I’ve slowly discovered that the story of these soldiers has left us with a complex and incomplete narrative of what happened as we gained independence from British colonial rule.įor some context, millions of South Asian veterans of WWII returned home just as the subcontinent was preparing to split into the independent countries of India and Pakistan after being under British colonial rule for nearly two hundred years. This is especially astonishing because WWII was truly global, with pivotal conflicts outside the European and Pacific theaters, and critical battles in British India and across Asia. When I stumbled onto this underappreciated history, I was astounded by the number of people who sacrificed and died, and the fact that this is not part of our history books in India, South Asia, or globally. Thirty of them won Victoria Crosses, England’s highest military honor, and more than eighty-seven thousand died. They transported artillery, repaired jeeps, and, under enemy fire, carried the wounded from the battlefield to safety. They fought in the mountains of Burma, the hills of Italy, and the deserts of North Africa. Why are the contributions of those from South Asia barely mentioned as we mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of WWII? By 1945, two and a half million Indians had stepped forward and “volunteered” to take up arms for their British colonial rulers in support of the Allies. These stories are from some of the 2.5 million Indians who fought in World War II (WWII fig. Here are snippets of the stories that I heard: a soldier fell into the ocean and was there so long his nails fell off a young groom left his wife of six weeks to fight on another continent five prisoners of war (POWs) escaped and were hidden in caves during a bitter winter in Italy a soldier came home to find his wife remarried, thinking he was dead. Major General Nanavati (1918–1963) and his wife, Sharda Nanavati, 1962.
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