WE WERE THERE EVERYWHERE

Indians fought on every front in World War II —the deserts of North Africa, the plains of Europe, the isles in the Pacific, the plantations of Malaya, the jungles of Burma, and finally the hills of Imphal and Kohima. Their valour and resilience helped the Allies win some of the fiercest battles of the war. THE WEEK looks at India’s world war—a story that is now all but forgotten

- R. PRASANNAN

It was a former ruler of India who sent the ultimatum that started the war. It was a future ruler of India who received the final document of surrender that officially ended the war. From the beginning to the end, World War II was India’s war as much as it was of any other people.

Let us begin at the beginning. At 4am on September 3, 1939, Lord Halifax sent a telegram from London to Neville Henderson, Britain’s ambassador in Berlin. The cable contained a message for Germany’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop: Withdraw Germany’s occupation army from Poland. “I have accordingly the honour to inform you,” continued the Halifax cable, “that unless not later than 11am, British summer time, today September 3, satisfactory assurances to the above effect have been given by the German government and have reached His Majesty’s government in London, a state of war will exist between the two countries as from that hour.”

That was perhaps the harshest step that Halifax, a man of peace whom his old friend Mahatma Gandhi had described as “the most Christian and the most gentlemanly” personage, had taken in his eminently successful public life. Born without a left hand, Lord Irwin, as he had been known before he was made the Earl of Halifax, had finally landed the most prestigious job in the world at that time, the secretary of state of Great Britain.