Friday, April 14, 1944. Indian drama.

The Bombay Explosion occured at Mumbai, India) when the British SS Fort Stikine caught fire and exploded, creating mass destruction and killing around 800 to 1,300 people.

Kohima was relieved with a British breakthrough.

Col. Shaukat Ali Malik of the Indian National Army entered Moirang with his troops and raised the flag of the Azri Hukumat e-Azad Hind for the first time on Indian soil.

The stories above illustrate the complicated nature of India and the Indian people in World War Two. Col/ Sjailat Ali Malik was a Muslim Indian who had previously served in a British Indian police force, the latter being quite militarized.  The INA was a collaborationist army in combat against the Allies, while of course the British Indian Army was an Allied Army, but subject to the British Empire and therefore not really a "free" army.  

Following the war, the INA would be regarded with sympathy by many Indians.  I don't know what happened to Col. Malik, but the Muslin portions of Indian broke off from it immediately with independence, forming Pakistan. Today, what had been East and West Pakistan are Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The Red Army reached the Carpathian foothills.

Gen. Nikolai F. Vatutin died of wounds received in an ambush by Ukrainian partisans on February 29, 1944.

The U-448 was sunk off of the Azores.

Last prior edition:

Thursday, April 13, 1944. Soviet advances in Crimea.

1940s, 1944, Australian Army, Clothing, Crimea, Eastern Front, Hawaii, New Guinea, Normandy, Operation Overlord, Royal Air Force, U.S. Air Force, Women

Sunday, March 19, 1944. Germany invades Hungary.

US 75mm howitzer engaging in direct fire, Bougainville

The Germans, now in the position of having to invade their own allies in order to keep them in the war, did just that and invaded Hungary with eight divisions.  The invasion was a complete surprise, and came from all directions.  It was largely bloodless.

Hungary was Germany's largest ally, and the country had approached the Western Allies as early as the summer of 1943.  Hungary had refused, starting around that time, to provide troops for the Balkans and by this time in 1944 was openly seeking to withdraw its troops from Ukraine.  By March 1944 it had largely demobilized and was nearly out of the war.

The Germans kept the Hungarian Army in the field, having no other choice.  The SS began the deportation of 550,000 Hungarian Jews, with Hungarian collaboration.  Admiral Horthy continued his efforts to negotiate a separate peace with the Soviet Union but had to form a new government under Döme Sztójay which reentered the war in the East.

The U-1059 was sunk by US aircraft off of Cape Verde.

The Indian National Army hoisted its flag on Indian soil captured by the Japanese offensive in northeast Indian.

Picasso's Desire Caught by the Tail was preformed for the first time in occupied Paris, making the performance presented by Albert Camus particularly pathetic, in my opinion.

Last prior edition:

Saturday, March 18, 1944. Summoned to Germany.

Wednesday, October 21, 1943. Indian declaration.

The Provisional Government of Azad Hind ("Free India") was declared with Subhas Chandra as president.  Its territory, such as it was, were those portions of Indian occupied by Japan.

It immediately declared it was entering the war on the Japanese side, an example of really not grasping the direction things were headed in, and in fact already well advanced towards.

On the same day, Japan began drafting high school and university students.

The Germans began liquidating the Minsk Ghetto as they were retreating from Belarus.

The RAF made a highly destructive raid on Kassel.

Algerian Jews, 140,000 in number were restored French citizenship, which had been restricted, along with the same for Algerian Arabs, on March 17, 1942 by Gen. Henri Giraud.  Arabs had to apply for restoration of their French citizenship.

Sunday, July 4, 1943. First Broadcast of the Armed Forces Radio Network.

American Armed Forces Radio Network began broadcasting from the United Kingdom. While the organization had been formed in 1942, this was its very first broadcast.

Subhas Chandra Bose became president of the Indian Independence League at its meeting in Singapore.

Władysław Eugeniusz Sikorski, Prime Minister of Poland and former Polish army officer, and the then head of its government in exile, died in a plane crash at Gibraltar.  While the British ruled the crash an accident due to mechanical failure, suspicions remain that it may have been sabotage.

Wednesday, June 16, 1943. Noor Inayat Khan inserted in France.

Subhas Chandra Bose met with Hideki Tojo, who promised to help India secure independence from the United Kingdom.

On the same day, Noor Inayat Khan, born in Moscow to an Indian father and American mother., was deposited by light aircraft in France as an agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE).  She'd serve as a radio operator under the code name Madeline.

The SOE, which was heavily penetrated by German intelligence, would ultimately capture her and execute her in September 1944.

Her father was a Sufi mystic, which heavily influenced her outlook.  Raised in London and Paris, she was a poet before the war.

The Japanese raided Guadalcanal by air.

"Japanese Air Raid on Guadalcanal, June 16, 1943. USS LST-340 burning after she was hit by an enemy bomb. She was run ashore off Lunga Point after the hit, and her fires were extinguished after considerably damaging her and her cargo. Note trucks burning on deck. This photograph was taken by TSGT. H.S. Bolser, fifteen minutes after she was hit."

Probably referring to the same event depicted above, Sarah Sundon notes:

Today in World War II History—June 16, 1943: Japanese suffer their biggest aerial defeat over the Solomon Islands, losing 96 of 120 aircraft to antiaircraft fire and to Allied fighter pilots .

Charlie Chaplin married Oona O'Neill, daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill.  The father disowned the daughter as a result.  It was Chaplin's fourth and final marriage.

Oona O'Neill in 1943.

She was barely 18 years old at the time of the marriage, Chaplin having a track record for young women.

Sunday, June 13, 1943. Bose arrives in Japan.

Indian revolutionary Subhas Chandra Bose, whom we've discussed on these pages before, arrived in Japan after traveling via U-boot and then by Japanese Imperial Navy submarine. The transfer of Bose en route is the only such example to occur between two nations of a civilian during World War Two.

