HISTORIES OF WAR
THE BATTLES OF IMPHAL
and Kohima are easily the most underrated battles of the entire Second World War. Overshadowed by titanic struggles like Stalingrad on the Eastern Front and the Allied landings at Normandy, they have received none of the military academic or the big budget movie attention of the other significant turning points in the global conflagration. Perhaps it was because, by early 1944, the writing was on the wall for the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA). With the US closing in on the Home Islands with a strategic bombing campaign, holding a land empire built in a little over a decade of conquests was going to be an insurmountable challenge. The IJA’s twin-axis thrust, its last in that theatre, was meant to capture the frontier towns of Imphal and Kohima and sever Britain’s access to the Japanese Empire’s southwestern most province, Burma. If the offensive was successful, it could open a gateway into India.
The British army had retreated over 1,500 km from Burma into India in 1942, the longest in its history. By 1944, the Japanese faced a retrained and rested army that was a far cry from the adversary they had chased back into India.
In Imphal 1944, Katoch, a military historian and a war tourism pioneer in the region, brings to bear his expertise on the subject in a racy narrative backed by Peter Dennis’s vivid illustrations. This book needs to be read with another in the series, Kohima 1944, to understand just how significant these military reverses were for the IJA. Though the rout of the IJA’s Kwantung Army in Manchuria was its largest defeat (and not Imphal as the book jacket erroneously mentions), this book tells how close Britain came to losing the Jewel in its Crown.
IN THE BANGLADESH
blitzkrieg of December 1971, the author sees the revival of a 2,000-year paradigm of Indian warfare—the just war—not wars of aggrandisement but one in response to a horrific genocide which East Pakistan’s military rulers embarked upon its Bengali population.
Bakshi also sees a reassertion of the Kautilyan war paradigm of extended, covert destabilisation and rapid execution, using speed and shock to benumb the enemy as opposed to the dull wars of attrition that have characterised warfare on the subcontinent. This would not have been the case considering in the months leading up to the 13-day war with Pakistan
These books are timely reminders of how the lessons from battlefields need a relook
in December 1971, India’s generals believed the port cities of Chittagong and Khulna, and not East Pakistan’s capital Dhaka, to be their objective. The chief of staff of the Eastern Command, Major General J.F.R. Jacob played a major role in convincing the army leadership otherwise. The rest, as they say, is history. Major General Bakshi revisits events leading to what is arguably the finest moment for the Indian armed forces—a synergised military effort that saw the army discarding attrition operations in favour of manoeuvre through difficult riverine terrain finally culminating in the fall of Dhaka, a humiliating surrender of the Pakistan army and the birth of Bangladesh. Victory was achieved through a superb coordination of all arms of the Indian state— political, military and dipomatic and is hence a reminder of how, nearly 50 years later, the lessons from the Bangladesh war demand a closer relook.
THE WORLD’S MOST
arduous military deployment gets an everyman’s relook in this book by journalist Harshal Pushkarna. His travelogue takes readers into the history, geography and politics of how the Indian army came to stay atop the 6,000-metre Saltoro Range since 1984, overlooking the world’s biggest body of ice outside the two poles, where temperatures range between 55 degrees and 20 below zero. His dig-in with the hardy soldiers manning the gates at the roof of the world is an eye-opener because it suggests an astounding amount of makeshift facilities and vintage equipment. This is alarming considering the deployment that has been on for over 34 years shows no sign of ending anytime soon.
—Sandeep Unnithan