An old Irish adage—‘Those under bonds will put others under bonds’—truly sums up the basic aspect of slavery. We had not only meekly submitted to an evil, which a nation ought to fight to the last, but had become the standard bearer of the pestilence of servitude in several foreign lands…In contrast to the Japanese propaganda the British had not even given us an empty promise of freedom after the war.
—Captain Mohan Singh, INA founder (1942)
The fall of Singapore…means the collapse of the British Empire, the end of the iniquitous regime which it has symbolised and the dawn of a new era in Indian history. Through India’s liberation, Asia and the world will move forward towards the larger goal of human emancipation.
—Subhas Chandra Bose, Radio Broadcast, Berlin, 1942
Why should we study the history of the Second World War and its immediate consequences as narrated by one of the foremost social and military historians of our time today when thousands of videos, including documentaries using authentic archival footage, on that epoch making event are available to us online? In answering this question, two points stand out. One, as an excellent foreword by James Holland tells us, history ‘is the compass that guides us to the present and helps us to prepare for the future, which is why it is good to be as objective as possible rather than succumbing to viewing history through a prism of social trends that reflect the present than the past’ (p. xii). Obviously, the spectre of ideology haunts history all the time. The second point is arrived at by the reader after he reads the splendid volume under review here. While no one will doubt the power of the visual in its narration of the Second World War, only the discerning among the Second World War buffs can truly appreciate the power of the word. No documentary or cinematic short can narrate the history of the Second World War like Craig has done in this book which is rich in both detail and analysis at several social and combat levels.
In this enormous book, Craig seems to have ‘discovered the ideal formula for writing popular narrative history: a defined cast of characters, flawless research and an exciting style’ that ensures both ‘readability and authority’ (p. xiii). Indian historians can learn a lot from such written history. For Indians in particular, the book focuses on Netaji in a ‘balanced and objective’ manner; a task difficult for any historian writing on the subject in contemporary India. Craig is full of admiration for Bose and the INA, and his richly detailed narrative of the events which unfolded in Singapore and Burma during the final year of the Second World War (1944-45) presents Bose as a ‘fascinating and complex figure’ (p. xiii). It is a different matter that Captain Mohan Singh, not Bose, was the actual founder of the Indian National Army. My friend Chandar Sundaram, the renowned Indian military historian who passed away prematurely in Canada in 2025, interviewed the unsung Mohan Singh at length some decades ago. Mohan Singh suffered the consequences of not toeing the Japanese line quite soon after founding the INA only to be released from a POW camp in 1945 after the Japanese surrender, described in some detail by Craig. Mohan Singh is mentioned briefly by Craig although his own assessment of Bose is not devoid of criticality.
The book is divided into three meticulously researched sections. The first focuses on two ‘sons of the Raj’, one, the soldier-officer ‘Timmy’ Thimayya, the future General and Chief of the Indian Army and the other, Bose, a rebel against the British. Both men, produced by the institutions of the Empire in England and India, are outstanding examples of what it meant to be an Indian in the modern world—professional and secular nationalist. Both men are idolized even today for different reasons, although the legacy of Bose has become politicized thanks to Indian politicians. Modern Indians can feel justifiably proud of both men although the Left critics of the Axis Powers would lament the fact that Bose shook hands with Hitler and kept his eyes shut to the general horrors and war crimes perpetrated by his Japanese sponsors in South Asia and the Andamans. The fact that Bose, in his death and after the defeat of the honourable INA, united Indians across the political spectrum is noted in glowing terms by Craig. The second section has interesting narrations about individuals and various Allied armies who rallied ‘round the flag’, meaning the Union Jack. The story of the immense sacrifices made by men, officers and civilians in the theatres of war and war crimes, including the horrors of Belsen in the West and Borneo in the East, is told in a prose which makes the book unputdownable. The narration moves effortlessly from Europe to the Bengal Famine and onwards to the Malays and Australians who fought the Japanese relentlessly, showing the world that the Japanese Army was not invincible. While men and women suffered terrible hardships and death everywhere, the ones who survived learnt important lessons of life and many cultivated a compassion for those they had held in contempt for long. Cooperation in combat meant the forging of lasting bonds between Europeans and Asians; the tales of European women working as nurses in the field hospitals and tending to Indian soldiers speak of the cultural transitions many of these women underwent. They never forgot Assam or the Brahmaputra after the Burma Campaign ended with the Japanese defeat.
Section three continues the history told in the previous section with the conclusion:
Despite the many humiliations of Singapore, Malaya, Burma and elsewhere, the British and Commonwealth forces came back hard in the Indo-Pacific. Lessons were learnt, and new talent and ideas advanced. It may be that the British Empire’s final moments in India were also its finest ones, and perhaps that is fitting…That this had indeed been India’s war as well as Britain’s war, but the army that had won it was now India’s to keep (p. 301).
Can the Bengal Famine, caused by British policies and Churchill’s deliberate neglect of this man-made tragedy or war crime if you prefer, be considered a fine moment in the history of the final moments of the British Empire in India? Further, not long after winning the war, the British lost the peace in India. What about the Partition the Raj hurriedly and mindlessly imposed on India in 1947, and the death of almost two million this caused in the country? Certainly not your fine moments in the dying light of the Empire! Despite this, the book makes for delightful reading. The language is easy and free of jargon. The author’s feeling for humanity and abhorrence of violence underlines the entire text. In sum, the book appears like an admirable combination of literature and history—the way history ought to be written, although at several places the author’s assertions should have come with footnotes. This is not to say that Craig imagines things but to assert the need to pay more attention to the craft of history writing.
Anirudh Deshpande is Professor of History, Department of History, University of Delhi, Delhi.