Yet, within a few months, a number of changes would force the Japanese to reassess their strategic perceptions of India. One factor that drew the Japanese toward a greater strategic focus on the subcontinent was the prospect of interallied cooperation. Even though Japan and Germany were not to be partners in a drive against the Soviet Union, the German successes in North Africa, the Middle East (including the abortive revolt in Iraq), and the possibility of a drive into South Asia from the southern flank of the Soviet Union suggested that German-Japanese cooperation could become a valid strategic concept.

That it did not was not the fault of Hiroshi Oshima, the Japanese ambassador in Berlin. He might never have understood the weakness in much of German strategy and their disinclination to look beyond the immediate operational situation.⁴But he and his German counterparts could both see that the British had to divert additional resources to the western approaches to India, which could weaken their ability to respond to a Japanese attack from the east. They also raised—but did not resolve—the issue of whether the objective of a move against India would be the disruption of Britain's worldwide lines of communication or be a continuation of Japan's expansion into Burma from Southeast Asia. The Germans, naturally, were most interested in a Japanese attack on Ceylon and subsequent attacks into the Indian Ocean. This would have a more direct potential impact on the Allied position in North Africa and the Middle East than on the battles that would shape Japan's future. In response, in Berlin in December 1941, Am-march on India. “After the capture of Singapore, Japan must turn toward India. When Japan attacks India from the east, it would be most advantageous if German troops threaten India from the west.”⁵

Yet, even though German troops were never to get within striking range of India, the Japanese were encouraged to look in that direction by what proved to be an illusion of cooperation. This made sure India would be included in the objectives that expanded after the victories of 1941-42, even though it appeared remote from more immediate Japanese objectives.

However, as Japanese prewar planning was swept away after the fall of Singapore, by what came to he called the “victory disease,” the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was redefined to include India.⁶ It was not a foregone conclusion how this would be implemented since Japanese strategy and planning remained largely service-specific. The Japanese navy reacted to the victories of 1942 by planning larger advances, focusing on Hawaii but also including India.⁷ In the words of Adm. Matome Ugaki, chief of staff to the Combined Fleet, “Our strategy aimed at an invasion of Hawaii, Fiji, Samoa, and New Caledonia as well as dominating over India and the destruction of the British [Indian Ocean] squadron.”⁸ However, the plans for the invasion of Australia were being finalized at this point, and the Japanese recognized that a simultaneous attack on India would pose insurmountable problems.⁹ Therefore, if both India and Australia were part of Japan's newly expanded strategic objectives, they would have to be prioritized.

The Plan Is Nothing, Planning Is Everything

In early 1942, Prime Minister Tojo was the main supporter of operations against India.¹⁰ He was opposed in this by Gen. Count Hisaichi Terauchi (commander in chief of the Southern Army, with headquarters at Saigon) and Gen. Hajime Sugiyama (chief of the Army General Staff), and the various intelligence agency. In addition to concern about Japan's strategic direction, they remained concerned about the dangers of success, which would leave Japan in occupation. They saw the Indians as incapable of establishing an orderly state after the British were driven out. These leaders had little time for non-Japanese allies and even distrusted their own collaborators of the Indian National Army (organized on Tojo's orders), much as they had originally distrusted the Burmese collaborators they were now trying to organize to support Japanese control.¹¹

Yet the army found India a possible option, in part as an alternative to ambitious naval plans for an expansion of the defensive perimeter throughout the Pacific.¹² It at least would not result in the piecemeal commitment of forces that the navy's strategy would entail. If a decision was made for a move against India, planning would have to begin in January-February, at the end of the Malaya campaign. Any move against India before the May monsoon might mean delaying the campaign to occupy upper Burma, including the vital airfields at Mandalay and Lashio, controlling access to China. If that happened the forces committed to Burma would have to deal with the remaining British and Chinese forces in upper Burma through the monsoon, with few resources available.

In early 1942 the Japanese saw the same two basic strategic options for offensive operations as the Germans (and British) did. A move against India could either strike at Ceylon, which then gave them the option of threatening Britain's Indian Ocean lifelines around the Cape of Good Hope; or strike directly at India, with a cross-border attack launched from Burma as soon as the campaign there concluded. The mechanisms of attack were also undecided. Naval raids—the navy's preferred option— and invasion were both considered.¹³ The two invasion options were planned as “Operation 11” and “Operation 21,” against Ceylon and India respectively.¹⁴

Japan's attacks against British forces seemed irresistible in the spring of 1942. The triumph of Singapore was followed by the relentless advance in Burma, despite Chinese intervention and the difficult terrain that, together with Japanese shoestring logistics, slowed their advance more than did the British. The question that had to be resolved was where the next target would be. Obviously, the conclusions of November 1941 were now overtaken by events.