Bose with the crew of the Japanese I-9.

The Zoot Suit Riots came to an end.  Amazingly, in spite of their damage so the American social fabric, and to the Zoot Suit itself, nobody was severely physically injured in the episode.

U.S. Army Air Force General Nathan Bedford Forrest III, age 38, when the bomber he was riding in as an observer was shot down over Kiel. He was the great-grandson of the famous and controversial Confederate General of the same name.

He was a West Point graduate from the class of 1928, and had been in the cavalry branch, but only for a year, before transferring to the Air Corps.  His father had been a businessman and a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

Monday, February 8, 1943. Bose leaves, Rutledge ascends.

Today In Wyoming's History: February 8: 1943 1943  A B-25 landed on a highway near Douglas due to low fuel. Attribution. Wyoming State Historical Society.

I've actually seen something similar occur. When I was a teenager, I was riding in his pickup truck when an A-26 landed in a field near the Interstate Highway, and then taxied up to the DOT fence.  The plane was on its way back to the Smithsonian and had lost oil pressure, requiring the pilot to make an emergency landing.

U.S. Economic Stabilization Director James F. Byrnes ordered a temporary ban on the sale of shoes until the following day, when shoe rationing officially commenced.

Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose and Abid Hasan were given safe passage from Germany back to Asia on board the U-180.  Bose, an opponent of English Colonialism, sided with the Germans and Japanese during the war.  He had been in Nazi Germany since April 1941.

The journey would lead to a Japanese submarine, which would take him to Sumatra, where he attempted to revive the Indian National Army.

Schenkl and Bose.

Bose left in Germany Emilie Schenkl and their daughter Anita.  Bose may have been married to Schenkl, although the circumstances of their union are ambiguous, having been conducted as a secret Hindo ceremony without witnesses.  They had met in 1934 during a previous Bose stay in Austria, when she had worked for him as a secretary.  He would not publicly acknowledge their marriage or union. His departure left her without a livelihood.

Bose died in a crash of a Japanese aircraft in 1945.  Schenkl lived until 1966.  Anita is a professor at the University of Augsburg.

Bose retains a sort of hero status in India for his opposition to the English, but it's hard to get past siding with the Axis and abandoning his family without support.

Civil control of Hawaii was partially restored, absent the Japanese American pre-war members of the Territorial Legislature.

The Germans killed the remaining 4,000 Jewish residents of Slutsk, Byelorussia.  On the same day, the Germans launched Operation Hornung, a counter-attack against Belorussian partisans.

Byelorussia suffered enormously during the Second World War, and had suffered before that under Stalin's repression.  As with Poland, the Soviet government had murdered its intelligentsia in the period leading immediately up to 1941. Following that, the Nazis were nearly as repressive of its population as they were of the Poles.  The Germans nearly forcibly conscripted young Belorussian men into police service, with the only real alternative being Soviet partisan service, which also conscripted.  Often membership in one or the other was simply by chance.  It was occupied by the Germans well into 1944.

The Red Army retook Kursk.

Wiley B. Rutledge was confirmed as a Justice of the United States Supreme Court.  He'd only serve for six years, dying at age 55 in 1949 due to a stroke.

He had an unusual career, starting off with the goal of studying law at Maryville College, but then switching to the University of Wisconsin as a chemistry student.  He graduated in 1914 with a bachelor's in that field at age 20.  He thereafter returned to law, studying first at Indiana University and then, after various stints of teaching, the Colorado Law School in Boulder.  He married his former Greek teacher, five years his senior, in the interim.  He graduated with a Bachelor of Laws, then a common law degree, in 1922, at which time he would have been 26 years old.  He worked principally as a law professor thereafter, until being appointed to the DC Circuit in 1939, and then on to the Supreme Court in 1943.  Extremely studious and hardworking, in some ways, he worked himself to death.

Monday, April 6, 1942. The Japanese strike India.

From Sarah Sundin's excellent day-to-day history of World War Two blog:

Today in World War II History—April 6, 1942: 80 Years Ago—Apr. 6, 1942: Japanese air raid on Vizagapatam and Cocanada, India, helps tip India to support the Allies. Germany cuts ration of bread, meat, and fats. Due to heavy Luftwaffe raids, British Royal Navy begins to withdraw surface ships from Malta to Gibraltar and Alexandria. Seven hundred Japanese-Americans are assembled at Santa Anita Racetrack. First group of Japanese-Americans are evacuated from San Francisco.

I'd draw attention to the first one of these items in particular. 

The British were trying to secure the support of India which, while it remained part of the British Empire, was increasingly moving towards independence and achieving it by default.  It would end up, however, contributing an army to the Allies which was the largest in the war, in terms of sheer manpower.

India had of course contributed manpower in the form of the Indian Army to the British Empire in World War One. But, like other parts of the Empire, it was increasingly reluctant to become as engaged in World War Two, and unlike Canada, Australia and New Zealand (as well as Ireland, which remained neutral in the war) it was not a self-governing dominion with de facto independence.  Indeed, in spite of ultimately fully committing to the Allied cause, a substantial number of Indians would end up in a rebel Indian army that served under the Japanese, although not terribly effectively.

The Japanese strike fit into a series of actions which caused people who remained subject to colonial rule in Asia to reject the Japanese as worse rulers, for the most part, than the Europeans had been, with Indonesia, where the Japanese were generally preferred, being the exception.  

The war ultimately accelerated the demise of colonialism, which was exposed as too hypocritical in light of Allied war aims, let alone propaganda, and the arming of local forces made it effectively impossible to keep on in the former role after the war.  A major impact of the war, therefore, was to complete the global death of empire, even if they'd linger on in various locations for decades.