Women at War by Vera Hildebrand

Author:Vera Hildebrand
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
Published: 2016-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

RJR RETREATS FROM RANGOON

WHILE THE RANIS IMPATIENTLY anticipated their deployment to the front lines, Allied forces emerged victorious in the protracted Battle of Imphal, which began in March 1944 in the region around Imphal, capital of the Indian state of Manipur. During their long retreat south, the exhausted INA troops endured serial military disasters, and a year later, in March 1945, Bose had no other option than to seek to evacuate the wounded soldiers remaining in the path of the British sweep.

Bose’s other chief concern was the safety of the 150 Ranis camped in Rangoon. He felt morally responsible to their parents for their safe return.1 INA captive B956 testified that ‘[Bose] used to say that he would be very happy if those girls died fighting in the cause of the country, but he would have no face to show if anything else happened to them.’2 In Bose’s value system, sending the Ranis into a battle that might result in their deaths and make them martyrs for Indian freedom was a worthy moral choice and the Ranis shared that point of view. Bose was concerned that it would be difficult to persuade these committed women to leave Burma while other INA soldiers remained on the front lines. He was right. Forcefully, the Ranis voiced their plea to stay to the end; they did not want to be sent home. They had come to free India or die fighting for that goal.3 They had trained hard for two years and that would all have been a waste.4 Bose insisted that they obey military orders.

Rasammah was deeply moved by an anguished and angry speech that Bose gave on 13 March 1945, when nothing was going well for the Azad Hind Fauj. In ‘his most impassioned speech’ to his army, Bose denounced INA officers who had deserted and become informants to the British.5 He ordered a purge of cowardly and treacherous elements in the army and commanded soldiers of all ranks to shoot any other soldier ‘if he acts in a treacherous manner’.6

After a series of heavy Japanese losses at Pyawbwe near Mandalay in mid-April 1945, General Kiani conveyed to Bose that Japan had given up the defence of Burma.7 General Slim, head of the Allied forces, described what followed as a race with elements of comedy as the Japanese army and the INA men, deprived of supplies and without communication to know the location of the enemy, attempted to outrun the Allied soldiers through the jungle in an effort to reach Rangoon before the onset of the monsoon.8

When the withdrawal orders were issued by the Japanese to withdraw from Burma despite Bose’s ‘overriding ambition to get the army into India at all cost’, the decision was welcomed by General Mohammad Zaman Kiani of the INA.9 He had been caught in heavy British shelling of the divisional headquarters that immediately followed the defection of Major B.J.S. Garewal, the second-in-command of the Guerrilla Regiment. Garewal was the officer in possession of INA and Japanese battle plans that included maps and the positions of various INA and Japanese headquarters.

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