The need to improvise follow-on strategic planning—where there was neither the time nor inclination for an extensive analysis of alternatives—started when Japan diverged from prewar planning after the initial objectives of 1941-42 were met.¹⁵ The legacy of prewar planning meant that an improvised direct assault against India represented a gambler's throw of resources that could lead to immediate or long-term disaster. However, it was also clear, given the overall strategy, that if they did not win a battlefield victory over the Allies in the first six months, they were unlikely to win in the end. India was obviously the base from which the Allies' industrial superiority would allow the eventual buildup of forces and reoccupation of Burma and, beyond that, Southeast Asia. The Japanese were also under no illusions that the political turmoil in India might prevent this.

Implementing this high-risk strategy would be difficult. It would mean sending the exhausted troops from the Malaya and Java campaigns to India. They would comprise the follow-up echelons. The divisions responsible for the initial assault would have to be brought down from the central reserve in Japan and Manchuria, which itself was a risk. The divisions that had gone into Malaya greatly benefited from intensive training in French Indochina, but there would be no time for that if the follow-up operations were to benefit from the strategic momentum of Japan's victories.

Whether the target was to be Ceylon or India itself, an option including an invasion would require pulling together convoys of Japan's relatively few—and now increasingly vital—fast merchant ships. This meant disrupting scheduled convoy sailings and ensuring that stockpiles of petroleum, steel, and other strategic materials would be reduced to a level far below what was considered acceptable.

In addition to requiring new strategic replanning, the Japanese advances also brought them into contact with new Asian populations. The Japanese came increasingly to see themselves as their propaganda presented them—as the deliverer of Asia from white control. The brutality of their own decades-long rule in Korea and their war against China never entered the calculations of Japanese decision makers. The contradictions increasingly pushing the British Indian Empire toward its end—how an empire that legitimated its mobilization for war on the grounds of democracy and self-rule could deny it to an Indian empire led by an Anglicized elite—were not part of Japanese thinking. Thus, the Japanese were surprised by the increasing tension between ruler and ruled in their new empire, and that it was not limited to the ethnic Chinese who were the first targets of their repression.

The Defense of India

The British were hastily improvising a defense of India. They had not previously considered a threat to India from the east.¹⁶With the threat coming so soon after the defeat at Singapore, there was little that could be done. Many of the available reserves—a division of British infantry, a wing of Hurricane fighters—had been lost in that debacle and the subsequent one in Java. Finally, on March 31, the British Joint Planning Staff assessed that if the Japanese decided on a bold offensive strategy against India, there was a danger of British defeat.¹⁷

The British were in a poor position to defend against any of the Japanese options. Churchill explained to a secret session of the House of Commons: “Alternatively [to an invasion of Australia) the Japanese may invade India. There is no doubt of their ability, if they choose to concentrate their efforts, to invade and overrun a large part of India, to take Calcutta and Madras, and certainly to make very cruel air raids upon defenseless Indian cities.”¹⁸ The commander in chief in India, Field Marshal Wavell—with only one British and six poorly trained and equipped Indian divisions available outside the Northwest Frontier—saw the main threat as coming overland from Burma, but he was overruled by the chiefs of staff in London, who redeployed his British division to Ceylon. ¹⁹

The Bengal administration, adjacent to Burma, was in no shape to be in the front line of a major conflict. It was unable to cope with the influx of refugees and military reinforcements, as well as a resurgence in nationalist unrest. Districts such as Contai, Midnapore, and Dacca were in open revolt much of the time.²⁰ The limited number of British troops available rendered the internal security situation paramount. There was the threat of widespread insurrection, which increased as it increasingly appeared to much of the Indian population that the Japanese advance was unstoppable and that British rule in India was doomed.²¹

The Indian nationalist leadership divided on the Japanese threat that had appeared on their doorstep. The Congress Party, mainstream of Hindu nationalism, had opposed participation in the war, which had been entered into by the Viceroy without asking Indian approval. However, Congress was not united. Leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru offered stronger Indian participation in the war effort in return for immediate independence or at least its guarantee. Radical members of the Congress Party who had already diverged from the prewar leadership, such as Subhash Bose, saw the Japanese as a positive force and sought their assistance.

The Muslim League, with a recent claim for their own country as part of the former empire, were more open to cooperation with the British, but were concerned about the threat of Hindu domination. Marxists such as M. N. Roy advocated strong allegiance to the cause of the United Nations, which included the Soviet Union. Mahatma Gandhi promoted a policy of passive noncooperation with the Japanese as the only moral policy. In short, there was little unity that could be “operationalized,” either to rally a patriotic defense against the Japanese invasion or to rise in support of it to gain independence.

