Subhas Chandra Bose Forms the Indian National Army
Some 40,000 Indian prisoners of war joined a Japanese-sponsored army to fight the British, and about 20,000 of them fought. The force was formed after the fall of Singapore in February 1942, when some 45,000 Indian troops became prisoners and were addressed by a Japanese officer and by Mohan Singh, a captured captain, who invited them to fight for Indian independence instead. The first version collapsed within the year over Japanese unwillingness to treat it as an allied army rather than an auxiliary. Subhas Chandra Bose revived it. He had been Congress president twice, had broken with Gandhi over methods, had escaped house arrest in Calcutta in 1941 and travelled through Afghanistan to Germany and then by submarine to Asia, and he took command in July 1943 and declared a provisional government of free India. He raised the Rani of Jhansi regiment of women, recruited among the Indian civilian population of Malaya and Burma, and fought at Imphal and Kohima in 1944 alongside the Japanese, where the campaign was destroyed by supply failure and monsoon. Bose died in an air crash in Taiwan in August 1945. The consequential moment came afterwards. The British tried three officers at the Red Fort in Delhi in late 1945, choosing deliberately a Hindu, a Muslim and a Sikh, and produced a defence campaign that united Congress and the League and a mutiny in the Royal Indian Navy in February 1946. The sentences were commuted, and Britain concluded that the army was no longer reliable.
- Year: 1942 CE
- Category: Military
