The Battle for Imphal / Kohima in 1944 was earlier this week voted ‘Britain’s greatest battle’ over infinitely more celebrated British battles, such as those of D-Day and Waterloo, in a contest organised by the National Army Museum at London. As someone who reads obsessively on whatever he can find on WW II as well on Bose – and by extension the INA – I was much intrigued.
Historian Robert Lyman, making the case for Kohima in a debate at the museum, asserted, without exaggeration, that “Great things were at stake in a war with the toughest enemy any British army has had to fight,” and ranked it with Midway, El Alamein and Stalingrad as the main turning point battles of WW II. The overall battle saw approximately 12,600 Commonwealth casualties and 58,800 Japanese ones, in what writer Compton Mackenzie has described as “fighting as desperate as any in recorded history”.
For the British, the battle was critical since Kohima was the key to Imphal, Imphal to Dimapur, and Dimapur – which had a massive supply dump which the Japanese would need to sustain further war effort this far from their supply lines – as the key to British India itself. Capturing that dump would enable the Japanese to consolidate and replenish their starving troops and kick off a campaign into India’s interior, much like they had sliced through Burma. In reverse, when the Japanese were forced to retreat, it was seen as ‘the biggest defeat the Japanese had known in their entire history’ till then. Till that point, advancing Japanese ground forces were largely assumed to be invincible, carrying all before them. After this battle, that myth was shattered and the momentum swung the other way.
For India, the battle had intriguing implications. If you transport yourself back in time, you are at a sort of cusp in the way India’s destiny was headed. Indian troops fought in large numbers as part of the Allied forces, as they did elsewhere. But here, they found on the opposing side, along with the Japanese, soldiers of Subhash Bose’s INA. Though the INA’s role could never have been militarily decisive, given its numbers and equipment, it would have been a romantic ideal for the INA to have been at the very tip of the Japanese advance, as Bose had wanted, and to have dislodged the British from Indian soil as part of a Japanese victory. However, that was not to be. Some look upon with nostalgia at what may have been had it happened, envisaging the INA’s military success sparking a revolt within the Indian Army. As Peter Ward Fay writes in his book on the INA, The Forgotten Army, ‘the magnificent confidence trick that made possible the Indian Army, indeed the Raj itself, turned on the unthinking reliability of the sepoy. And without the sepoy, (the officer leading the counteroffensive, British Maj-Gen William) Slim was nothing.’
If the Japanese had won – and they very nearly did during the initial offensive – would an INA hoisting an Indian flag as part of a victorious anti-British force have shaken the ‘unthinking reliability of the sepoy’? I do not quite agree with Lyman when he says that the Indian troops “weren’t fighting for the British or the Raj but for a newly emerging and independent India and against the totalitarianism of Japan.” It could equally be argued that the INA troops were not fighting for the Japanese empire but for Bose’s vision of an emerging and soon-to-be-independent India. This claim is an overly romanticised view of the British who were hardly reluctant in enforcing totalitarianism in circumstances where their national interest dictated it.
A Japanese-INA victory could also have had another implication: an Axis tie-up on Indian soil. Andrew Roberts, in his The Storm Of War, writes that “If Japan’s attack on eastern India and Ceylon had been co-ordinated with a German advance through Egypt, Iran and Iraq – prior to Operation Barbarossa – the British Empire could have been severely threatened in northern India”. Rommel marching through the lightly defended Khyber pass on India’s West and Japanese troops pouring in after victories at Kohima / Imphal on the East would have thrown up many possibilities, fascinating, frightening, or both.
An Axis victory in this part of the world would have changed global power equations in many ways. The idea of a Bose possibly establishing a new structure over the subcontinent with German and Japanese troops makes for a very interesting mental rewind – I can’t think of anyone else who would have commanded the subcontinent with the consent of both Axis powers. Also, given that in a fluid situation, he was able to convince large numbers of soldiers to switch loyalties to his cause and pick up arms against their erstwhile masters, he may well have been able to repeat the exercise with the Indian soldiers serving the British empire if the British were seen to be beaten – and thereby reduce the absolute dependence on the powers that supported his endeavours, to whatever degree, since those who studied Bose’s temperament would safely hazard a guess that he would be an inconvenient and not adequately obedient representative. If the Axis forces expected him to be a nominal figurehead and build something like what the Vichy regime was in occupied France, a standoff between them and him would be a question of when, not if.
Interestingly, for all the Aryan ethos and the Swastika, Hitler was clearly more enamoured of the ruling British than the ruled Indians. He wrote in Mein Kampf, ‘I, as a man of Germanic blood, would, in spite of everything, rather see India under British rule than any other.’ That, of course, was before WW II broke out. Would his ‘any other’ have included the non-Aryan Japanese, if that choice had to be made? Given the uneven tenor of German-Japanese ties, it’s a question to vex historians and analysts alike.
Robert Lyman thinks that “In protecting the Indian sub-continent from the ravages of Japanese rule, whose vicious cruelties had been apparent in Manchuria and China since 1931… the British Empire performed its greatest service to the people of India”. Much as the British contributed to modern India, I think this particular claim is making a virtue of necessity, that too in hindsight. I read a piece in TOI on how soldiers who fought in the British Army during the battle feel forgotten and neglected after hearing of the battle’s recently elevated status. Perhaps the Museum in London does need to give them their due to a greater degree, since it rates the battle to which they contributed significantly as its most significant ever, but I’m fine with them being neglected in India. While they may have been excellent fighting men, I am not sure if there’s much ground for any sentimental appreciation here. They joined up to draw a salary and served the British as their foremost instrument of ruling India – and if they didn’t realise that, they had serious comprehension problems. They would have fought for the British Empire at Timbuktu or Ulan Bator if deputed; that they fought at Kohima was a factor of geographical allocation of resources, not from any great wish to defend the motherland. They did not fight or die for ‘defending India’; they did so for the loyalty to their paymasters and for the izzat of their regiments. They merit respect as any fighting soldier does – but not India’s sentimental gratitude, sorry.
The INA, in reverse, was not as strong or mean a fighting force, but it was clearly not available for use by the Japanese to occupy the Philippines or fight against Chinese troops – it was in its very concept meant as an instrument only of Indians attempting to fight their way onto Indian soil for a cause, howsoever romantically distant from execution as it proved subsequently. Bose’s followers may see the Kohima defeat as a tragic ‘if-only’ moment which denied him his place in history, even if on the Axis’s shoulders. He was not a man to give up easily and would certainly not have been content to see one empire replace another in India. Who knows what India’s geographical and political essentials would be today if he were to have been the driver of the first decade of a non-British India?
So while it’s the British who see it as their greatest battle, it’s probably a battle worth as much recall for us, a people who pay little attention to military history, as it is for them.