An attempt to deal with the nationalist unrest that was undercutting the defense of India led to the British dispatch of the Cripps mission in March 1942. This brought Sir Stafford Cripps, the British politician who had been most sympathetic to at least the Congress Party's approach to Indian nationalism in prewar years, to make a deal. Between the nationalists' desire to use the moment of greatest peril for maximum political leverage and Churchill's and the Viceroy's unwillingness to make concessions at such a time, there was little common ground. Psychologically and politically, May 1942 found the British Indian Empire at the weakest point in its history. The Indian population had been impressed by Japanese power. The seemingly unstoppable advance made an impact on civilian and soldier alike, similar to what was seen in France in 1940 and in North Africa at the peak of Rommel's advance. As a result of this overall assessment that no resistance could be made to Japanese landings in the Calcutta area until at least June, the Admiralty believed emphasis should be on “denial measures” such as preparation for demolitions.²² The discussions of a wide-scale “scorched earth” policy further reduced morale. No word had yet leaked out to India of Japanese atrocities in Southeast Asia, or that non-Chinese were not to be spared the full weight of Japanese rule.

Map 11. Japanese Invasion and Occupation of India

Japan Invades India

The Japanese decided to make a rapid thrust outside of what had been seen as their strategic sphere of influence and defensive perimeter only a few months before. The strike at India would have to be approved by the highest levels of both services and the government. The strategic goal was now to block access to China not by controlling airfields, but by defeating the British Indian Empire. Implementing the Clausewitzian concept of center of gravity with a vengeance, they aimed to deprive the Allies of bases from which they could both resupply China and mount an offensive to retake Southeast Asia.

The eventual plan was a variation of Operation 21 proposed by Gen. Shojhiro Iida, 15th Army commander. He favored an offensive into the plain of the Ganges.23 The final compromise was marrying the go-now approach with the amphibious component of Operation 11. It subsumed the plan, already advanced for an Indian Ocean raid by Japan's carrier strike force supported by fast battleships and oilers. This force would remain committed to the action, but after their attack on Ceylon and the installations there, would pursue any surviving British forces before covering the arrival of two slower follow-up forces, one a large invasion convoy, the other of battleships and their escorts to provide shore bombardment and to prevail against any surviving British battleships that tried to challenge the invasion force (see Map 11).

The key to this Japanese change of strategy—the decision that the strategic reserve would have the greatest value if committed against India rather than elsewhere—was improved intelligence. Japanese intelligence regarding their British opponents had been weak before the war, until the capture of French Indochina gave them a base.²⁴ Then aerial reconnaissance over Malaya had shown them how weak the British position was. The Japanese thus came late to grasp the fact that for a numerically weaker attacker, intelligence was key, with its ability to locate the transitory advantages that an opportunistic planning process and a rapid deployment capability might exploit.

Before the war the Japanese had not achieved good intelligence coverage of the subcontinent. They greatly overestimated the size of the forces in India well into 1942, believing there were a half-million men in thirty divisions (seven British, twenty-three Indian).²⁵ However, they may have had a general idea that the newer, high-numbered Indian army divisions were raw and insufficiently trained with the cadre of prewar officers and NCOs stretched very thin indeed. The Indian army had never planned for massive expansion, and its recruiting, training, and induction were still very much dependent on “handcrafting” by regimental officers and NCOs. Nor was there an effective program in place to bring training lessons from other fronts home to those units still forming in India.

But there were other intelligence sources that were able to convince the Japanese that a strike directly at India would work as required: the Germans, for instance. German-Japanese cooperation had remained largely illusory, but intelligence was one area where the potential payoff was the highest, when disruption to British secure cable communications through the Middle East forced a greater reliance on longer routes or, more frequently, radio messages. The Germans proved able to intercept and decode long-haul communications between India and Britain, which were then passed to the Japanese in a degree of inter-Axis cooperation that had not been previously achieved.

From these reports, the Japanese extrapolated the weakness of the forces defending India—key information, to be sure— and more important, the sense of confusion and defeatism among the British. It told them that a Japanese offensive move would be hindered more by their own limitations than the resistance of the British Indian Empire. It was clear that this was an area where the enemy was weakest in spirit—that neither Englishmen in London or Delhi nor the majority of Indians were willing to sacrifice to defeat the Japanese because of the decline in the perceived legitimacy of British imperial rule, which undercut any material advantages the British might have had.

To take advantage of this transitory crisis—before Churchill was able to provide top-down leadership or the Indian army could address the problem of the defense of India in an effective way—meant striking before the monsoon season began in mid-May.

The first stage of the operation was opened in mid-March, with the invasion of the Andaman Islands (evacuated by their limited British garrison) as the Japanese navy entered the Indian Ocean in earnest. In the first two weeks, Vice Adm. Chuichi Nagumo's 1st Air Fleet operations failed to sink the British battle fleet, which retired out of range, but sank the carrier Hermes, the cruisers Dorsetshire and Cornwall, and large numbers of smaller warships and merchant ships throughout the Indian Ocean. Once the British air and naval threat had been reduced, the Japanese inflicted heavy damage to the port at Trincomalee, including the tank farm and the dockyard. The carriers then ranged northward and inflicted the same treatment against Bengal, striking airfields and military installations around Calcutta and Chittagong. This time, however, the port installations were not hit.

