1945 The Reckoning - Extracts and articles

THE BENGAL FAMINE - EXTRACT

Bengal, 1943

Angela Noblet was in love. A love which, just as Matron had

commanded, she kept carefully separate from her hospital

duties, where she remained under the command of her amour, the

newly promoted Lieutenant Colonel Edward Lossing. She and

Teddy walked and picnicked, dined and danced. At the local

concert hall they watched the latest American films together −

Blood and Sand with Tyrone Power was a favourite − their feet

crunching on half-chewed betel nuts as they stood to sing ‘God

Save the King’. Then they strolled back to the hospital arm in

arm, alert for snakes and jackals, passing by the naked, grey-

bearded sadhu (holy man) as he recited his hypnotic evening

prayers. And soon the lovers even had a song.

We took a truck to the river Damodar, a mile or so away from

Asansol, taking along a wind-up gramophone, some records

and a rug to lounge on. There for the first time I heard a record-

ing of the great cellist Pablo Casals playing Après Un Rêve by

Fauré, an experience that made such an impression on me that

when I hear that plaintive melody so many years afterwards I

am wafted back to a moonlit river bank, with a vista of distant

mountains and romantic memories of my first real love affair.

But in India one always swings between the earth and the

stars. As I closed the lid of the gramophone I saw the busy

scarab beetle rolling its ball of dung along the ground.

Angela shared nothing of the physical side of this relationship

with her diary, but the couple were close enough to travel on

leave together, although she did carefully note that separate

bedrooms were in use at all times. One day, after leaving Asansol

on a slow train journey towards a lake resort called Bhimtal, they

suddenly ground to a halt alongside a goods train.

‘What’s that noise, darling? That tapping.’

‘I can see some people under the other train, I think. Hundreds

of them’

‘What are they doing?’

‘It’s sticks, they have sticks and little bowls.’

‘Good God, the poor wretches must be desperate.’

Angela had never shied away from the harsher side of life in

British India but now, peering through the grimy window of the

carriage, her eyes slowly adjusting to the dark, she was suddenly

face to face with something horrifi c, something that today many

people consider a war crime or even a genocide. Creeping along

the tracks underneath the goods train were dozens of men and

women pushing bamboo spikes up into the slatted fl oor of the

wagons, in the hope of puncturing a sack of grain. A thin trickle

of wheat was their reward, which they caught in small bowls. The

driver knew they were there and did nothing to stop them. When

the time came to move on, he let off a loud whistle to give them

a moment to escape from under his wheels. Angela wondered

aloud about people like this being not so sympathetically treated

elsewhere, parents maimed or killed in their desperation to fi nd

food for their families. A sergeant who had joined her at the

window said that half the grain would be gone by the time that

train reached Calcutta.

After an uncomfortable night made more so by what she had

witnessed, and by the hard beds of the ladies’ rest room at Bareilly

station, they took another train up into the mountains. Once

again the troubles of wartime India interrupted the journey. An

elderly Indian man started up a political conversation, asking what

they thought of Gandhi, his ‘iniquitous imprisonment’ as a result

of the ‘Quit India’ campaign and the fact that Indians under British

rule were starving to death in Bengal.

We told him about the plundering of the goods train. He remarked

severely that, because of the Japanese invasion, there was no rice

coming in from Burma and asked us when we were going to

‘drive those fellows’ out. We were suitably apologetic but explained

that we could not manage without Gandhi’s cooperation. He

demanded to know how the Mahatma could help us when we

had put him in jail. This seemed rather a circular argument so we

sat and smiled at him. He beamed back expansively through his

large spectacles, salaaming affectionately when we left the train.

This polite but firm disagreement on a train to a beautiful village,

where food was plentiful, tourists lounged on the verandas of splen-

did hotels and spent lazy days fi shing by the lake, captures perfectly

a sense present in many sources from this time, both Indian and

British. Anger mixed with fatalism. An understanding that, yes, of

course, war had made famine relief more difficult than ever before

but, alongside that, a bubbling fury that Indians themselves, while

risking their lives in huge numbers all around the world, were not

in a position to help their starving compatriots. And always close to

the surface there was another feeling, no less powerful for never

being tested in the real world, that however hard the authorities tried

to help, and try many of them did, they would surely, inevitably,

have done more had the food run short in Surrey, Manitoba, the

Western Cape, New South Wales or North Island.

The calamity unfolding in Bengal further accelerated momentum

towards independence and left an abiding stain on the reputation

of the Raj. Nobody knows how many died in the great famine

but it is probably between two and three million. That these

deaths took place at a time of exploding economic activity in

India − and even in other parts of Bengal such as Asansol − only

reinforced the shock and the outrage.

Rice was the staple food of Bengal’s poorer communities. The

year-long crisis began when a combination of a rare plant disease

and a tropical cyclone in late 1942 destroyed much of the crop and

sent prices soaring. Some traders hoarded what they could in the

anticipation of even higher prices to come. Local officials did little

to stop this. Those who could pay did so, but soon Calcutta and the

larger regional towns were filling with people who could not afford

the new prices and were forced to look for food elsewhere. Because

of the intense fear of invasion, a policy known as ‘denial’ also played

a tragic part. Boats and food supplies had been confiscated from

border regions to prevent the Japanese from seizing them. As a

result villages that had relied upon fi shing began to struggle to feed

themselves, farmers were no longer able to travel upstream to their

paddy fi elds and it became much harder to move what rice supplies

there were to the places that needed them most.

Soon entire families, weak with hunger, began to succumb to

disease and corpses appeared on the streets. In Calcutta emaciated

figures begged for scraps outside grand hotels where well-dressed and

mostly white guests still enjoyed their gala dinners and Saturday night

balls. The authorities attempted to organise relief camps and bring in

fresh supplies of food, but the many pressures of war, the shortage of

merchant ships and some bad flooding later in 1943 disrupted every-

thing still further. Help was always late and inadequate and soon the

scale of the misery was overwhelming. Letters reached Indian soldiers

in North Africa and Italy revealing the desperation in their home

villages, causing such anxiety that their officers pressed the authorities

to do more. Clive Branson, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, was

now serving in India and what he saw appalled him.

‘It is all very well to parade members of the 4th Indian Division around England but the sincerity of that praise wears a bit thin if those men’s relatives are dying of hunger in the villages of Bengal.’

‘I thought I was a sophisticated hard-boiled egg and could take

a detached view of things,’ wrote Satyen Basu, a doctor in the

Indian Army, ‘but witness a baby barely two years old lying in the

lap of his brother of about six, both so devitalised that they are not

able even to move from the street corner and biding their time to

be shifted by somebody, sometime, alive or dead.’

Burma and Malaya had traditionally supplied rice to Bengal

but, as Angela Noblet’s fellow passenger had rightly pointed out,

the Japanese had stopped all that. In the past so-called ‘Famine

Codes’ had picked up early signs of distress and triggered official

action. But as the crisis deepened during the first half of 1943

everything seemed to happen in slow motion, in glaring contrast

to the intense activity in the war economy. Neighbouring regions

did not rush food to Bengal for fear of running short themselves

or − so it was whispered − because politically connected merchants

wanted to keep the price up. Churchill’s government did try to

help but the issue took months to reach the top of the relevant

in-trays in London.

Hundreds of thousands of tons of grain then arrived in Bengal despite intense pressure on maritime resources and the threat of Japanese submarines. However, amid a general lack of urgency and ‘grip’, some of that food got caught up for weeks in bottlenecks at the ports and railway hubs. And still the people died. Churchill even appealed directly to Roosevelt for help with relief aid but the President said that he could not spare the shipping. Again, amid so many other priorities, the starvation of poor Bengalis never quite made it to the top of anyone’s list.

