First Indian National Army
The First Indian National Army was the Indian National Army as it existed between February and December 1942. It was formed with Japanese aid and support after the Fall of Singapore and consisted of approximately 12,000 of the 40,000 Indian prisoners of war who were captured either during the Malayan campaign or surrendered at Singapore. It was formally proclaimed in April 1942 and declared the subordinate military wing of the Indian Independence League in June that year. The unit was formed by Mohan Singh. The unit was dissolved in December 1942 after apprehensions of Japanese motives with regard to the INA led to disagreements and distrust between Mohan Singh and INA leadership on one hand, and the League's leadership, most notably Rash Behari Bose. Later on, the leadership of the Indian National Army was handed to Subhas Chandra Bose. A large number of the INAs initial volunteers, however, later went on to join the INA in its second incarnation under Subhas Chandra Bose.
This first incarnation of the Indian National Army was involved in operations of espionage in the Burma frontier which, according to some military historians and allied generals, threatened the morale of Indian troops and fed discontentment and was partly responsible for the failure of the first Burma offensive. Operatives of the INA were also landed in the Indian coast by submarine for planned espionage operations within India. Coming at the time that the Quit India Movement had raised turmoil within British India, the threat of the INA affecting British Indian troops and INA operatives mounting espionage within India saw the start of a propaganda campaign in the British Indian Army and a news ban on the unit that was not to be lifted till after the war ended.
Background
Indian nationalism in World War II
With the onset of the Second World War all the three major Axis powers, at some stage of their campaign against Britain, sought to support and exploit Indian nationalism. They aided the recruitment of a military force from within Indian expatriates, and from disaffected Indian prisoners-of-war captured while serving with the British Commonwealth forces. Italy in 1942 created Battaglione Azad Hindoustan, formed of ex-Indian Army personnel and Italians previously resident in India and Persia, led by Iqbal Shedai. This unit ultimately served under Raggruppamento Centri Militari, but the effort proved unsuccessful. It was overtly propagandist nature that ultimately found little acceptance among the Indian soldiers, while Shedai's leadership was seen to be lacking legitimacy by the troops. By November 1942, following the defeats in El Alamein, the Italian efforts had failed.German motives and intentions with relation to India were more complex. The German Foreign office wanted to support Indian revolutionaries and nationalists, but there is consensus that, ultimately, Hitler held the belief that the British had to rule over the unfit Indian masses.
However Subhas Chandra Bose, who was one of the most prominent leaders of the Indian movement at the time, arrived in Germany in April 1941 after escaping from house arrest in Calcutta. He met with Hitler and the Nazi high command, making the case for raising an Indian unit from Rommel's Indian prisoners of war from the battlefields of Europe and Africa, as the nucleus of an Indian Liberation force. The Indische Legion was thus formed. In January 1942, a small contingent parachuted into Eastern Iran with a Brandenburg unit to commence sabotage operations against the British. Most of the legion however only ever saw action in Europe, fighting as a Heer unit and later incorporated into the Waffen SS after the Allied invasion of France. Nearly thirty, including the leadership and the officer corps, were also transferred to Azad Hind after its formation, and saw action in the INA's Burma Campaign. A segment of the Free India Legion fought against British and Polish Forces in Italy in 1944.