So far, this was consistent with the original plan for an Indian Ocean raid, although a few weeks in advance of it. But among the effects of concentrating Japan's carrier strength was preventing long-range reconnaissance aircraft from shadowing the troop convoy and the battle squadron as they entered the Indian Ocean under radio silence. The British, however, through U.S.-supplied decryptions and other intelligence sources, soon realized that this was not simply a carrier raid. But whether Ceylon or India would be the target remained uncertain. Ceylon nevertheless received most of the reinforcements.

Thus it came as a surprise when, in early April, the Japanese seaborne invasion of India commenced with the main thrust, utilizing two divisions, coming ashore southwest of Calcutta at Balasore in the state of Orissa. Other, smaller forces came ashore between Chittagong and the right flank of the beachhead. It was a small invasion, the logistics improvised and run on a shoestring even by Japanese standards. It was weeks before the first follow-up divisions were able to come ashore.

But while the Japanese were at risk from an immediate counterattack, they were strong enough to secure their beachhead from the immediate local counterattacks the British were able to launch. In early 1942 the British lacked a central reserve in India, their ability to move reserve formations down from the Northwest Frontier and the interior limited by civil unrest, which affected movement on the railroads and created problems with the infrastructure. These actions were not widespread, and the increasing civil unrest did not amount to a general uprising, but the cutting of rail lines and destruction of telegraph lines at key moments prevented the British from shifting reserves against the Japanese beachhead.²⁶ The British responded by arresting the Congress Party leadership, Gandhi, and many other leading Indian nationalists.

As a result, they were unable to launch a large-scale counterattack that could have pushed back the overstretched Japanese invasion. While to the British this appeared the proverbial “stab in the back,” it was in fact the lack of reserves and British planning itself that prevented such an operation. The counterattacks launched were those envisioned by GHQ India in their initial defense plan, not a single hammer blow, but multiple blows by uncoordinated, reduced-strength brigade forces.²⁷ In a series of battles in the initial weeks of the campaign, both before and after the Japanese capture of Calcutta, the British launched a number of counterattacks, which, because of the problems experienced by British commanders, ended up operating independently.

These counterattacks over the crucial weeks of the campaign were often marked by great heroism by British and Indian troops alike, and often tactically proficient or clever, but in the end they were operationally futile. In this way, they resembled the offensive operations of the combined arms “jock columns” in the North African desert at the same time.

The initial Japanese carrier air attacks had defeated the limited British airpower in Ceylon and Bengal—the latter a numerically inferior force of Hawker Hurricanes and Curtiss Mohawks—and ensured that there would be little air opposition to the invasion. Japanese bomber aircraft had been able to move forward to the airfields at Mandalay and Rangoon soon after they were taken, and these now launched a series of attacks on the cities of Bengal, especially Calcutta. As in Burma, the shock of the air attacks was much greater than the damage inflicted and led to the British decision not to try and defend Calcutta.

What happened after the Japanese flag was raised in Calcutta was exactly what had been envisioned by the India Command's Joint Planning Staff in their assessment of March 14, 1942.²⁸ This included “(a) a big refugee problem; (b) a serious internal security problem; (c) the probability of fifth column activities in Bengal; (d) large scale desertion of labor from threatened areas, paralyzing all industrial and transport activities; (e) a breakdown in civil administration; (f) large scale looting; and (g) general loss of morale throughout the population of India, which could not escape having an effect on the Indian forces.”

The arrival of the monsoon in mid-May was accompanied by the end of the British retreat from Burma, adding an overland threat to Bengal in addition to that from the expanding Japanese beachhead. The British thought the monsoon would bring a halt to military operations. What it actually did was impede the logistically light Japanese a great deal less than the British. As in Malaya and the Philippines, the Japanese demonstrated in India that they were able to function despite a limited and frayed supply line. They operated on appropriated food— causing starvation in the areas through which they advanced— and on impressed transport.

By May the Japanese threat to India was achieving the proportions the British Joint Planning Staff had estimated two months earlier: eleven divisions by sea and two more advancing over the border from Burma.²⁹ Once Calcutta had been captured the Japanese were faced with their next decision, of a main advance. The ultimate decision was for a drive westward with Bombay as the ultimate objective.

The prospect of an advance across the subcontinent, with open flanks and a tortuous supply line leading back to Japan, was a daunting one. Ceylon-based submarines had already started to exact losses from Japanese troop and supply convoys. But there was no strong resistance that could have crumpled the overstretched Japanese advance. The key to this was the British view—in Delhi, though not in London—that the situation was hopeless.³⁰ As with the French in 1940, this enhanced the potential that even limited operational and tactical defeats would have strategic results, and prevented available depth and resources from being effectively utilized. The fall of the Indian empire resembled in many ways the fall of France. It was unable to recover from tactical and operational defeats because the national will and ability to resist was low, and many of the Indian divisions proved to be as untrained and underequipped as French reservists were in 1940.