The men who ran British India have received much furious

criticism for the famine. But one of the least effective arms of the

state was the democratically elected (albeit on a limited franchise)

Bengali government of Khwaja Nizamuddin. Another Cambridge-

educated politician, Nizamuddin would one day become Prime

Minister of Pakistan. But in 1943 his administration was slow to

transport food from areas of surplus into the worst affected parts

of his region. After the war the celebrated Indian economist

Amartya Sen studied all the available data about food production

and storage in Bengal and other parts of the country in 1943. He

concluded that there should have been enough in northern India

to feed Bengal, but speculation, inflation and hoarding exposed

the poorest class of people to fatal danger, and then officialdom

didn’t react decisively until it was much too late. Such was the

dysfunction that India continued to export rice even as Bengalis

starved. In charting the economic forces that shaped the Second

World War historian Richard Overy also considered what

happened in Bengal to be avoidable, an example of administrative

oversight when faced with a familiar case of ‘market distortion

and uneven distribution’ of a staple foodstuff. Food surpluses else-

where in India − some lying tantalisingly close by − were not

mobilised in time to do any good.

One key insight into the official British mindset comes from the

letters of the governor of Bengal, John Herbert, a much more

powerful man than Khwaja Nizamuddin. Herbert first played

down the crisis, complaining about the ‘bad press’ it was generating

and worrying that the huge number of wretched people trying to

find a means to survive posed a security threat and a ‘particular

nuisance in areas where troops are concentrated’.

Reading official communications such as Herbert’s it is possible to see something else lying behind the tardiness − an ingrained acceptance of poverty and inequality as just ‘an Indian thing’, something natural, some-

thing baked into how the people in charge regarded life and death

here. One day, perhaps just after riding in his official car through

streets full of desperate human beings, Herbert wrote this:

I hope we can get out some effective propaganda to counteract the present unhelpful tales of horror in the press which manifests itself largely in photographs which might have been taken in Calcutta at anytime during the last ten years.

You did not have to be a follower of Subhas Chandra Bose to

recoil at such an attitude. And the obvious question that such

comments prompted quickly appeared on a million lips: ‘Does

anyone doubt, were the victims white, that more would be done

to help them?’ All this horror unfolded a year after the chaotic

retreat from Burma and just months after the ‘Quit India’ campaign

had revealed the depth of support for independence − a triple

catastrophe for the Raj. This was well understood by Archibald

Wavell who took over as Viceroy in October 1943. He injected

new energy into the relief eff ort and used the army to transport

food into Bengal from areas of surplus, but the fight he had to get

help from London depressed and infuriated him:

I feel that the vital problems of India are being treated by His

Majesty’s Government with neglect, even sometimes with

hostility and contempt . . . [the famine] is one of the greatest

disasters that has befallen any people under British rule and

damage to our reputation both among Indians and foreigners in

India is incalculable.

There are some today who will tell you that Winston Churchill

hated Indians and wanted them to die, actively choosing to starve

Bengal out of sheer malice or as a twisted kind of revenge for the

‘Quit India’ campaign. Just about everything Churchill ever said

was written down somewhere, along with lots of things that he

might or might not have said. You can find ample evidence of his

romantic, paternalistic love for India and plenty of his furious

anger towards Indian nationalists and rebels. One day when

particularly enraged about Gandhi, in a drunken snarl he infa-

mously called Hinduism ‘a beastly religion’. There are numerous

examples, too, of how very old-fashioned views of India and

Indians affected his thinking. At one point, he exploded with

‘Muslims are warriors and Hindus are windbags’.

Churchill did not want Indians to starve but in the end it did

come down to priorities. When describing his role in the famine

the more sympathetic writers point to the unprecedented scale of

the war eff ort being managed from London. Churchill’s team had

to organise supply convoys upon every ocean and numerous great

campaigns on land, sea and air across multiple continents. Amid all

of this − and with the future of the world in the balance − why

would suffering in Bengal suddenly trump all other considerations?

But now and again you can hear something else, something that

lurked at the margin of this subject like an unwelcome spirit. It was

the subtext of many conversations about the famine in both

London and India and it went something like this:

It’s India. Famines happen there. There are too many people

and a lot of them live on the margin of starvation even at the

best of times. We are not heartless men. We do what we can

and we do it better than anyone else. But we can’t do every-

thing. Oh, and there is a war on, don’t you know?

When told of the need to rush food supplies to Greece in 1944

Churchill revealed a hierarchy of concern that was clearly based

upon both racial prejudice and a caricature of Indians as helpless

peasants: ‘The starvation of anyway underfed Bengalis matters less

than that of sturdy Greeks.’ Indians didn’t have to hear private

conversations like that to know how the men at the top of the

empire could sometimes dismiss their most pressing concerns.

When released from house arrest and able to speak in public again,

Gandhi immediately called what happened in Bengal ‘a manmade

famine’. Sucheta Kripalani, a future Congresswoman, damned ‘the

utter callousness with which the government behaved . . . perhaps

one of the reasons that really drove iron into our souls’.

Because if the British could not or would not manage the country primarily in the interest of Indians then they should stand down and let

Indians themselves take their turn (and it is indeed worth noting

here that there were no serious famines ever recorded in India after

independence, although one did take place in Bangladesh in 1974).

Whether callous, careless or both, it was hard to deny the moral

force of all this, especially if you claimed the right to govern this

place based upon your ability to organise the essentials of life

better than the people you ruled. A century earlier, when another

natural disaster led to a nation-changing famine in rural Ireland,

the British state was condemned both for a lack of action and for

allowing prejudices about the rural Catholic Irish to undermine

what limited action it did take. A famously angry leader column

in the Galway Vindicator, written on New Year’s Eve 1846, thun-

dered that the London government’s refusal to interfere in ‘the

market’ of food

puts to blush every feeling of humanity and libels the very name

of Christian . . . It is, we repeat it, nothing less than the murder

of the people . . . Even now [the authorities] seem inhumanly

apathetic. Good God, was there ever such cruelty perpetrated

before by any Government calling itself either civilised or

Christian? Again we ask ‘Must the people starve?’

Britain’s reputation in Ireland is to this day affected by the way

that question was answered. The long-term impact of the Bengal

famine, and the way it was addressed, was not very much differ-

ent. Because when the question ‘must the people starve?’ was

asked once again the answer that came back was bleakly and sadly familiar.

An essay about Subhas Chandra Bose

INDIA, YOU’VE BEEN ‘BOSED’

Writer Phil Craig explains why the cult of Subhas Chandra Bose, widely acclaimed as the true hero of Indian independence, is unhistorical, unfair and just plain annoying.

Earlier this year Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi posted this to his many millions of followers on X:

‘Today, on Parakram Diwas, I pay homage to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. His contribution to India’s freedom movement is unparalleled. He epitomised courage and grit. His vision continues to motivate us as we work towards building the India he envisioned.’

Since I was at that precise moment working on a book that argues the exact opposite of this - that Bose’s life did not advance Indian independence by a single hour - I watched Modi’s ‘like’ counter growing with some irritation.

I consider that Subhas Chandra Bose sits neatly in a long tradition of revolutionaries so passionately committed to their idea of perfecting humanity that they are more than willing to see large numbers of actual humans perish along the way. And long before Modi pressed ‘send’, such people have never been short of admirers willing to make excuses. From the deputies who propped up Robespierre through ‘the terror’, through the credulous writers and journalists who admired the way that Stalin was transforming the Soviet Union all the way to the American intellectuals (looking at you Mr Chomsky) who found it so very difficult to say anything bad about Pol Pot, a phrase involving the making of omelettes and the breaking of eggs was never far away.

Thinking of what Modi had written I took solace in a favourite quote from Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children:

‘What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same.’

Because that’s a perfect way to describe the life and legacy of Subhas Chandra Bose – lots of things, believed today by lots and lots of people, that are not true but which have become very real and very important indeed. And that is why in today’s India he is studied, revered and, truth be told, near-worshipped more than the original heroes of independence, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Indian politicians, especially Hindu nationalists like Modi, raise statues of Bose, open schools named for Bose and regularly invoke Bose’s long struggle for freedom. Any mention of India and the Second World War in an online forum rapidly evolves into a debate about his importance then and now, with Bose’s many young fans prominent, adulatory and loud.

