The Indian Contingent

The Forgotten Muslim Soldiers of Dunkirk

Ghee Bowman

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780750993791
• eBook ISBN:
  9780750995429
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

'An incredible and important story, finally being told' - Mishal Husain
On 28 May 1940, Major Akbar Khan marched at the head of 299 soldiers along a beach in northern France. They were the only Indians in the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk. With Stuka sirens wailing, shells falling in the water and Tommies lining up to be evacuated, these soldiers of the British Indian Army, carrying their disabled imam, found their way to the East Mole and embarked for England in the dead of night. On reaching Dover, they borrowed brass trays and started playing Punjabi folk music, upon which even 'many British spectators joined in the dance'. What journey had brought these men to Europe? What became of them – and of comrades captured by the Germans? With the engaging style of a true storyteller, Ghee Bowman reveals in full, for the first time, the astonishing story of the Indian Contingent, from their arrival in France on 26 December 1939 to their return to an India on the verge of partition. It is one of the war's hidden stories that casts fresh light on Britain and its empire.

1

Seven thousand miles to help

A tree whose girth fills one’s embrace sprang from a downy sprout;

A terrace nine stories high arose from a layer of dirt;

A journey of a thousand leagues began with a single step.¹

Sixteen-year-old Aurangzeb, from the quiet Punjabi village of Rajoha, did not realise that his life would change forever during the monsoon season of 1939. The youngest of four brothers, he had been named after the great Mughal emperor, his name meaning ‘Ornament of the Throne’ – perhaps his parents had high hopes for his future. As in so many Punjabi families, all four brothers went into the army, one of them reaching the grand old age of 82 after his retirement. At the start of September 1939, keen to see the world and to start earning a wage, Aurangzeb heard that the Royal Indian Army Service Corps (RIASC) was recruiting, as India had just declared war. He travelled 200 miles to the city of Lahore and signed up as a bellows boy – part of a team making shoes for horses and mules. Just a few weeks later he was in Europe. According to family tradition, this bellows boy used to write poetry in Urdu or Punjabi in his breaks from shoeing and would send the poems back to Punjab, where they were kept by family members.²

In March 1942, a telegram arrived in Rajoha from Army HQ, informing the family that Aurangzeb had died in Wales, many thousands of miles away. He was only 18 years old. The hospital records show that he died of tuberculosis, a common complaint among the men of K6, and he was buried three days later in Brecon.³ Forty years afterwards, in 1982, his nephew was in Britain on duty with the Pakistan Navy and tried to find his grave. He searched in vain in London, not realising that the site was actually 170 miles away to the west, so he finally gave up in sorrow and took a photo of himself outside a cemetery in London. In 2018, I showed Aurangzeb’s relatives a photograph of the cemetery in Brecon, with irises growing around his grave, and a cluster of red poppies placed by the local British Legion. They were visibly moved by the picture and were reassured to know that the Commonwealth War Graves Commission look after his grave with respect. The poetry-writing 18-year-old bellows boy is remembered to this day in a quiet village in Pakistan and a garrison town in Wales.

The process that brought Aurangzeb to Wales started on 3 September 1939. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s much-quoted speech that took Britain into the war was heard not just in Glasgow and Godalming, but in Dar es Salaam and in Dunedin, in Labrador and in Lahore. From the outset, this was an imperial war: the countries of the British Empire were just as involved as those of the British Isles. Some parts of the Empire were given a choice and joined in without hesitation. Such was the case with the Dominions – the white settler colonies which governed themselves within the Commonwealth – South Africa, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. The subject colonies in Africa, the West Indies and the Pacific, meanwhile, were given no choice – they entered the war when Britain did. The same was true for India.

