India's+role+in+WW2

=__India During World War 2__=

__Edited by Taylor Lamontagne__

__Lead up to war__
When England went to war on September 3, 1939, the Dominions had the right to decide in their legislatures whether to fight. Ireland remained neutral; Canada waited a few days to show their independence. India, with colonial status, had no such choice. India went to war when England went to war.The India Congress Party, led by Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawarhal Nehru, controlled the provincial legislatures. Rather than support the war, the Congress Party pulled their deputies out of the legislatures. With only the Nazis to fight, Indian units gave good service in North Africa; but the Indian public did not mobilize to support the war.



=The Indian Stance= The Indian National Congress was led by Gandhi, Patel and Azad and they took a stronge stance against the fascism and Nazism. Because Gandhi was in an open letter with Adolf Hitler he tolerated and viewed Nazism as a massive source of violence. During this time several other Indian leaders and politicians expressed concerns over the rise of Fascism and Nazism but continued to support the British cause.

Following this a man names Jawaharlal Nehru pointed out to the people that they would inheret the contradiction in the British Argument of them going to war with the Nazi's for the single sake of freedom since India was denied that same freedom. This man also pointed out that Nazism and the British Raj represented the two core ideologies that the congress was fighting against which was imperialism and racism. Because of this hypocrisy the congress refused to align the British fight against the axis powers only until India would be granted their independence.

People who supported the British Raj continued to argue that Great Britian could not afford to have to go through the massive struggle of decolonization during such a difficult period. People believed that loosing India who was the most prized colony would put a massive weight on the British manly because they were facing war on all fronts. Because of this the British Viceroy in 1939 declared that India would enter the war, doing so without any permission or consultation of the Indian Congress. = = =__India in WW2__=

In 1941, India went from colonial combatant to potential battlefield when the Japanese attacked the Western powers. India became the scene of political upheaval. Gandhi and Nehru tied Indian participation in the war to Indian independence. Rioting and strikes led to the outlawing of the Congress Party in August 1942. In 1943 Winston Churchill and the British Empire needed millions of Indian troops, all of India's industrial output, and tons of Indian grain to support the Allied war effort. Such massive contributions were certain to trigger famine in India. Because Churchill believed that the fate of the British Empire hung in the balance, he proceeded, sacrificing millions of Indian lives in order to preserve what he held most dear. The result: the Bengal Famine of 1943-44 in which millions of villagers starved to death. Gandhi's political rival, Chandra Bose, went to Berlin and then Tokyo to raise an Indian National Army out of exiles and POWs captured in Singapore. Bose raised 7,000 and joined the Japanese when they invaded India in March 1944.

In Kohima-Imphal, the British and Indian units waged a running battle with the Japanese and Indian Nationalists, who were poorly supplied and far from their base of operations. By August 1944 the invasion was repelled. Bose and the Axis powers had assumed that there was widespread contempt for England in India. In fact, Indians would support both England and the war effort. 2,000,000 Indians served in the Army, and 24,000 were killed. Major infrastructure was built to support both the Indian Army and the Allied Armies. By war's end, most of the Indian Army's officers were Indian. With food shortages after the fall of Burma, some 1,500,000 Indians died of starvation during the war. Bose died in 1945, enigmatically dying in a plane crash on his way to Japan. Many have criticized his alliance with Germany and Japan, since they had no real support for Asian independence and committed many reprisals against civilians.

The surviving members of the Indian National Congress were put on trial in 1945 by the British Colonial Administration, and they received huge public attention as support for independence grew. Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, turned over the government to Nehru in 1947. Its a little known fact that that the Royal Indian Armed Forces were the largest all-volunteer armed force in history, with nearly 20 million men fighting with the Indian Army, the Royal Indian Air Force and the Royal Indian Navy. In 1932, the Indian Air Force act was passed, establishing for the first time a localized air force in India. The legacies of racism and colonialism toward Indians by the British made the growth of the Royal Indian Air Force slow, and by 1938, only a squadron was in service, both flying and called the Wapitis. The emergency of WW2 changed all that. By 1939, the RIAF was up to three sqns, and a plan for rapid expantion was put in place. By the end of the war, the RIAF had risen to seven squadrons, with substantial numbers of Indian personnel flying in RAF and many other colonial nations. This airforce fought side-by-side with the British and Americans against the Japanese all over Asia, and Indian-manned squadrons distinguished themselves in the air war in Europe, as well as in the Middle East and North Africa.