There was no mass rising of Indians to meet the Japanese, though the unrest did greatly hinder British military efforts. It did not matter that only a minority of the educated classes in the Indian empire would say “Better the Japanese than the British” or, in the case of many Muslims, “Better the Japanese than the Hindu-dominated Congress Party,” just as only a minority of Frenchmen actually did say “Better Hitler than Leon Blum” in the years before their defeat in 1940. These attitudes, rather, showed that they did not have the will to be mobilized for a war effort involving all of society and its economy the way Stalin was able to mobilize the Soviet Union in 1941 and— without the use of secret police—Churchill mobilized Britain in 1940.

The Indian empire was also suffering from a crisis of legitimacy in 1942. In some ways it was not the educated Indians who wanted independence who were important. The British had devised the military elements of the Indian empire so that they did not matter, the manpower being provided by those groups that had traditionally been associated with the British army. Resources for the war effort were, as required, to be provided by a top-down command economy. But increasingly, not the Indians, but the British leadership (and the Anglicized Indians who were also part of the leadership classes of British India) did not believe in the empire. They were unwilling to fight and die for the maintenance of British rule in India.

This led to the collapse of resistance throughout the subcontinent. The Japanese largely advanced into a vacuum. The advance was slowed by no more than the summer heat and the general anarchy as British rule collapsed. The British held on in Ceylon, in the south—the Japanese did not think it worthwhile advancing there—and in the Punjab and Sind, with the port of Karachi providing a haven for reinforcements. Additional British divisions arrived in May and June,³¹and U.S. aircraft arrived to provide air cover. This reflected the decision to go with Operation 21 rather than Operation 11 as the model for the invasion, which limited the Japanese ability to move against British lines of communication running to those areas they still held. While Ceylon would become increasingly isolated as the Japanese expanded southward they were unable to pull together the additional resources that would have been required for an invasion.

Attempting an Occupation

The most immediate result of the fall of Delhi and the flight of the vice regal government to Karachi was its benefits for the Japanese position in China. Without the logistics and communications support that came from bases in India, Allied airpower in China largely eroded away. The Japanese ability to make advances in China was limited only by the increasing shortage of their own resources, which in turn was compounded by the invasion of India.

As the Japanese occupation of the vast majority of the subcontinent began, the first reaction of the Indian populace was curiosity.³² They had been totally unarmed as a result of British policy, whose intent was to prevent active resistance as well as to create feelings of powerlessness. So they could not have offered active resistance even had they been so motivated. The Indian population was also faced with the more immediate problems of a nonfunctional economy. There was widespread destruction of infrastructure and industry, as there had been in Burma and the Andaman Islands.³³ This meant that the potential for widespread food shortages soon became very real.

In the aftermath of their occupation of major objectives in India, the Japanese repeated their practice—as in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Rangoon—of having British prisoners sweep streets, perceiving this to be a ritualized act of public humiliation. However, as in the previous incidents, this had the effect of increasing respect for the British military among the population, who saw them maintaining discipline under difficult conditions. This, along with the immediate economic disruption, led to the now-departed British rule quickly being recalled with nostalgia by many Indians.

Ill prepared to control much of India at the same time as it was trying to do so in China, the Japanese took over the British system of administration, including its non-European personnel, wherever feasible. As a result, it appeared to be a continuation of the Raj under a new, more brutal and less effective leadership. Effectively, the administration was rooted in the hands of a relatively few Japanese military officers, with the army proving considerably more brutal and repressive in practice than the navy.

Indian nationalists, while happy to be relieved of British rule, did not find the Japanese sympathetic to their demands for self-determination. To the Japanese, the Congress Party leadership was not seen as fit material for collaboration. The Japanese may have used the rhetoric of removing a dying imperialism from Asia and reviving Asia for the Asians, but presented with the leadership the British had jailed earlier in 1942, they left them in jail, deciding that they were basically no more than brown Englishmen, and if they had resisted the rule of a distant British emperor, were even more likely to resist the rule of a Japanese one.

Gandhi, despite his worldwide stature, was subject to continued confinement. When his followers in Orissa tried to meet Japanese extraction of in-kind food taxes with nonviolent resistance, they were met with heavy firepower and Gandhi himself was threatened with summary beheading. Fortunately for the Japanese, calmer heads in Tokyo prevented this, but it was a clear demonstration of the rapidly developing tensions between the occupiers and the occupied. Throughout India the general attitude toward the Japanese followed that of the Andaman islanders who first experienced their occupation: impressed by their energy, efficiency, and discipline, but horrified by their atrocities and the brutality inherent in their system.