His public life began with a scuffle in a Calcutta school and a history teacher he transformed into a verb. At Presidency College, a hothouse for Indian boys destined for high office, he stood out as both a rebel and a natural leader of rebels. After a confused dispute about a teacher called Mr Oaten reprimanding a smaller boy, Bose and his friends set upon him in a corridor, thirty seconds of chaotic violence that led to his expulsion from the college and instant celebrity across Bengal. In numerous other schools teachers found themselves violently ‘Oatenised’ by their Indian pupils, acting in solidarity with Bose.

Teenage rebellion versus imperial arrogance is an easy story to tell and we rush to take sides on issues such as this, then and now. Bose, never one to chose the less dramatic phrase, spoke of this period as his baptism of fire, his first experience of martyrdom, his first understanding of the personal price that the call to leadership would demand of him. But for all that he was hardly nailed to a cross. Behind the scenes some strings were pulled and some family influence peddled and within a year the young radical was back in education, a semi-detached member of upper class Bengal society once again, studying philosophy at the Scottish Church College in Calcutta. And within two more years he set out for England to take up a much-coveted place at Cambridge University.

In the years that followed Bose rose through the ranks of nationalist politics in India. He was drawn to protest groups and secret societies, some underground and illegal. Although he publicly admired Gandhi’s commitment to non-violent protest, he would not condemn those who did resort to bombings and assassinations. All of this drew the attention of the police and in 1924 he was arrested for the first time. His flair for self-promotion guaranteed him an important voice in the Congress Party and he was arrested once again during the civil disobedience of the early 1930s. The Raj was evidently unsure how to handle this irritating but popular young agitator and he experienced phases of official harassment punctuated by months of tolerance.

By now he was known far beyond the shores of India and wherever he went a string of politicians, writers and celebrities queued up to meet him and be photographed alongside him. The Congress party could not decide how to respond to the men that had recently taken charge in Germany, the Soviet Union and Italy, men who were transforming their nations but at the price of militarism and repression. Nehru was instinctively opposed to authoritarianism but Bose was less certain. To make the sweeping changes India needed, he believed that a strong governing party imposing a military style of disciple may be necessary. ‘Nothing less than a dictator is needed to put our social customs right’ he explained in one private letter, and it wasn’t hard to guess who he already had in mind for the role.

He was hardly the only young politician in the 1930s to think like this. Many people, disenchanted with capitalism and dismayed by the global economic slump, looked at what was happening in Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union with open admiration. There was also an undeniable glamour to the dictators of this decade, whether communist or fascist: the mass rallies, the ranks of strutting soldiers, the burning torches and the ‘Triumph of the Will’ rhetoric. Bose had yet to don a uniform or address a military parade, but he clearly did imagine himself in just such a role.

Bose saw the outbreak of war in Europe as the moment for Congress to declare independence and said so forcefully. Nehru disagreed, and soon the police pounced. Imprisoned once again Bose announced a fast unto death, in a statement couched in the quasi-spiritual language he had made his own:

‘Today I must die, so that India may live and may win freedom and glory . . . What greater solace can there be than the feeling that one has lived and died for a principle? . . . What higher consummation can life attain than peaceful self-immolation at the altar of one’s Cause?’

The Raj relented and he was released into a form of house arrest, his visitors carefully monitored and the area swamped by police. And yet despite all of this he was able to plan an escape that played out like an exciting episode in a John Buchan novel. Sending coded messages through a network of couriers, Bose obtained a disguise good enough to deceive all of his many guards. Then, with the help of his supporters, he managed to travel for days by train, in private cars and on foot across many thousands of miles of northern and then north-western India with half the country’s police out looking for him. Such ingenuity and courage, from by a man weakened by a long history of illness, turned Bose into even more of a hero amongst the believers in his cause.

He avoided the searching police and intensified border controls by trekking on foot along high mountain tracks and then hitch hiking along rough Afghan roads until he arrived safely in neutral Kabul in early 1941. There he made the most fateful decision of his life. He contacted diplomats from the German and Italian embassies and asked for their help to travel to the very centre of the struggle against the British Empire - Berlin. Only there, he believed, could he best represent the interests of India to Britain’s most potent enemy. In the heart of Germany he would plan a revolution and help bring down an empire, accepting help from his oppressor’s foes just as Irish freedom fighters had done in 1916.

Escaping British spies, he managed to reach Berlin and became an honoured guest of the Nazi regime. As German armies raced eastwards towards Moscow later that year he happily socialised with Hitler’s leading lieutenants, including Goebbels and Himmler, and visited a concentration camp accompanied by some of the men most responsible for the Holocaust. At the camp he was photographed alongside Martin Luther, who had been the note taker at the Wannsee Conference in 1942, when plans for the mass extermination of European and Soviet Jews were formally approved, and the fanatical Reichskommissar of occupied Holland, Arthur Seyss-Inquart.

All this makes him rather a soft target now. It’s easy to contrast him at a gossipy drinks party in Berlin with what was happening at the exact same moment in town squares, forest clearings and isolated quarries across Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic provinces of the Soviet Union. Places from where stories of the ‘difficult work’ being done by specialised military units, and their often-enthusiastic local assistants, made their way back to Germany that summer and autumn. But - his many defenders argue - how can any of that horror be allowed to discredit Bose’s pursuit of his dream of independence for India and a better world for all humanity? A man doing a great thing in a bad world is still doing a great thing, is he not? If troops representing the men calling you ‘Excellency’ and serving you strudel are massacring Jewish women and children thousands of miles away, and you half know and half don’t know about it, then why should that stop you pursuing a very different and decent policy of your own? It’s just that you need the help of these dangerous people to bring a better world to fruition.

There’s no reason to think that he knew any firm details of the worst atrocities during his time in Berlin but it’s also impossible to believe he didn’t notice the scale of persecution, exclusion and then gradual removal of Jews from public life in Germany and Austria during the many months he lived there. And yet of all the memos, articles, speeches, telegrams and letters he produced while living amid the leading men and women of Hitler’s Reich, not one expressed concern for the plight of Germany’s or Europe’s Jews. Explaining his position to a friend who was uncomfortable about some of his statements in Berlin, Bose settled on a formula he would use time and again:

‘We won’t say anything either in favour of or against the Germans, for what they do in Europe does not strictly concern us.’

Once Japan entered the war, Bose embarked upon another dramatic and secret journey – via submarine from Germany to the Far East. In Tokyo he persuaded Japanese Prime Minister Hideki Tojo to allow him to lead the small Indian National Army, a force made up of Indian prisoners prepared to break heir vow to a King-Emperor in London and fight alongside the Japanese to bring independence to their homeland.

Bose’s energy and charisma supercharged the INA and, on 5 July 1943, he stood proudly before twelve thousand men in its uniform, outside Singapore’s Supreme Court, one of the British Empire’s grandest buildings. He promised that they would soon go into battle under Indian leadership making decisions based upon Indian priorities. This wasn’t entirely what the Japanese military understood the relationship to be, for Bose had to rely on others for weapons, transport and much more besides, but on this exhilarating day nobody was going to challenge him on the details. Instead a full throated cheer rang out over this former imperial fortress, as Bose introduced his men to their new battle cry: Chalo Delhi – ‘Onwards to Delhi!’ - and then made a solemn promise:

‘If you follow me in life and in death - as I am confident that you will - I shall lead you to victory and freedom.’

By August 1943 the INA could call on about 60,000 fighting men, supported by the innumerable branches of Bose’s Indian Independence League that were springing up across Japanese-occupied South East Asia. The INA added real combat power to Japan’s plans to invade India in 1944 and critically, Bose was convinced, it would lend it an irresistible moral force as well. He predicted that the troops of the official Indian army would be most reluctant to fight against their brothers - sometimes their actual brothers - in the INA and he expected mass desertions to his cause to begin the moment battle commenced.

