India World War

In 1943 Winston Churchill and the British Empire needed millions of Indian troops, all of India's industrial output, and tons of Indian grain to support the Allied war effort. Such massive contributions were certain to trigger famine in India. Because Churchill believed that the fate of the British Empire hung in the balance, he proceeded, sacrificing millions of Indian lives in order to preserve what he held most dear. The result: the Bengal Famine of 1943-44, in which millions of villagers starved to death.

Nariman Karkaria, a young Parsi from Gujarat, had always wanted to see the world. So he left home as a teenager with fifty rupees in his pocket to do just that. After working in Hong Kong and Peking for a few years, in 1914, when war was in the air, he decided to volunteer for the British Army. Passing through China, Manchuria, Siberia, Russia and Scandinavia, he reached London early in 1915 and managed to register as a private with the 24th Middlesex Regiment. He was now a Tommy.

The extraordinary firsthand account of an American special forces unit in the jungles of southeast Asia and their guerilla operations against the Japanese during World War II!

With the engaging style of a true storyteller, Ghee Bowman reveals for the first time the astonishing story of the Indian contingent–the Muslim soldiers who fought in the pivotal Battle of Dunkirk–from their arrival in France on 26 December 1939 to their return to an India on the verge of Partition.

In 1941 and 1942, the British and Indian armies were brutally defeated and Japan reigned supreme in its newly conquered territories throughout Asia. But change was coming. New commanders were appointed, significant training together with restructuring took place and new tactics were developed. A War of Empires by acclaimed historian Robert Lyman expertly retells these coordinated efforts and describes how a new volunteer Indian Army, rising from the ashes of defeat, would ferociously fight to turn the tide of war.

A brilliantly original history of the First World War, retracing the footsteps of the Indian army's 1.5 million men who, in 1914-18, served about the globe from Europe to Africa, Asia and the Indian Ocean. After years of neglect, The Indian Empire at War raises the curtain on the Indian soldiers' personal experiences fighting for the Allies against the Central Powers and returning home to play their part in the Indian Independence movement.

Long before Australia started to be considered one of the best places in the world to live, it was thought to be completely unlivable. In the 15th century, the European race to claim land began. Despite the fact that Australia was a large landmass, no nation believed it was worth colonizing. The land was claimed by the Netherlands. However, little exploration happened there. Many countries actually believed it to be uninhabitable. However, the Aboriginal populations had already been thriving on the land for millennia.

From 1931 to 1953, there was a race like no other. It was a race to the top of the world - a race primarily between Great Britain, Nazi Germany and the United States. Carried on across nearly the entire sweep of the Himalayas, it involved not only the greatest mountain climbers of the era, but statesmen and millionaires, world-class athletes and bona fide eccentrics, scientists and generals, obscure villagers and national heroes.

Two Lives tells the remarkable story of Vikram Seth's great uncle and aunt. His great uncle, Shanti, left India for medical school in Berlin in the 1930s and lodged with a German Jewish family. In the household was a daughter, Henny, who urged her mother "not to take the blackie". But a friendship developed and each managed to leave Germany and found their way to Britain as the Nazis rose to power.

Subhas Chandra Bose was a revolutionary who sought Indian independence, but as many would contend, he ended up on the wrong side of history. In order to shake off the British yoke, Bose enlisted aid from Germany and Japan during World War II. This has led some to roundly condemn Bose as nothing more than a fascist cast in the same mold as Adolf Hitler, Hideki Tojo, and Benito Mussolini. But is there more to this complicated figure than meets the eye?

Huge international companies and corporations are a normal part of our everyday lives today. For most, their unimaginable wealth and power, rivaling even some of the smaller countries of the world, is something we take for granted. And we see them as the living embodiment of the capitalist system, regardless if we take it as a good or a bad omen. However, this wasn’t always the case. 

On a sweltering summer day in 2007, having just lost her brother to illness, Livia Manera Sambuy finds herself standing before a 1924 photograph of a stunningly elegant Indian princess at a museum in Mumbai. What's written in the caption will change her life forever. This gorgeous Punjabi princess, it's said, sold her jewels in occupied Paris to save Jewish lives, only to be arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp, where she died within a year. Could it be true? And if so, how could such a sensational story have gone unnoticed?

John Auden was a pioneering geologist of the Himalayas. Michael Spender was the first to survey the northern approach to the summit of Mount Everest. While their younger brothers - W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender - achieved literary fame, they vied for a place on an expedition that would finally conquer Everest, a quest that had become a metaphor for Britain’s efforts to maintain power over India. To this rivalry was added another: in the summer of 1938 both men fell in love with a painter named Nancy Sharp. Her choice would determine each man’s wartime loyalties. 

In April 1942, the Imperial Japanese Army steamrolled through Burma, capturing the only ground route from India to China. Supplies to this critical zone would now have to come from India by air—meaning across the Himalayas, on the most hazardous air route in the world. SKIES OF THUNDER is a story of an epic human endeavor, in which Allied troops faced the monumental challenge of operating from airfields hacked from the jungle, and took on “the Hump,” the fearsome mountain barrier that defined the air route.

This book brings to light some of the lost stories of Indian aviators who built the very foundations of human and physical infrastructure for what is now the world's fourth largest air force. It benefits from several first-person interviews with some of the last Indian survivors of World War II, enabling a level of fidelity that is quite rare among Indian histories. 

China-Burma-India is one of the most forgotten theaters of World War 2. As the United States entered the war after Pearl Harbor, it looked to China as a source of manpower as well as a base for bombers and a way to eventually invade Japan. The Japanese, British, Americans, and Chinese each had their own motivations and policies in the Pacific that would ultimately lead to the involvement of Burma in the Pacific War. The conflict in Burma was an intricate affair that may be best understood through the story of the first Yunnan Expedition into Burma.

Over the last 2,000 years, ambitious men have dreamed of forging vast empires and attaining eternal glory in battle, but of all the conquerors who took steps toward such dreams, none were ever as successful as antiquity’s first great conqueror. Leaders of the 20th century hoped to rival Napoleon’s accomplishments, while Napoleon aimed to emulate the accomplishments of Julius Caesar. But Caesar himself found inspiration in Alexander the Great (356 - 323 BCE), the Macedonian king who managed to stretch an empire from Greece to the Himalayas in Asia by the age of 30.

In considerable operational detail, this chronicle captures not only the logistical nightmare of fighting in the CBI theater, but also the impossible dilemma confronted by colonial subjects in Asia during an inescapable global conflict. Should they trade a western colonial power for a Japanese version? Should the Burmese National Army betray Japan and ally with the British and Allied forces? Could Japan be trusted to “Free India” within a “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” as the India National Army hoped?

The Trees are all Young on Garrison Hill is written and read by a veteran of the Second World War battle of Kohima. This tautly-written autobiography takes the listener on a journey from a quiet respectable Scottish boyhood to the sudden brutality of jungle warfare in Assam and Burma, and afterwards through the twilight of Empire in India, where Gordon Graham lived for 10 years after the war.

It is 1918, six months after the end of World War I, and Rosalind awaits the return of her father from the war. While it is common practice for British children in India to be packed off to boarding school at the age of 6, Rosalind is unusual because she lives and is schooled in India because her mother insists.