The Japanese soon brought into India their own army of Indians recruited from prisoners of war and ethnic Indians in Southeast Asia after their victories in Singapore and Hong Kong.³⁴ These units had seen little fighting in the Japanese conquest of India, being mainly used for logistics and second-line duties, including occupation. They were important in allowing the Japanese to try and legitimize their authority by borrowing the cause of Indian nationalism. However, the disintegration of the “voluntary” Indian National Army in December 1942 showed how ineffective the Japanese were at dealing with the realities of India in anything other than the direct top-down attempt to work through the control of local intermediaries, which had characterized their actions from Korea through China into Southeast Asia.³⁵

The Bengal famine of 1943 led to the first major crisis of Japanese rule. It took several million lives and reflected the poor harvests in much of India and the loss of rice imports from Burma. The Japanese had commandeered much of the remaining transportation assets to support their continuing military campaigns against the British in the south and west, so there was little ability to shift food. Despite repeated air attacks on Ceylon, which suppressed much of its offensive capability, Japan continued to collect taxes in rice at the height of the famine, as it had in similar circumstances in Java.

The Japanese did attempt to alleviate hardship in the areas of India they occupied. They tried to increase rice yields. They tried to introduce sweet potatoes and other alternative crops. Conscript labor was rounded up whenever it could be identified—which in India often meant in urban areas—under military direction, and was sent to the field for what amounted to slave labor either in agriculture or on infrastructure repair. Fugitives from this conscription were soon on the move throughout Japanese-occupied India.

But in the final analysis the Japanese Indian Empire was faced with widespread famine conditions because of the lack of petrol, the disastrous collapse of internal communications, and the continued destruction of war, including the loss of coastal shipping. In response, the Japanese attempted to build and repair infrastructure. Their efforts at building air bases and railroads were more intense than those the British had tried to put in place before they were defeated. The Japanese made massive use of prisoner and conscript labor, as in Southeast Asia.

Despite the declaration of the nominal independence of India in these efforts, the Japanese did not invest heavily in building Indian institutions or forces that they could use. They showed no real interest in respecting either the traditional cultures of the subcontinent or in the modernized and educated classes and their capabilities. The Indian National Army was rebuilt after its December 1942 collapse, but while its manpower strength was considerable, it had little real effectiveness. Like the puppet forces in Japanese-occupied China and Manchuria, it was used primarily for internal security.

This approach to occupation led to the Japanese becoming increasingly familiar with the indigenous tradition of revolt in the subcontinent, which had been focused against foreign rule since long before the British appeared and was now reflected in increasing, if disorganized, opposition to Japanese rule. This was combined with the view of educated Indians that the Japanese offered all of the oppressive features of British rule without any of its enlightenment. Throughout Indian society, there was a hatred of the Japanese military police. This was compounded by widespread Japanese use of mass executions and torture, especially where espionage or sabotage was suspected. Gratuitous executions became a mark of Japanese rule.

Japan Loses the Empire

The fate of Japan's Indian empire was not determined by events in the subcontinent itself, but by the decisive battles fought against the United States in the Pacific. The Japanese also found that they could no more complete the military occupation of the subcontinent than they could that of China. They could hold most of what was militarily and economically valuable, but occupying the frontiers of British India or even, beyond that, the passes of the Hindu Kush that provide a natural forward defense, was far beyond their capability.

In the long term, the subcontinent was peripheral to both Britain and Japan. The British, short on resources, were so absorbed by the struggle for Europe and the Mediterranean that the preservation of an Indian empire that would almost inevitably end or be transformed soon after the conflict was a distant third priority.

The British defeat in India accelerated the inevitable process of their move to junior partner in the Anglo-American alliance. This forced them to adjust their policies to U.S. requirements if they wanted to receive the necessary resources to continue the conflict. It was among the motivating reasons behind the British grant of independence, in the form of “dominion status,” to the remaining four British-occupied provinces of western India— Punjab, Sind, Baluchistan, and the Northwest Frontier—in 1943. There was considerable unrest at this. The Sikhs of the Punjab were particularly reluctant to become part of the new state, so were given autonomy and the chance to opt out after the war.

With most of India occupied by the Japanese, the British had to also give greater weight to the Muslim population of the west, with the new dominion being a Muslim-majority area. But they realized that the Muslim League, under Ali Jinnah, had already been diverging on a course toward partition. This had been opposed by the Congress Party and the Hindu majority, but as they were now under Japanese occupation, they had to be content with promises of their own dominion after being liberated.

In the new dominion, named “Pakistan,” the British established a government-in-exile of an independent India. The need to have at least a nominally Indian government involved also forced them to transfer back almost all of the seven Indian army divisions that were overseas at the time of the Japanese invasion. Along with newly formed Pakistani divisions (equipped by the United States, though still trained by the British) and U.S. and British divisions, these forces would have to eject the Japanese from India.

This new Indian government was not built around Indian nationalist leaders—since these were already in Japanese custody— but was drawn from major landowners in the Punjab and refugees, including a number of the native rulers of prewar “non-British” India. Whenever possible, the British made sure that leaders linked with the Indian army and the “martial races” of India received the political power.