But before it did he decided to visit the Chinese city of Nanking as a guest of the Japanese Army, and while in this city he spoke of Asian unity and universal Asian values. It was an astonishing thing for him to do. Everyone who could read a newspaper or a magazine in the late 1930s knew what the Japanese army had done in that city during a six-week rampage that was instantly known as the Nanking Massacre or, more accurately, the Rape of Nanking. Finding themselves in complete control of a civilian enemy population the soldiers of Emperor Hirohito indulged in crimes that even now are too upsetting to recount in detail. Something truly bestial took hold of these men as they targeted young and old, and especially women and children, and inflicted upon them acts of sexual violence on a scale as spectacular as it was stomach turning. That Asian men did all of this to other Asians in Nanking made Bose’s decision to speak about unity and shared values there all the more remarkable.

In December the Japanese took him to the Andaman Islands, where for the first time he hoisted the flag of an independent India over territory that had been freed from British rule. Bose is now so deeply integrated into the story of Indian independence that, in 2023, the Times of India published an article celebrating the 80th anniversary of this ceremony.

‘Netaji [ most honoured leader] Subhas Chandra Bose, being the relentless freedom fighter that he was, hoisted the Indian flag in Port Blair in 1943, long before India won independence. This was done to declare Port Blair free from British rule. If that was not one of the most incredible acts of defiance during the Indian freedom struggle, we don’t know what was.’

It was certainly an act of defiance but it was also - inescapably - a propaganda effort on behalf of the empire that had replaced the British on these islands. And their rule was to be every bit as brutal and arbitrary as the Raj at its worst. Just a month after Bose’s visit 44 Indian civilians were shot without trial by the Japanese army in what was called the Homfreyganj massacre. Most of them were members of Bose’s own party but the governor he had appointed could do nothing to save them. It’s one of many hundreds of examples of extra judicial killings and torture that took place on the Andaman Islands, even though - as far as the outside word was told - they were now formally under the flag of a free India.

The INA struggled in combat and failed to make much of an impression during the Kohima and Imphal campaigns of early 1944. There were few if any defections from the British led Indian Army, partly because well-publicised stories of Japanese cruelty to civilians, doctors and nurses made most Indian soldiers feel deeply suspicions of the promises made by Bose and his allies.

During the 1945 advance of the British 14th Army into Burma (an army that was 80% Indian, all volunteers), the INA did put up some resistance – but it was patchy and ineffective. By the end of April Bose’s war was over as fact but only just beginning as legend, and as the latter it has proved to be much more effective. The many vivid tales of hard-to-prove victories and exaggerated suffering that emerged from the final stages of the campaign have as much if not more prominence in the India of today than the actual victories of the regular Indian army of 1945.

In one story from this time, popular on websites that push the Bose hero story today, a small group of sick and injured INA men – most without boots – launch a final attack on a British base. All accept that they will likely die but proclaim it to be their sacred duty. In this attack – which British war diaries failed to record – the INA men manage to kill over 500 British soldiers while losing just 17 of their own.

The British response to unlikely INA triumphs such as these, according to the same sources, is predictably savage - bombing hospitals without mercy. Did any of it actually happen? Well, did Mr Oaten deserve his beating or his verb? It depends on what you choose to believe, as Bose understood very well. And if enough people do decide to believe such stories then they become and remain influential, real even if not wholly true.

On 18 August 1945 a plane carrying Bose crashed on take off in Taiwan. Bose was badly burned as he escaped and died soon afterwards. According to one witness he attempted to run through some burning wreckage whilst wearing clothes that were already doused in aviation fuel.

On learning of the death of his old tormentor, Edward Farley Oaten sat down to write a rather surprising tribute.

Did I once suffer, Subhas, at your hands?

Your patriot heart is stilled, I would forget!

Let me recall but this, that while as yet

The Raj that you once challenged in your land

Was mighty; Icarus-like your courage planned

To mount the skies, and storm in battle set

The ramparts of High Heaven, to claim the debt

Of freedom owed, on plain and rude demand.

Bose the Indian Icarus, it’s an arresting image. From a scuffle by the school notice board to sending an army to liberate Delhi, this was a man who all his life ran towards the flame, even when doused with petrol. Someone who cared deeply for the struggling masses but who was attracted by a pseudo-spiritual language of national renewal, intoxicated by a call to greatness, and dismissive of the petty compromises made by lesser men.

And so, given how his public life began, what should his verb be? I offer two alternatives.

bose

/boʊs/

rhymes: -əʊs

Verb (contested)

1. success through personal sacrifice, vindication after death

It was hopeless but they believed they could bose their way to ultimate victory

Similar: sacrifice martyr envision inspire prognosticate

2. willing to ignore evil for sake of ambition or fanaticism

He saw the death pits but by now he was too far bosed to care

Similar: exculpate rationalise excuse mitigate overlook

To some extent he is entitled to the posthumous adulation he receives, and doubtless expected, but it’s a shame that Indians –who did not make the compromises with evil that he felt necessary are not granted such a place in its history. Including many who were every bit as committed to independence as he was. I argue that it was the Indian officers of the British-led army who truly made independence inevitable. They built a formidable (and, critically, apolitical) military that not only delivered a historic defeat to the Japanese Empire but was also ready and able to support a new free nation.

But the further we move away from 1945 the easier it is to forget about the traditional and, yes, sometimes conservative forces that shaped the players. Which is why a reckoning now can never be the same as a reckoning then. A residual loyalty to Britain and the Raj, even in a nationalist, was understandable in the 1940s in a way it simply isn’t today. And, conversely, as we leave the age of European empires behind and focus our attention on their brutal and rapacious aspects, we’re naturally more inclined to favour those who were implacably opposed to them, whatever deals they did with whatever devils. And this is why Bose is such an easy sell – and an easy tweet - today.

There’s no expensive drama being made about the Indian Army of 1945, no exciting reconstructions of the Arakan campaign or its astonishing ‘Thunder Run’ through central Burma. But there is a lavish, and cloyingly sentimental 10-part epic about the Indian National Army on Amazon Prime and millions have watched it. It includes little or no reference to the cruelty of Bose’s Japanese allies or his genocidal Kameraden in the SS.

Which is sadly why I can’t imagine India de-bosing itself anytime soon.

Phil Craig’s book 1945: The Reckoning is published in India, Australia, New Zealand and the UK on April 24 2025.

To commemorate the 80th Anniversary of the liberation of Belsen - I story I cover extrensively in 1945 The Reckoning - I am sharing this chapter from my earlier book about 1942.

The end of Chapter 12:

All sorts of prisoners had been brought to 7 Armoured Division headquarters in the aftermath of Operation Splendour and most of them were uninteresting. As usual Vaux had Paxton do the interrogations while he went though the captured materials - diaries, letters photographs - with one ear on what was being said on the other side of the room. And that was how he heard about the women. The man in question was just an ordinary soldier, one of a group. Paxton was doing the talking and Vaux was studying their possessions.

The photograph showed an ordinary street, somewhere in Central or Eastern Europe to judge from the houses either side of the road. What was unusual was that there were naked women running along the pavement. The camera had focussed on one, quite attractive, quite young. She was obviously both frightened and embarrassed and was holding her hands between her legs. And the soldiers in the picture were laughing. Vaux interrupted Paxton’s routine interrogation with a question of his own in English. ‘Who are these?’ Vaux struggled to contain the surging anger in his voice. The soldier was quite startled. ‘Who? Them? Oh, only Jews.’

Chapter Thirteen: Midpoint

Peter Vaux was looking at a snapshot of occupation, and the absolute power of one human being over another that occupation meant. Most British people knew nothing of this. Most, but not all.

