By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

A Professor Eunan O’Halpin of Trinity College, Dublin, found evidence of assassination orders when Subhas Bose was about to enter Nazi Germany.

The reason he was targeted is because of his intentions to not simply lead India out of the empire, but to do it by force and in conjunction with the Axis. However Subhas Bose never went to Turkey. However as mentioned in p.1, he reached Berlin via Moscow.

Sugato Bose, a professor of history in the Harvard University, said he had already informed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh about the matter.

“I met the Prime Minister on July 26 and informed him of the existence of the documents and told him that unveiling these documents would not affect bilateral ties with UK in any way. Netaji himself was not against the people of Britain but the imperial government,” said Bose.

“I think the British government should make public all the relevant documents about Netaji,since this issue is not going to affect ties between India and United Kingdom in any way now,” he said.

The revelation comes at a time when a Commission is probing the mysterious disappearance of Bose 60 years ago to submit its report on November 14,2005. They will visit Russia in September 2005 to establish a trail of the leader’s alleged movements after August 1945 (see further below).

The document calling on British agents to kill Bose

This information was passed on to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on July 26, 2005, during his meeting with Sugato Bose, a professor of history in the Harvard University, 2005, in the hope Britain finally will move to open the still secret files it has acknowledge to still hold about Bose.

In the autumn of 1941, a few weeks after Subhas Chandra Bose reached Berlin, and ten thousand miles away in Tokyo, the cautious Prince Konoe was abruptly replaced as prime minister by General Tojo Hideki, a tough, fifty-seven-year-old soldier and leader of the war party. After the war, Konoe revealed how. Emperor Hirohito had come to see eye to eye with the militarists: `gradually he began to lean towards war. And the next time I met him he leaned even more towards war ... as a prime minister who lacked authority over the high command, I had no way of making any further effort because the emperor, who was the last resort, was this way. (Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the making of modern Japan, London, 2000, p. 420.)

During the months of October and November Japan's dizzying war plan rapidly took shape. Far from vacillating as last-ditch negotiations in Washington to avoid conflict ran into the sand, the high command were already planning how to end triumphantly a wav they clad not yet even started. Their `Working Plan for Ending the War with the U.S., Britain, the Netherlands and Chiang kai-shek' recommended: `wait for a good opportunity in the European war situation, particularly collapse of mainland England, ending of German-Soviet war and the success of our policies towards India'. (Ibid., fn. 82, p. 738.) The day originally planned for the Pearl Harbor attack, 8 December, was only a stepping stone on this long advance. By early November Hirohito had already approved the forward strategy. Visions of conquest danced before his eyes: `I understand you are going to do Hong Kong after Malaya starts. Well, what about the foreign concessions in China?’ (Ibid., p. 423.)

One area where the Japanese armies excelled all others during the War (except for Germany who had done much worse to the Jewish population of Europe) was in their infamous tactic of using mass rape as a `scorched earth' policy and to encourage aggression in their men.

In regards to managing the traffic of prostitutio the Japanese military were not alone. The British army had regulated barracks prostitution in India in the past, and was to do so again during the great Asian war. It had its own problems: 3 5,000 Allied servicemen contracted venereal disease in 1943; that is sixteen times the number who fell in battle. (Special meeting held at HQ SACSEAC to consider methods to combat VD in SEAC', 7 December 1945, British Military Administration /DEPT/1/z, Arkib Negara Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur.)

But Alexandra Hospital in Singapore, apparently as a form of retribution, the doctors who met the Japanese at the hospital entrance were slaughtered and many patients were bayoneted in their beds. Around 400 others were crowded into an outhouse overnight, later to be killed. The Asian doctors on duty were aghast as they watched the soldiers smashing the X-ray machinery. (T. J. Danaraj, Japanese invasion of Malaya and Singapore, memoirs of a doctor, Kuala Lumpur, 1990, pp. 78-80)

In mid May 1943, after a long journey by Japanese submarine, Subhas Chandra Bose was to slip into Singapore, and then, flew on to Tokyo.