This series of changes reflected U.S. political pressure. Since U.S. airpower and extensive ground troops had been deployed into Karachi and up into the Punjab, American domestic political concerns insisted that this had to be seen as a battle for liberation, not as a battle to reestablish the British Indian Empire. There was little even the most stalwart empire loyalists in London could do about the situation.

The period between late 1942 and 1944, the two years prior to the Anglo-American move back into India, included limited grand offensives toward Bombay and Delhi and moves to secure control of the air and sea around Japanese-controlled India. This involved the buildup of strategic bombers in and around Karachi, to hit targets throughout South Asia. Ceylon, which previously had been reinforced only by means of hard-fought Malta-style convoy battles, was now turned into a jumping off point for air and naval operations that severed the Japanese logistic lifeline except for a trickle flowing in overland from Thailand.

The Japanese were unable to put in place a system of indirect rule that might have secured their Indian empire, for as the Allies advanced, the Indians looked to them increasingly as liberators. The Allied offensive was a slow and deliberate one compared to Japan's lightning victory, but in the end it was inevitable that Japan was unable to hold its Indian empire. The Japanese flag was hauled down—in Delhi, Calcutta, and throughout India— and replaced with the flag of an independent Dominion of India that had been created expressly to defeat it

It is readily apparent that Japanese occupation transformed the Indian movement toward independence. While prewar Indian nationalists such as Nehru had shown sympathy for a policy of nonalignment with prewar great power competition, the effects of the Japanese occupation were to burn the necessity for collective security into the postwar Indian consciousness as effectively as it did that of the French in Europe. Postwar India was shaped by the need to reconcile this requirement with the nationalist impetus of many of their policies. This prevented the move toward international isolation that the Japanese occupation had on Burma.

After the war, India took a different course than it would have if the prewar nationalists had led the movement to independence. As it was, independence came with liberation. Those few prewar leaders who survived Japanese captivity—Gandhi had starved himself to death in a fruitless hunger strike—were seen as irrelevant. The leaders of the Dominion of India were landowners, native princes, and men thrust forward from the Indian army, conservative pragmatists. While strong nationalists, they realized India's future would lie primarily with the United States and secondarily with Britain, much as the leaders of Australia and New Zealand did. This included membership in U.S.-led regional defense organizations.

The Dominion of India's pragmatic focus extended to the Dominion of Pakistan. While regretting partition, they saw this as reflecting necessity and removing the potential irritant of the Northwest Frontier. Relations between the two countries, within the Commonwealth, were cordial. The Dominion of Pakistan also joined postwar U.S.-organized regional security organizations. Ceylon's wartime British occupation was reflected in its remaining a colony for many years thereafter.

The Japanese occupation of India, even where brief, left lasting resentment. On the positive side, they had a passion for building and public works, where the Western colonial powers had tended to leave well enough alone when they had not benefited from control or from the economy. In the Andaman Islands, for instance, the Japanese built roads and airfields and port facilities, where the British had been content to have the minimal amount that the islands' plantation-and-prison economy required.

The ephemeral Japanese Raj had however, been a strategic success. Despite defeats in the Pacific and eventual defeat in India, the Japanese blocked the resupply routes to China long enough for the rotten Nationalist government to finally fall apart in late 1944. Much of the Japanese army in China was transferred to Indochina, where its mass was able to slow the Allied advance to a crawl along the Mekong River. The badly wounded Soviet Union, whose forces had met the American General Patton in eastern Poland decided to honor its treaty of neutrality with Japan, freeing more divisions from the Kwangtung army in Manchuria. Exhausted in Europe, Britain's Atlee government had no more taste for war, especially after Singapore was recovered. Even the remorseless Americans were brought around with the quiet Japanese offer to evacuate the Philippines. The Treaty of Lima in 1946 left Japan with most of Indochina and China and a couple of small problems named Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse-Tung.

The Reality

The changing Japanese options and plans regarding India were actually considered. As it was, the Japanese settled for the “Indian Ocean Adventure” of spring 1942 to support their invasion of Burma. It was 1944 before they tried an overland invasion of India, which was defeated.

The British plans for the defense of India are genuine. The events once the Japanese invade are taken from British appreciation of the “worst possible case” of a Japanese invasion, which Japan could have used an intelligence advantage to achieve.

The British failure in the invasion is assumed. Initial British defensive plans collapsed in both the 1941 invasion of Malaya and the 1944 invasion of India. In the latter case, there were enough resources, space, and time to compensate for the initial Japanese success. That was unlikely to be the case in spring 1942.

The Indian unrest and the arrest of nationalist leaders actually took place in August 1942, brought forward in this version by a few months. Today's India was shaped by the emergence of the Japanese threat in 1942, transforming the independence movement.