Only 25 miles from the coast of Normandy, the islands of Jersey, Guernsey and Alderney were indefensible. Churchill ordered the evacuation of all military personnel in June 1940 and the Germans landed a few days later. Hitler, delighted to have acquired a tiny piece of the British homeland, had the islands heavily fortified.

On Guernsey, Kaye le Cheminant’s mother told her that the Germans were bad people who took over other people’s countries and that she shouldn’t speak to them. Her father said they were mostly just ordinary men who would rather be at home with their own families.

On a sunny Saturday morning in the fields near my home, I was playing with my friends. The branches of the large trees hung low enough to be used as swings. Paddy and I hoisted the two younger children up, then followed ourselves, setting the branches swinging. ‘There’s a German officer watching us’ said Paddy.

It was a doctor from the nearby military hospital. He held out his hand and called out that he had sweets for the children. The younger ones went to him and Kaye followed, but at a distance. ‘Come on,’ said Paddy, as he showed her his sweets: little pink and mauve shapes that smelt magical.

As the other three were sucking their sweets the doctor came to me, very tall, I remember, and slim in his uniform and knee-high boots. He wore steel-framed spectacles. ‘Your parents have forbidden you to accept anything from a German?’ I nodded. He said that refusing the sweets would make no difference to the war but, as a parent himself, it would please him if I had some sweets.

Kaye said thank you as she had been taught and took her share. The Doctor said goodbye and returned to the hospital. ‘I knew better than to mention the encounter at home, though I felt sure that Dad would not have minded.’

Most German soldiers on Guernsey had little else to do but feed sweets to British children. They were free to roam the cafés, cinemas and shops. They tended market gardens, wrote long letters home or sunbathed on the cliff tops, leaving ample evidence of their homesickness and boredom. A wooden bowl with a message carved around the edge ‘For my darling wife on her birthday’, doll’s houses made from painted cigar boxes, thousands of tiny pieces of oak and beech dyed and polished and formed into a mural of the distant Rhineland. Protest at their presence generally amounted to little more than the occasional ‘V for Victory’ sign chalked up on a wall, or the whirr of a forbidden printing press.

Anyone who might have wanted to take part in more active resistance faced overwhelming problems. Almost all men of military age had been evacuated, there were no inaccessible mountains or teeming cities in which to hide a guerrilla army and there were 37,000 occupying troops, almost as many as the remaining islanders. As a result, people did as they were told and tried to live as normally as possible and as normal life went on, Kaye le Cheminant was one of many surprised to find that some of the enemy could be quite pleasant.

The men turning Guernsey into a fortress were different. The Organisation Todt (OT) dug foundations and poured concrete, using slave labourers imported from Poland, Russia and other occupied countries. A Methodist (check) minister, the Reverend Douglas Ord tried to help them. ‘Many are in the most repulsive condition,’ he wrote, ‘and all are treated like cattle by their German taskmasters.’ The islanders were told to avoid the workers, who were described as murderers, rapists and child molesters -- desperate men of the worst kind. One day Kaye le Cheminant saw a group of Russians singing beautifully but mournfully as they marched along. Most had no shoes and they were all obviously starving.

Although some islanders offered food and water, most were reluctant to become involved with frightening looking people calling out to them in strange languages. On the occasions that men escaped and were found cringing in barns or grubbing in fields for food, they were generally turned in to the Germans.

After the war survivors and captured guards described what happened behind the barbed wire fences: exhausted men beaten to death, crucified on fences, hanged, drowned, beheaded with shovels and stoned to death. Such scenes would be horrifying anywhere, but on Guernsey, an Enid Blyton island of summer holidays with nice mummies and daddies, of picnics by the rock pools, they seemed peculiarly out of place. But, like the German soldier’s photograph, they demonstrated something very important about Nazi occupation: you received a sweet or a shovel depending entirely on your race.

***

Kaye le Cheminant remembered that her family’s doctor had been in a hurry to leave in 1940. Her mother had shaken his hand and asked ‘Do you really have to go?’ He’d smiled and said, ‘Just look at my nose!’ But some Jews were unable to escape. Therese Steiner had been born in Austria in 1916. She travelled to England to flee the persecution of Jews in the months after Germany and Austria united in 1938. Trained in dental nursing and child-care, she found a job with a dentist in Kent, becoming nanny to his two children. In the summer of 1939 the family was on holiday in Guernsey. For three weeks Therese led expeditions to the beach and sing-a-longs around the piano. Then war was declared. The family went back to England, but they were not allowed to take her with them. No one with an Austrian passport could enter the mainland without special permission. In the panic this was impossible to obtain, and so Steiner was forced to say goodbye. Soon afterwards she was arrested by the Channel Island police, imprisoned as a potential Fifth Columnist, and only freed when the Germans landed. After that she managed to get a job as a nurse in Castel Hospital.

Douglas Ord was a frequent visitor. He described Steiner as ‘bright and universally respected,’ a well-educated young woman who was popular with the patients and could talk to anyone. Nurse Barbara Newman worked with Steiner and thought her very sophisticated

Therese was full of life, very intelligent and she could talk on all sorts of things. She’d come from the continent to a little place like Guernsey, which was quite something. She was a very good pianist, we used to have musical evenings every so often at the hospital, and she used to play to entertain the staff.

Those responsible for what Hitler called the ‘New Europe’ enforced his racial policies with great care, even in a tiny outpost like Guernsey. The first race laws came shortly after the occupation, and were incorporated into local statute by the pre-war civilian authorities. An announcement appeared in the Guernsey Evening Post instructing all Jews to register with the police. Approved by their own representatives and backed by their familiar police and courts, the order seemed inoffensive. Some whose racial status was ambiguous decided to register.

Following this, a stream of anti-Jewish legislation passed into island law. Jews were barred from public buildings, lost their businesses and were prevented from seeking employment. The laws were administered by the officials of Victor Carey, the senior local official, known as the Bailiff. The German civilian administrator, the Feldkommandant, asked Carey to provide a list of all Jews living on the island. He promptly complied:

Feldkommandantur 515, Guernsey

re: card-indexing of Jews.

Sir,

I have the honour to acknowledge your communication of the 17th instant on the above subject, and in accordance with the instructions contained therein, I enclose copies of a letter which I have received from the Inspector of Police, together with the lists referred to in that letter, and which I hope will satisfy your requirements.

I have the honour to be, Sir, Your obedient servant,

Victor G. Carey, Bailiff.

Once it became clear that registration was going to lead to some form of persecution, there was considerable debate about who was Jewish and who was not. Some islanders went to great lengths to prove that they were less than fifty percent Jewish so as to escape the new laws. In this they had the active support of Carey and his officials. Hundreds of letters went back and forth and two Guernsey people were removed from the list. To clarify matters, an order arrived from Germany in May 1942 stating:

Any person having at least three grandparents of pure Jewish blood shall be deemed a Jew. A grandparent having been a member of the Jewish religious community shall ipso jure be deemed to be of pure Jewish blood.

Detailed inventories were made of the businesses taken from Jewish ownership: a grocer with ten pounds of stock, a milliner with a hundred. The Bailiff let it be known that it was his intention to refund the money with interest once the war was over. Jews lost their wireless sets, then they were ordered to wear the yellow star in public. Pressure was brought on the local press. The Jersey Evening Post’s headline of 27 April 1942 was ‘Jewish-Bolshevist Danger’. The propaganda film Jew Suss was shown in local cinemas with English subtitles. In the film’s final scene a German woman tries to resist a Jewish rapist whilst an Aryan hero races to her aid. A member of the audience remembers the reaction:

This part elicited cries of admiration from the German audience and their local female companions. The film ended in thunderous applause, when the Jew met his end.

***

Therese Steiner had not been overly concerned when she was first instructed to register and had gone down to the office of the Inspector of Police. There, a polite British clerk took her identity card, smiled, and gave it back to her marked with a red letter ‘J’. He looked slightly embarrassed and gave her an expression as if to say, ‘This is all so silly, but what can we do?’

