On this day in 1942 the Hukbalahap Rebellion, a Communist peasant rebellion, commenced in the Philippines. The Huks, as they were called, conducted a guerilla war against the Japanese which lasted through the war and turned into a rebellion against the Philippine government which lasted until 1954.
The movement was supported by the US during the war, and opposed by it after the war.
It was interestingly put down after the war not only by military means, but by political reforms that co-opted the most pressing grievances of the Huks, leaving them essentially without a political base.
Stafford Cripps met with Mahatma Gandhi and presented British plans for a semi-independent India after World War Two.
Cripps was a left wing lawyer and a member of the Labour Party. He'd been ambassador to the Soviet Union before it was attacked, during which time Cripps had warned Stalin that a German attack was inevitable. Churchill had appointed him to the position due to Cripp's Marxist sympathies. He became a member of the war cabinet during the war and his mission to India presented a plan of his own devising which met with support from nobody on either side of the issue. After the war he was a figure in the Labour government and was one of those who approved of the sending of jet engines to the Soviet Union, something Stalin had dismissed as impossible due to being "foolish", which resulted in the design going into the early Mig 15s.
The Japanese won at Toungoo.
In a bizarre event, German internees managed to convince their native Indonesian guards to rise up in a rebellion against the Dutch on the island of Nias, and declared it to be an independent state. This followed Japanese landings on other Indonesian islands. The Japanese would land on Nias in April and they removed all of the Europeans, save for a physician, from the island.