The conduct of the Japanese occupation is taken from that in China and Southeast Asia, with India-specific information taken from their occupation of the Andaman Islands. Unlike the Germans in the Channel Islands, the Japanese did not set out to make the Andamans a model occupation. The eventual Japanese defeat in India is what they experienced in Burma writ large.

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Broomfield, J. M., Elite Conflict in a Plural Society (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1968).

Chatterjee, A. C, India's Struggle For Freedom (Chuckerbutly & Chatterjee, Calcutta, 1947).

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Fay, Peter Ward, The Forgotten Army: India's Armed Struggle for Independence, 1942—45 (University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1993).

Goldstein, Donald M., and Dillon, Katherine V. (eds.), Fading Victory: The Diary of Admiral Matome Ugaki, 1941—45 (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 1991).

Hayashi, Saburo, and Coox, Alvin D, Kogun: The Japanese Army in the Pacific War (Marine Corps Association, Quantico, 1959).

James, Robert Rhode (ed.), Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches,  vol. 6 (Cassell, London, 1974).

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Ohmae, Toshikazu, “Japanese Operations in the Indian Ocean,” in David C. Evans (ed.), The Japanese Navy in World War II in the Words of Former Japanese Naval Officers (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 1986).

Prasad Bisheshwar, Defense of India: Policy and Plans (Orient Longmans, Delhi, 1963).

Sudata, Deb Chaudbury, Japanese Imperialism and the Indian National Movement: A Study of the Political and Psychological Impact of Possible Invasion and Actual Occupation (University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana. Ph.D. dissertation [UM1 9236439], 1992).

Takushiro, Hattori, The Complete History of the Greater East Asia War, vol. 2 (500th Military Intelligence Service Group, Tokyo, 1953).

Toland, John, The Rising Sun (Random House, New York, 1970).

Voigt, Johannes H., India in the Second World War (Arnold-Heinemann, Delhi, 1987).

 

Notes

   1.  See generally W. Ellsbree, Japan's Role in Southeast Asian National Movements 1940-45 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1953), and Joyce Lebra (ed.), Japan's Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Oxford University Press, Kuala Lumpur, 1975).

   2.  Lebra, op.cit., x.

   3.  Johannes H. Voigt, India in the Second World War (Arnold-Heinemann, Delhi, 1987), 86.

   4.  Carl Boyd,Hitler's Japanese Confidant (University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 1993), 38.

   5.  John Toland, The Rising Sun (Random House, New York, 1970), 245.

   6.  Ibid.

   7.  John Toland, Saburo Hayashi and Alvin D. Coox, Kogun: The Japanese Army in the Pacific War (Marine Corps Association, Quantico, 1959), 42-43.

   8.  Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon (eds.), Fading Victory: The Diary of Admiral Matome Ugaki, 1941–45 (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 1991), 128.

   9.  Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Document No. 4076, Translated Records (University Publications of America).

 10.  A. C. Chatterjee, India s Struggle For Freedom (Chuckerbutly & Chatterjee, Calcutta, 1947).

 11.  Ibid.

 12.  Edward J. Drea, In the Service of the Emperor (University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1999), 34–36.

 13.  Ibid., 36.

 14.  Hattori Takushiro, The Complete History of the Greater East Asia War, vol. 2 (500th Military Intelligence Service Group, Tokyo, 1953), 156.

 15.  On naval planning for the Indian Ocean, see Toshikazu Ohmae, “Japanese Operations in the Indian Ocean,” in David C. Evans (ed.), The Japanese Navy in World War II in the Words of Former Japanese Naval Officers (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 1986), 106–110.

  16. Bisheshwar Prasad, Defense of India: Policy and Plans (Orient Longmans, Delhi, 1963), 136–39.

  17. Ibid., 139.

  18. On April 23, 1942. Robert Rhode James (ed.), Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, vol. 6 (Cassell, London, 1974), 6,618.

 19.  Voigt, op.cit, 106

 20.  J. M. Broomfield, Elite Conflict in a Plural Society (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1968), 305.

 21.  Voigt. op.cit, 107.

 22.  Ibid., 107.

 23.  Ibid., 183.

 24.  See generally Hayashi and Coox, op.cit., 31–36.

 25.  Ibid., 44.

 26.  This is what actually happened in August 1942, when India historically was in danger from a postmonsoon Japanese advance.

 27.  Prasad, op.cit, 170–83.

 28.  Ibid., 153–155.

 29.  Ibid., 160.

 30.  Voigt, op.cit., 144.

 31.  Ibid, 168.

 32.  Deb Chaudbury Sudata, Japanese Imperialism and the Indian National Movement: A Study of the Political and Psychological Impact of Possible Invasion and Actual Occupation (University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana, Ph.D. dissertation [UMI 9236439], 1992), 228.

 33.  Ibid., 229–32.

 34. See generally Peter Ward Fay, The Forgotten Army: India's Armed Struggle for Independence, 1942-45 (University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1993).

 35.  Ibid, 201.