As the months passed, Steiner became anxious. What she feared most was being taken away to work as a forced labourer. This, it was rumoured, was happening to Jews in France. Her disquiet increased in the early months of 1942 when, on the instructions of the Feldkommandant, the Guernsey authorities investigated her financial affairs. They determined that she had no savings and an income from the hospital of 48 pounds a year plus board and lodging.

Therese’s employers wrote to the Feldkommandant’s office to say that, as a hospital nurse, she was a ‘key person’ and should be protected from being drafted to work for the Germans. Therese’s friend Elizabeth Duquemin, another native of Vienna, was engaged in a protracted bureaucratic struggle to free herself from the anti-Jewish laws. Although registered as a Jew she was married to a British non-Jew and hoped that this might win her exemption.

Every day I lived in fear and terror. I was in trauma all the time. Every day I was frightened, and did not know if they would take me away, or my baby daughter, or my husband.

Anonymous letters arrived on the Feldkommantant’s desk. One woman who had married an islander was reported for being a ‘bad-tongued Jew…who had just married for a business affair to escape your jurisdiction’. Steiner spent hours playing the piano to try to ease the tension. But the pressure was too much for some. On Jersey one Jewish man hanged himself, another went mad and died in the island asylum of ‘maniacal exhaustion’.

On xxxxxxx The Bailiff was told to round up all registered Jews for deportation. He instructed the police to carry out the order. In late April Therese was told to report to Police Headquarters again. The duty clerk told her that she had to pack a bag and prepare herself to leave the island under the care of the German police.

I do remember well Therese coming into the office where I conveyed to her the instructions given to the Guernsey Police by the German military authorities. Therese became extremely distressed, bursting into tears and exclaiming that I would never see her again.

Two other Jewish women were to be deported with her. Elizabeth Duquemin had been saved by her husband’s British nationality. The night before the deportation Therese went to her friend’s house where she borrowed a large suitcase for her belongings. According to Duquemin ‘she had to report the next morning to be taken away to France and she was in a terrible state of anxiety’. Douglas Ord saw her that night too:

She was in great distress and seemed to feel that her feet were now set upon her via Dolorosa. I did what I could to comfort her, but what can you say or do?

Therese went back to the hospital to play the piano by herself. The next morning Barbara Newman, her nurse friend, helped her with her case along the steep cobbled road down to the harbour at St Peter Port.

We got down there at half past seven, which gave us half an hour to chat and say goodbye and so on. We met the other two women. We were laughing and joking as though she was going on a day trip to Herm Island or somewhere. Because what else could you do? You had to make as light of it as you could. There was a wire fence all across the entrance to the harbour, with a little doorway through, and an armed guard with a tin hat on standing there, and someone came from behind and called them and off they went. That was it.

***

There are palm trees down by the harbour and a statue of Prince Albert. Barbara Newman still watches the day-trippers sail off to Herm Island to look at the famous shell beach. The road she and Therese Steiner took that morning has steep grey granite walls grown over with ivy, and bright green ferns in the cracks. There are quaint little blue post boxes with Queen Victoria’s name on them.

‘This is all so silly, but what can we do?’

Those in authority could have refused to obey the order, resigned, organised a demonstration, tried to hide the Jews. It would have been very frightening to defy the armed men who had taken over their island, but such things were tried elsewhere. Not often, but sometimes. In Denmark, opposition of this kind did reduce the amount of human suffering.

After all, Guernsey was not Poland or the Ukraine. At this stage in the war, when they were still winning it, the Nazis were reluctant to punish civilians deemed -- like the Aryans of the British Isles -- to be fellow members of the master race. Obstruction and protest might have led to local compromise, and the worst the Bailiff and his officials could have expected was the loss of their jobs rather than their lives. Ambrose Sherwill, the island’s Attorney General, admitted later that ‘I still feel ashamed that I did not do something by way of protest to the Germans: a vital principle was at stake.’

However he rationalised it, Bailiff Victor Carey presumably considered the following question: is it worth risking trouble for 40,000 of his own people to prevent the rough treatment of a handful of foreigners?

***

Across Poland and thousands of miles into the Soviet Union, Hitler’s armies were followed by the Einsatzgruppen, the ‘cleansing squads’, with orders to clear designated areas of the race-enemy. Jews were rounded up and either shipped to the nearest ghetto to await employment as slave labour, or taken into the forests and shot.

The first experiments with gas began in the autumn on 1941, using vans with the exhaust fumes directed into a sealed passenger section. The drivers were told to drive around until the screaming stopped. The first specially built gas chamber opened at Chelmno in Poland shortly before Christmas. And by now the Nazis had found something more potent and reliable than engine exhaust: Zylon B.

At the Wannsee conference on 20 January 1942, a decision was taken to solve Europe’s ‘Jewish problem’ within three years. The architects of the new plan set themselves a logistical challenge: the discreet murder of between eight and ten million people. Simply transporting the victims would require a substantial proportion of the available transport in the east. By the end of March new camps had been set up on main rail lines in Poland.

From now on there would be a concerted attempt at secrecy and euphemism. ‘Special treatment’ and ‘resettlement’ were the favoured expressions. Jews were told that they were being sent to areas where there was room for them. But already the Allies knew more than Hitler realised. In their initial enthusiasm, the Einsatzgruppen had made detailed weekly reports, listing the numbers of Jews killed, messages that had been intercepted and decoded by British intelligence. But, as yet, no one in London or Washington knew about Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor or Auschwitz; all of which were busy by the spring of 1942 with facilities for gassing large numbers of people and disposing of their bodies. By June tens of thousands of Jews a week, mostly from the newly conquered lands in the east, were being transported in cattle trucks to their deaths.

Jews from Western Europe were also sent to the camps. Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects of the Wannsee plan, visited Paris in May 1942 (check) and ordered the first deportations of French Jews. For administrative purposes, France included the small part of Britain that was held by the German armed forces. The Guernsey Jews were being treated with formal politeness at every stage. But the pursuit of them was to be as remorseless as that carried out by any Einsatzgruppen.

***

On 13 July the Marham briefing room was hot and crowded. Don Bruce was thinking of the huge 4,000-pound ugly dustbin of a bomb that his Wellington would carry that night. The products of ingenious cruelty, these bombs were dropped half an hour after a raid and were designed to create maximum blast damage over a wide area. The intention was to kill rescue parties digging for the injured, firemen trying to douse the incendiaries and dazed survivors venturing out of their shelters. The force of their explosion would burst lungs at several hundred feet. Crews hated carrying them, partly because of their evil purpose, but mostly because of the extra threat they posed to the aircraft. Their size required the removal of the bomb doors, which meant that if the plane went into the sea it would sink more quickly. Their thin skin meant they were vulnerable to flak, and might suddenly explode inside the bomber. And arriving so late over the target meant that you would be the final, isolated straggler on the journey home, with all nearby fighters on full alert.

Duisberg was the target tonight. Front gunner Bill Margerison would have to drop the bomb, whilst Bruce operated the GEE navigation equipment to make sure they hit exactly the right mark. The weather expert arrived to conclude the briefing, met with the usual derisory cheers. Bruce collected the maps and his radio codes, printed on rice paper so that he could eat them if he landed on enemy soil. He checked in his pocket for the lucky ‘Blue Top’ key ring he had picked up the previous year from the Canadian beer company of the same name.

I was walking back across the room when one of the WAAFs called out, ‘I hope you have a pleasant trip sergeant.’ I came out of my reverie, turned round and said, ‘Yes, so do I, thank you very much.’ She smiled sweetly and I made a mental note to look her up when I got back.

