The Forgotten Army: India's Armed Struggle for Independence, 1942-1945

The Germans had a batallion of British volunteers who were known as Hitlers Englishmen. God only knows what happened to them.


"JIFs" or Freedom Fighters?   May 2, 2000
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The Indian National Army, and its operations with the Japanese in the Burma theatre of operations during World War II, was long a controversial subject between Indians and British, and generally regarded with curmudgeonly disapproval by the British. The fact is that the issue of collaboration was probably more complicated in the Asia-Pacific theatre than it was in the European theatre. Experiencing the colonial rule of the British, French, and Dutch, many Burmese, Malays, Vietnamese, Sumatrans and Javanese saw the Japanese as colonial liberators. Even in the Philippines, under an allegedly benign American rule, much of the legislature stayed on to work under the Japanese. The Germans, of course, used peoples like the Lithuanians and Ukrainians in order to carry out the "Final Solution", but the situation was somewhat different. Asian nationalists struggling for independence, largely along lines laid for them by Western educations, found themselves betrayed by Western colonial empires who were committed to holding on at all cost (or so they thought until 1942). Fay's book provides a case study of one of the most famous (or notorious) instances of collaboration in the Asia-Pacific theatre. He examines the history of the Indian National Army (derogatorily referred to by the British as "JIFs"--Japanese Indian Forces) through an INA perspective, specifically in interviews with Prem and Lakshmi Sahgal, a husband and wife who found themselves in Singapore in 1942 when the British surrendered to the Japanese--Prem as a captured officer, and Lakshmi as a doctor. Both, disillusioned and fed up with years of British promises of independence that grew consciously or unconsciously caught up in red tape and official footdragging, decided to join the Japanese-affiliated force of Indian soldiers that would reclaim India for the Indians. The rest of the story should be read through their words, providing a much needed other side to the story of the Indian struggle for independence.