Earlier Mohan Singh had secured better treatment for Indian troops from Japanese commanders in the field than the other fighting forces had received. But the future relationships between an Indian National Army and the Japanese divided Indian officers. Mohan Singh raised to a General by the Japanese determined to raise the INA into an effective fighting force. In April 1942, with a group of officers at Bidadari prisoner-of-war camp in Singapore, he issued a statement of intent - a united India, above caste, community or religion.

Mohan Singh however became more cautious about the Japanese connection when the Japanese were taking over once again the camps of Indian prisoners of war who had not joined the INA. Rash Behari Bose (an Indian radical who had escaped to Japan in 1905) and his entourage arrived in Singapore and took up residence in the Park View Hotel. He became bent on keeping what he saw as Mohan Singh's dictatorial tendencies in check. (Motilal Bhargava and Americk Singh Gill, Indian National Army, secret service, New Delhi, 1988).

Next Mohan Singh began to assert his independence from both the League and the Japanese. He was perhaps not politician enough to achieve this: he ended in head-to-head confrontation with them both. The lawyer and INA propagandist, J. A. Thivy, recorded a furious exchange with Major Ogawa on 2 December after an advance party of INA personnel had been embarked for Burma without Singh's approval:

 

OGAWA: Why have you suddenly become suspicious?

SING x : Your sudden and straight refusal to a genuine demand re Bangkok resolutions and moreover, by seeing your ideas in Malaya and Burma. OGAWA: You cannot compare India with Malaya and Burma. India will be more independent.

SINGH: What do you mean by `more'? (Iwachi, F. Kikan, pp. 238-46; Nair, An Indian freedom fighter, PP-193-211.)

At a crisis meeting on 29 December Rash Behari Bose dismissed Mohan Singh and the Japanese arrested him as he left the room, and decided to bring Subhas Chandra Bose to Asia instead.

Subhas Chandra Bose arrived at Kallang aerodrome in a silk suit and a grey felt hat but within three days he had abandoned this attire for the military uniform and top boots he would almost exclusively be seen in thereafter. On 4 July a press conference was called in the auditorium of the Cathay Cinema. The old revolutionary Rash Behari Bose was the first to speak: `You might now ask of me what I did in Tokyo for our cause, what present I have brought for you? Well, I have brought for you this present.' With this he transferred leadership of the Indian Independence League to Subhas Chandra Bose

In the wake of the opprobrium that had confronted `General' Mohan Singh, Subhas Bose took no military rank. But he resurrected the Indian National Army. Since the dismissal and arrest of Mohan Singh in December 1942., the Indian soldiers had returned to their internment camps. In February 1943 the intelligence chief Iwakuro told the Indian officers that the INA could not be dissolved, and anyone attempting to do so would be treated as a mutineer in the Japanese army.

He retained Mohan Singh's use of Hindustani as a language of command. Bose also argued that `Ceylon was the pendant in the Indian chain', and established a Lanka Unit within the Indian Independence League. Some members felt coerced. One propagandist on the Burma front would later describe how broadcasts would round off with a message in Sinhala: `all this is rubbish'.

Many enthusiastic Ceylonese youths were genuinely inspired by Bose, and joined the Lanka Unit either through a spirit of adventure or as a way of gaining a clandestine passage back to Ceylon and their families.

Bose's presence energized the civilian organization, and he launched a furious drive for funds on the peninsula and further afield, visiting in a short space the principal cities of the Japanese Empire: Rangoon, Manila, Bangkok, Shanghai and Nanking.

But even Subhas Bose was not immune from critique. Rash Behari Bose's secretary A. M. Nair attacked both the pretence of Netaji's entourage and his aloofness, which Nair saw as the product of an engrained 'master-servant complex'. Above all, `[h]e functioned as though the community could be looked after by speeches'. (A. M. Nair, An Indian freedom fighter in Japan: memoirs o f A. M. Nair, New Delhi, 1985, P• 2.55.)