The thought of the trip acted as a laxative to most people. Before climbing into my flying gear I’d always visit the latrines. A bird had built its nest up on the pipes near the ceiling. It used to fly in and out and it had raised a family of chicks there; I always looked on this as a good omen. But on this day the painters had been in, they’d painted the pipes and chucked the bird’s nest out.

Bruce and the rest of Mooney’s crew waited for the WAAF to come along with the transport. Then they were taken round to dispersal. The others all took off, at two minute intervals, whilst they sat their with the 4,000-pounder sticking out from the belly of the plane.

The outward flight was uneventful. They were all old hands by now. They found the target, the GEE led Bruce to his aiming point over the burning city and the bomb was released right on time and right on target. But as they turned to escape they were ‘coned’ once again. The first blue searchlight landed on the rear turret, from where Ron Esling shouted, ‘For Christ’s sake Del get us out of these beams’. They had very little time before their height was calculated and all Duisberg’s guns trained upon them.

Mooney threw the plane into the normal series of evasive manoeuvres as the gunners screamed for him to get them out of the light. Bruce heard the sound of a stick rattling on corrugated iron and thought quietly to himself, ‘That’s shrapnel hitting the sides and wings. So this is what it feels like to be hit’. The port engine began to burn, Bruce could see the flames through a side window. Mooney closed the engine down and, in desperation, tried something new, suddenly pulling the bomber up into a drastic stall turn. As equipment fell around the cabin, the Wellington quickly slowed until it stood on its tail. Bruce felt a moment of sickening inertia and then, with a sudden wrench on his control column and a boot on his rudder, Mooney had them in a dive back in the opposite direction. Searchlights flailed all around and they were free, but free only to tear down towards the ground at dangerously high speed.

We plunged down from about 14,000 to 10,000 feet, then 9,000, 8,000. The crew were floating in space inside the aircraft, only the navigation table held me down where it pinned my knees. Accumulators, maps, nuts and bolts, pencils, all floated past my face. My eyes were glued to my airspeed indicator: it read 320, 330, 340, 350 mph. I found myself thinking of the red warning plate on the pilot’s control panel: ‘THIS AIRCRAFT MUST NOT BE DIVED AT SPEEDS IN EXCESS OF 300 MPH.’

Gravitational force pinned Bruce, his arms felt like lead, his eyelids were closing. As he hung onto his navigation table, the wireless operator crashed about inside the cabin and Mooney, his arm muscles bulging at the effort, yelled ‘Come on you big ugly bastard’ as he struggled to pull up.

Slowly they started to level out. Over the intercom, Bruce could hear Mooney panting between his curses at the plane, their stupid bomb, the German searchlights, the entire ‘RA Fucking F’. And then it was over. The floor was littered with debris. Bruce looked down at his table.

We’d dropped 6,000 feet, virtually in a straight dive. The case containing our rations had burst open and the raisins had formed a little pile on the desk; as I looked bleakly and weakly at them an earwig suddenly crawled out of the sticky heap. Thank God I didn’t eat any of those.

Mooney continued to fight with his aircraft to prevent further loss of height. But chunks were missing from the port wing and that engine was gone altogether. Then the starboard one began to overheat. Mooney had to throttle back to prevent a fire on his one good wing. Slowly the bomber sank back towards the ground as power seeped away from the battered, leaking engine.

We’d come back on one engine before so we thought we might make it. It’s not that far back from the Ruhr. But as we travelled on we realised we were losing far more height than we should be. Del said he couldn’t climb because of the state of starboard engine. He said to me, ‘Do you think we can make the sea and ditch?’ I did some pretty quick calculations, I reckoned we were making a ground speed of 70 - 80 mph, but I worked out we would still be well inland by the time we reached zero feet. We couldn’t crash-land on land at night, so after a little discussion Del said, ‘I think we’d better bale out.’

Mooney gave the command ‘Jump. Jump.’ The rear and front gunners were the first to go. Bruce remembered the drill: he removed his intercom leads from his helmet in case they strangled him, he took off his tie and crawled towards the front escape hatch.

As I passed Del he grinned and gave me the thumbs up. And then I was at the opening. Four thousand feet below the ground appeared to be moving slowly past. It looked dull, grey and uninviting. As I hesitated I heard the instructor at OTU saying, ‘If you have time, you will probably lower yourself by your hands.’ That’s the way for me: better than diving out head first. I faced the rear of the aircraft, hands on either side of the hatch. Gingerly I lowered my feet and legs. The slipstream caught them, and like a straw I was swept along the underside of the fuselage. For a second my parachute pack caught against the hatch. I wriggled and then was free, wrenched away into the night.

It was so quiet after the noise of the engine. I could hear the air rustling past my face. My stomach felt a bit strange, like being in a fast lift, but I thought, ‘I’ve heard about this parachute lark and it’s not so bad really.’ It was pitch black and I wasn’t sure if I was looking at the ground or the sky. I suddenly realised my knees were bending towards my chest, I must be falling on my back head down towards the ground. It was quite pleasant really. Then I thought, Christ, the ripcord, pull the ripcord.

High above Bruce, Del Mooney was trying to save his own life. To buy time he’d applied full power to the starboard engine, which was now in flames. Having held the aircraft straight for the rest to get out, he struggled with his own parachute pack then let go of the controls and pulled himself down to the escape hatch under his seat. The plane immediately began to circle as it fell burning towards the ground. When he got to the hatch he was held in for an agonising moment by the G-force. He fought to push himself clear.

***

What possible purpose could be served by transporting three women? Yet it was obviously a matter of great importance: over 5000 documents relating to the Jews in the Channel Islands have been found, a staggering amount of paperwork considering that there were twelve on Jersey and ten on Guernsey.

Therese Steiner was now in occupied France, where local officials had been helping the Germans round up Jews for months. She was sent to the town of Laval. Although forced to wear the yellow star, she was allowed to seek work and for a couple of weeks found employment as a nurse and a place to live. But when the orders came through from Paris for a quota of Jews to be sent east, ‘stateless Jews’ such as her were extremely vulnerable. She was arrested by French police on 19 July and taken to Angers. There she was locked up with a group of other Jews, who were told that they would be sent for resettlement to Poland, where there was room for people like them. Dr André Lettich was there:

We were herded together in the small rooms of a seminary, 25 to 30 to a room. The doors were locked. The following day we were put into lorries and taken to the railway station

So far the men enforcing the rules had all worn the same ‘what can I do?’ expression as the Guernsey clerks. But as Steiner moved further and further from the island the level of politeness gradually declined. Now, as she prepared to board the train, there was no politeness at all. Rude, loud, angry guards who smelled of brandy waved leather whips. They seized her rings and her watch. She was allowed to keep one small suitcase. Some started to weep, others quietly swallowed their jewellery or tried to hide rings inside their bodies. They were marched out onto the platform but there were no carriages for them, just old trucks used for animals. They were pushed in, 75 to 80 per wagon, and then the windows and the doors were sealed.

Rail convoy no.8, carrying 824 Jews, crossed the German border near Trier late on 20 July. According to Franz Novak, the man who arranged the eastward transportation of all Western European Jews, the deportees were loaded onto trains in broad daylight. In no surviving instruction is there mention of the need to do this at a quiet time of day. Those who scheduled the trains made no effort to separate them from normal railway traffic. A Jewish woman who was transported from Poitiers to Auschwitz in July 1942 recalled stopping at stations and calling out to passengers on the platforms for water. Every now and then a trainload of commuters or French children on a school trip would come to a halt at a red light next to a thousand people in cattle trucks. No one on Novak’s staff thought mixing up the desperate and the ordinary like this would cause any serious problems.

André Lettich remembered that ‘During the journey, crammed one against another, we suffered terribly from thirst, and we were obliged to sacrifice a small corner of the cattle car for calls of nature.’ People put their mouths to knotholes in the wooden walls for fresh air, or stood on each other’s shoulders to reach the tiny windows high-up, which were criss-crossed with barbed wire. There was no food and no water. Children were soon crying and asking unanswerable questions. Where are we going? Why can’t I have a drink?