British-Indian army in Malaya
Large number of Indian troops had begun arriving in Malayan peninsula and Singapore by 1941, as a part of defensive preparations for possible war with Japan. It was estimated that were some 37 000 Indian troops stationed in these areas, making up roughly about the 40 percent of the total military strength of the British forces. The British-Indian troops swelled from 200 000 to 900 000 between 1939 and 1941. However, these deployments were beset with a number of problems. The troops were spread too thinly, with insufficient resources and supplies in the Malay Peninsula and Singapore. Further, a large proportion of the British-Indian troops were very young recruits who had very little or no combat training and experience, leading to anxiety amongst the British-Indian forces. Feelings of discrimination amongst British Indian soldiers, compared to the pay and service conditions for European soldiers created acrimony. Indiscriminate recruitment by the Indian government in order to maintain the numbers for its army, meant that it was no longer carefully curating its selection for the armed forces. By 1941, both verbal and physical abuse directed by European soldiers towards their Indian counterparts was rampant.Japan and Indian nationalism
India and Japan, especially from the last decade of the 19th century, had enjoyed a growing exchange of cultural, religious and philosophical ideas. India, as the home of Hinduism and from the second decade of the 20th century, the home of Gandhian philosophy, had been an attraction for Japanese and Buddhist and literary figures. India, in the meantime, looked to Japan as an inspiration of a model industrialised, advancing Asian society and nationhood. The Japanese victory over Russia in 1905 had furthered the inspiration Japan infused, especially among Indian nationalists. Noted Indian and Japanese cultural figures, including Okakura Tenshin and Rabindranath Tagore acknowledged the connection of the two Asian nations, their heritage, and the vision of pan-Asianism.After the end of World War I, Japan increasingly became a haven for radical Indian nationalists in exile, who were protected by patriotic Japanese societies. Notable among these included Rash Behari Bose, Taraknath Das, A M Sahay as well as others. The protections offered to these nationalists effectively prevented British efforts to repatriate them and became a major policy concern.
By the end of the war however, the pan-Asiatic vision gradually shifted away from prominence as the independence movement in India became engrossed in the issues facing post-war India. Agitations against the Rowlatt act, the Khilafat Movement protesting the removal of the Ottoman Caliph, as well as Gandhi's Non-cooperation movement in 1922 demanding home rule took the centre stage. By the time that the pan-Asiatic regained any prominence, Japan's aggressive and often nihilistic war in China had robbed her of the high ground that Japan held among the Indian population, and among Indian nationalist leadership.
Japan's India Policy
At the outbreak of the war in south-east Asia, Japan had not formulated any concrete policy with regard to India. Its headquarters lacked any India experts, while civilian experts on India were few in Japan. India was peripheral to Japanese war plans at least through 1941. It did not feature in the plans for Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which focused on south-east Asia up to the Indo-Burmese border.From late 1941 the Japanese began to profess increasing support for the Indian Independence movement. Exiles like Rash Behari Bose had already voiced their demands to the Japanese authorities that support and pursuit of Indian Independence be an aim of the Japanese campaign, but neither the government nor the Imperial Japanese army were able to commit to these earlier. Militarily, India was important as the origin of the Ledo road which supplied Nationalist Chinese and American forces, as well as the supplies airlifted over The Hump. Also, the idea that the western boundary of Japan's empire would be controlled by a more friendly government was attractive. It would also have been consistent with the idea that Japanese expansion into Asia was part of an effort to support Asian government of Asia and against western colonialism. Nonetheless, the task of establishing a stable orderly state if the independence movement succeeded would be enormous. The army would be occupied in China and the Manchuria-Russia border and in the newly occupied territories. It was widely accepted that the Congress was anti-Japanese. Gandhi, even during the intense Quit India Movement, had categorically warned the Japanese
"Make no mistake. You will be sadly disillusioned if you believe that you will receive a willing welcome from India"However, in April 1941, the Consul General to Calcutta had noted activities of the Forward Bloc. From Berlin, ambassador Oshima Hiroshi had reported on Subhas Bose's organisation of the Free India Legion.
The successful Malayan campaign, and the subsequent Burma campaign brought under Japanese administration a large number of Indian expatriates. Although not essentially sympathetic to the Japanese, they held substantial nationalist motives, and sought to exploit the window offered by the reversal faced by the British forces to drive them out from the Indian sub-continent. In these circumstances, the Japanese military administration encouraged the various disparate Indian nationalist groups in East Asia to form an anti-British alliance. These came together to form the Indian Independence League, with its headquarters in Singapore. The IIL was also responsible for the welfare of Indian communities in East Asia. From the Japanese point of view, this was primarily a propaganda move of initiating anti-British sentiments among civilians and soldiers in South-east Asia, and some Indian organisations like the Thai-Bharat Cultural Lodge held mistrust of the Japanese, and of local Indians who worked with them. The lodge preferred to work independently, and used Thai-donated equipment and the German embassy in Bangkok to Liaise directly with Subhas Chandra Bose.