On 21 October, within three months of his arrival in Malaya, speaking in the auditorium of the Cathay Cinema, Subhas Chandra Bose announced the formation of the provisional government of Azad Hind: `But with all the Indian leaders in prison and the people at home totally disarmed - it is not possible to set up a Provisional Government of Azad Hind within India.

On 6 November the Japanese ceded the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to the provisional government, and on 3o December, the tricolour was hoisted above them. They were renamed Shaheedi (Martyr) and Swaraj. This came with no formal transfer of administration, but in the eyes of the Indians overseas it added legitimacy to the planned INA war in India's name.

The INA had to be welded into a fighting force. Forty-six recruits were sent to the Imperial Military Academy. Other youth training camps were established in Kuala Lumpur, Seremban and Ipoh. New recruits streamed in. Yet there were other motives. As the rubber estates ran down, it was dangerous to be seen to be unemployed. Those who were became prey to Japanese forced-labour schemes. The INA was often the only alternative to the Siam-Burma railway.

The tensions and sexual predation on estates were at odds with the visionary rhetoric. In October 1943, partly to counter the charge that Indians were being coerced into rebellion against the Raj, Subhas Bose announced the formation of a women's brigade. It was to be called the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, after the heroine of the Mutiny-rebellion of 1857. It was headed by a young doctor, Lakshmi Swaminathan, who had settled in Singapore shortly before the war and had been alienated by its affluent indifference to the cause of colonial freedom. Bose approached her with a proposal for a fighting force. The Japanese refused to issue it with weapons, but Bose insisted that the INA would provide. As one recruit put it in a radio broadcast in January 1944: `I am not a doll-soldier, or a soldier in mere words, but a real soldier.’ (Young India, 23 January 1944.)

Of the volunteers at the Women's Training Camp in Singapore, most were local born, and one was as young as twelve. Recruits were urged to give up all ties of love and family. A proud father from Seremban said on visiting the camp: they look `like seasoned soldiers'. (Young India, 12. December 1943.)

The first contingent of 500 women and girl soldiers left Singapore, reaching Burma in late 1943. There they were given training in jungle warfare and nursing and soon took responsi Rash Behari Bose had left the field to the younger Bengali. He returned to Japan in October, but before he left had one last meeting, in private, with Subhas Bose. This time it was the old man's turn to urge caution in the alliance with the Japanese: they had claimed right of conquest in Manchuria, they would do so in India. Quit India had shown that this would not be accepted by the Indian nation. He tried to persuade Netaji to abandon the belief that the British could be defeated militarily, and use the INA to give moral support to the struggle already going on within India. Rash Behari Bose reported the conversation to his long-standing aide, A. M. Nair. Netaji, said Nair, made no comment. But `he did not put up a cheerful face'. (Nair, An Indian freedom fighter in Japan, p. 23o.)  When the INA went to war in November 1943, the first troops - Shahnawaz's 'Subhas Brigade' - were filled with a strange mix of fervour and fatalism.

The year 1943 had been one of the most terrible in history for the whole of east Asia, but especially for the people of the great and embattled crescent of land which stretched from Calcutta to Singapore. The cities of Japan had tasted the first fruits of American mass bomb­ing. In China, millions had died in the famines in Kwantung province and tens of thousands in the bloody slugging-match between the Nationalist and Japanese armies. Scarcities and forced labour flayed the people of Burma, Malaya and Indo-China. A whole generation died in Bengal. Yet the region was still gripped by a kind of stasis. The two sides, the Japanese, the Burma Defence Army and the Indian National Army on the one side, the British, Americans and Chinese, on the other, were still fencing cautiously as the monsoon came to an end. For the AI-lies, Southeast Asia was still on the back-burner. The slow build-up to the invasion of Europe absorbed most of Alan Brooke and Marshall's time. The Japanese and their allies were still unsure of their next move: with the war in China unresolved and the American fleet steaming forward across the Pacific, sôme strategists decided they could still afford one final thrust against the British in India, whom they still regarded with disdain. But it could not come yet.