Therese knew about childcare, knew that children needed security, routine, regular sleep, someone to keep them clean and get them a drink of water. One of the purposes of this train journey was to remove all such props to ordinary life. To take doctors and piano teachers and professors and nurses and nice mummies and daddies and turn them into something resembling the normal occupants of these wagons; weak and unyielding and already half ready for death.

***

Don Bruce and Del Mooney hung under their parachutes over Holland. They saw the Wellington spinning into the darkness below them, like a giant Catherine Wheel throwing out spouts of burning petrol as it turned.

I suddenly thought I’m going to live, I’m going to live. Because I really did think that was it for me in that plane. Then I saw some trees coming up fast and I pulled off a pretty decent landing in a field.

We’d always been told to hide the parachute so the Germans wouldn’t know how many had come down. So I dragged the chute down with some effort, it was a huge mass of silk, God knows how you were supposed to bury it or hide it, I looked around and thought maybe I could just bung it under a hedge. I couldn’t see any hedges though and I thought if I muck around here much longer there’s going to be a German patrol along. I left the parachute in a tangled heap under the tree, threw my ‘Mae West’ on top, and made off across the field away from the aircraft to look for a road.

Bill Hancock had injured himself on landing and was calling out to attract attention. He was near a German post, and soldiers soon came out to get him. Mooney was close by and was picked up too.

Some villagers were coming out of a church. I approached them and they took me to the village baker’s house. I spent 4 hours there. People came from miles around to see me, to see a person from the country in which all their hopes for freedom were vested. I hope I was suitably impressive!

The baker asked the Burgomaster what to do. The Burgomaster said he had no choice but to hand me over -- so many had seen me. In fact, people had come in and shaken me by the hand. The baker’s wife asked how old I was. I drew on the table, ‘21’. When she saw this she threw up her hands and started howling. I felt like howling myself, I was so all-in.

After a couple of hours they said a friend of mine was there: it was Bill Margerison. I was so pleased to see someone who spoke English. We were handed over to the Feldgendarmerie and taken to the Lufwaffe airfield at Eindhoven.

There was an unpleasant guard, lantern-jawed. He sneered, ‘Tommies, eh!’ and propelled us none too gently to the cells. There was no mattress, but I was so tired I was out like a light. We spent one night there, then were taken by train to a prison in Amsterdam.

A German officer came in and chatted amiably in English about places he’d visited in Britain before the war. Then he suddenly asked whether the RAF had concrete runways at Marham. Bruce, half expecting the thumbscrew, said he couldn’t tell him that. The officer came back to the question two or three times without success. Next came a trick the aircrew had been warned about: a fake Red Cross form was produced supposedly to help the Germans notify the captives’ families that they were safe and well. It asked for all kinds of technical details about their base, their raid and their aircraft.

I felt as if I was a minor actor playing a role in a play! I filled in the parts we were allowed to fill in, and signed it. Then the mood changed and he asked sarcastically ‘What church or hospital were you aiming for?’ I, equally sarcastically said, ‘We were given the whole city to pick from.’

Bruce and the others were put on a train for a prison camp in Germany. They had to change at Cologne, just recovering from its battering by the RAF. The station was crowded with evacuees, and every carriage was soon packed, with more grim-looking people standing along the corridors clutching luggage. They stared at Don Bruce sitting with his guard in a comfortable reserved compartment.

I was looking out at the platform. An old German came up and stood right in front of me on the other side of the glass, and though I couldn’t hear him he was obviously swearing away at me, then he spat straight at me. It slowly dribbled down the pane.

He went off and fetched an officer and had a word with our escort to get us moved out of our compartment. Our officer told him to get lost. Then he went away and returned with someone with lots of gold braid on his uniform, who clearly outranked our officer. We had to go and stand packed in the corridor with all the German evacuees. A German sailor cracked me on the back as I walked past and everyone cheered. It was frightening.

Don Bruce’s train left Cologne on 16 July, four days before Therese Steiner’s cattle-truck passed close to the city on its slow journey to Poland.

Refugees from Cologne with British ‘terror bombers’ in their midst, Jews travelling to Auschwitz, rolling over the same rails on the darkened fringe of a ruined city. For the rest of his life Don Bruce would feel guilty about the old man spitting, and all the good people he’d killed with his terrible ugly bombs. But when he discovered about the cattle trucks, he wished with all the force of an outraged decency that some of his bombs had fallen on those men, that he could have seen those men plain through his bombsight as he’d clenched his stomach. That it could have been clear and straightforward.

***

They would sometimes stop for hours. At times people approached them. Some offered water, for free or in exchange for a ring or two. After three days in the trucks they reached Auschwitz and looked out, bewildered, at people with shaved heads and striped uniforms. Is this some kind of asylum? Surely we’re not meant to be coming here? Men shouted ‘Raus, Raus.’ People jumped or fell from the wagons. Most were sick, weak. It was raining.

Dr André Lettich was there. ‘They ordered us to stand in ranks of five. We were up to our knees in mud…anyone who tried to put on his waterproof or hat to protect him from the rain learnt by blows to the head that this was forbidden.’ The women were given numbers. Three SS officers stepped forward. One raised a white-gloved hand, and with a small gesture indicated where each person was to go: ‘Links; links; rechts; links’. Right was for those young fit and able to work. Therese Steiner might have survived the initial selection, no one knows.

The people in striped uniforms were not meant to talk to the new arrivals, but some muttered in Yiddish under their breath. ‘You have a trade, tell them, now.’ This is what saved Lettich. Some mothers were passed fit to work, but they did not want to be separated from their children. When they followed them they were not stopped. They began to walk towards the buildings, the old and sick helped along by the others. They were told they had to shower, then they would get food and water and be put to work. They had to undress and be shaved. The shaving was painful, carried out by barbers in striped uniforms with razors blunt from use. They were herded into a long, narrow room with showerheads in the roof; the room was sealed. They stood crowded together waiting, hands between legs because they were embarrassed to be naked.

Outside, a man in a mask climbed a ladder, and emptied a tin through a hole at the top of the wall. Inside, something was wrong. There was no water coming from the showers; they were not showers. They screamed and clawed at the door and walls. Their bodies convulsed and heaved, trying to expel the poison, and soon they lay thickly on the floor.

An SS man looked through a peephole. The room was ventilated, and more men in striped uniforms were sent in, stepping on the bodies, checking orifices for hidden jewellery, removing gold teeth. These men too will be killed. They dragged the bodies out to a pit to be burned. Therese Steiner’s clothes, shoes and hair were sent to Germany. Her ash was used as fertiliser.

***

President Roosevelt liked to talk about the ‘Four Freedoms’ to which, he said, he’d devoted his life. The freedom from want, the freedom of conscience, the freedom to worship and then the one that always resonated most strongly: the freedom from fear. The artist Norman Rockwell illustrated it for a propaganda poster. A father and mother from an average home look down at their sleeping children, in their hand a newspaper reporting some horror in Europe. That’s what this is all about, the picture says, we’re fighting to create a world where children can sleep happy and clean and have all the bad things kissed away. It was sentimental, of course. America was fighting for a lot of reasons, as was Britain, and some of them were far from altruistic. But in 1942 the people of both countries were beginning to understand that this was a war unlike any other, against an enemy unlike any other.

Therese Steiner’s train passed near Cologne on 20 July 1942, the midpoint of a war that Adolf Hitler was still winning. On that day, with the Panzer armies advancing deeper into southern Russia, Heinrich Himmler ordered the final ‘cleansing’ of all remaining Jews in the Polish ghettos.

The men who sent Don Bruce to Duisberg had no more idea about Auschwitz than he had, or had the police clerks in Guernsey. But they did have a vision that was clear and straightforward: doing dreadful things, and sometimes doing dreadful things to civilians, was the only way they could see to set a world free from fear.