In fact during during 1944 for example conditions on the Thailand-Burma railway deteriorated badly. The building of this line had become central to Japanese strategy, as they tried to link up the disparate units of the great crescent. Stories of the Second World War and the `Bridge over the River Kwai' have concentrated on the suffering of Australians, Britons and Americans. Ten or perhaps twenty times as many Burmese, Indians, Chinese and Malays perished, largely unrecorded in films and memoirs.

Thus it was in the absence of decisive military activity that a conference was held in Tokyo from 5 to 8 November, was a conference of Japan's Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Here gathered all the leaders of Japan's sponsored Asian governments from Manchukuo in the north to the Philippines, Indo-China, Burma in the south and, of course, Subhas Chandra Bose, leader of Free India, but as yet ruler only of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. General Tojo had organized a range of impressive ceremonies which included audiences with the emperor, visits to the shrine of the Meiji emperor and the Yasukuni shrine for the Japanese war dead, and a mass rally in Hibiya Park. Hundreds of journalists gathered from the nations of the new Asia for `the greatest assembly in world history'. (Greater Asia Newspaper, Rangoon, 27 November 1943, cf. ibid., 20 December.) The aim was to persuade the representatives of the dependent nations of Japan's continued determination to lead Asians to their freedom from Anglo-American domination.

Subhas Bose remained in high spirits at this `family party'. His army was ready. The cry 'Chalo Delhi!' was already on his lips. This, he said, echoed the recent German war cry `To Paris, To Paris!' and the Japanese `To Singapore, To Singapore!' (Ba Maw, Breakthrough in Burma: memoirs o f a revolution, 1939-1946, New Haven, 1968, p. 343.)

As the New Year of 1944 dawned in Calcutta, the auguries for the British remained very mixed. People were dying in the streets and the word `famine' was now used officially. Even though the army were securing more rapid deliveries of food, and Churchill had finally relented about sending relief shipping to India, in Bengal people were weakened by malnutrition and were easily carried off by the Indian winter ailments. Even when they could get food, their stomachs were too withered to digest it. Well into 1944 the authorities still worried about a recurrence of famine when the monsoon once again proved erratic. The ‘Supreme Commander’ General Wavell, fortified by the office of viceroy, nagged, berated and threatened the British government: `Please tell your colleagues that they have been warned! (Wavell to secretary of state for India, 12 January 1944, Mss Eur D977/z, Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library.)

Numerous voices in Whitehall and in Washington continued to predict that India would never make a strong base for an offensive against the Japanese, or at least not in the foreseeable future. (Chiefs of Staff Committee, 3 April 1944, `Maintenance of India as a base', WOio6/3836, Public Record Office, The National Archives, Kew, London.)

The Americans began to pour resources into India, rebuilding a large part of Calcutta Port and further developing airfields for the Burma-China Hump. As the summer approached they put in five battalions of military railway engineers and effectively took control of the Assam railway's northern section. Predictably, this led to a severe outbreak of tension between the British and Americans. Black Americans were regarded with particular suspicion.

According to the British, they never seemed to realize how difficult it was to pull further resources out of India: `you can't tighten the belt of a skeleton', as one senior official had put it. (Statement of Financial Adviser Military Finance at Army Commanders' Conference, 9 July 1943, India intelligence summary, 23 July 1943, L/WS/i/ 1433, OIOC.)

American commanders were determined that US resources should not be used to `re-build the British Empire'. This infuriated the British because it was so difficult to disentangle the civilian from the military use of newly installed generators, roads or port facilities. (E.g. General Lindsell to Quarter-Master General India Command, 14 April 1944, WOio6/3836, PRO.)

In the end the Indian National Army fought gallantly against the British Indian army, at the great nat shrine of Mount Popa, as they moved together with the Japanese south from Mandalay. There were, by this time, deep divisions in the INA between the pro- and anti-Japanese elements and about whether to withdraw into Malaya.

Subhas Bose, stationed in Rangoon/Burma moved out together with the Japanese retreat. On 24 April he appointed a deputy leader of the provisional government of Azad Hind, and began to evacuate his personnel to Bangkok.  Here he considered an  alliance with the Soviets and once more fled to Russia.
 
 

See Part 1

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