In undivided British India – the territories that would later become India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – opinion was split. Mahatma Gandhi, the spiritual leader of many Indian nationalists, expressed sympathy for the Allies in general and the Poles under attack, but non-violence remained his core belief.⁴ On 14 September, the Congress Party, which had led the nationalist movement since the 1920s under its leader Jawaharlal Nehru, issued a manifesto which declared: ‘If the war is to defend the status quo – imperialist possessions, colonies, vested interests and privileges – then India can have nothing to do with it. If, however, the issue is democracy and a world order based on democracy then India is intensely interested in it.’⁵ Congress was against Fascism, but also against the imperialism that the British Raj represented and it would only support the British war effort if the end of that Raj was unambiguously in view. The previous president of the Congress Party, Subhas Chandra Bose, a balding and bespectacled Bengali who still had influence and followers, took a much harder line and pressed for active civil disobedience against British rule as a route to independence.

At the other end of the spectrum was Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan, the prime minister of Punjab, the northern province that was home to most of the men of Force K6. He was a staunch Empire loyalist, known as the ‘soldier premier’ who made sure that his sons enlisted in the army.⁶ In Punjab, Hayat Khan’s Unionist Party had won most Muslim votes at the recent elections. Elsewhere in the country it was Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League which was most popular among Indian Muslims. At this stage Jinnah was cautiously supportive of the British war effort, for he saw within it an opportunity for advancement of the political ideals of the League. India’s Muslims were a minority, keen to assert their rights and to be seen as equal to Hindus. Jinnah’s hope was that by active participation in the war effort, the Muslim route to equality in politics could be assured. The Indian people at large, meanwhile, may not have known where Poland was, and may not have cared very much at that stage, but by the time of the termination of hostilities six long years later, they had come to know the names of many obscure corners of the world – Keren, Monte Cassino, El Alamein and Imphal among them – where the men of the Indian Army had fought and died.

As governments and people around the Empire decided their response, the British and French army planners set to work. When Poland fell it was still a small war fought on European soil and showed no sign of turning into a conflict that would involve every continent and almost every country of the world. In many ways, the planners thought, this was to be a rerun of the Great War a generation before. In place of the continuous line of trenches stretching from the English Channel to the Alps, the French had constructed a concrete hedge all along their border with Germany – the Maginot Line. Opposite it, along the Rhine and the border with the region of Lorraine, stood the German equivalent, the Siegfried Line. These two opposing barriers were designed to be impregnable, but the gap between the end of the Maginot Line and the Channel was the weak spot, undefended by any permanent forts, for it ran along the border of neutral Belgium. The Allied planners predicted the Germans would flout Belgian neutrality, as they had in 1914, and throw a right hook through the Low Countries. Therefore, as well as the French armies along their northern border, the British would take station there. The Allied strategy revolved around holding the Germans with the combination of the Maginot Line and a strong force in the north, thus keeping France inviolable while the Allies built up their reserves. The French were defending their patrie – their homeland – although one fifth of the French Army were from colonies in North and West Africa, Madagascar and Indo-China.⁷ The men of the BEF, meanwhile, were not defending their homes but standing at a distance, holding a section of the line around Lille, away from the German border.

* * * * *

Such an army would need a lot of feeding. Napoleon Bonaparte famously said that an army ‘marches on its stomach’, and over the centuries a lot of effort has been expended in order to keep that stomach full of bread, and the corresponding rifle full of bullets. By 1939, supply was recognised as the core business of war. German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel said, ‘the battle is fought and decided by the quartermasters before the shooting begins.’⁸ The ratio of combat soldiers to noncombatants could be surprisingly high – one writer put it at 1:12 for the US Army.⁹ Each front-line hero needed many more heroes of the rear echelon to support him, and those heroes are always overlooked by historians.¹⁰ The BEF’s supplies would come by rail, not from the nearest ports at Calais and Dunkirk, but hundreds of miles from Cherbourg, Nantes and St Nazaire.¹¹ The city of Le Mans in north-west France became a crucial staging area, and the headquarters for the lines of communication. All these places would become significant to the Punjabi sepoys of Force K6.

Transporting the supplies of food, fuel and ammunition would be undertaken by trains and lorries; at least that was the British plan. In contrast with the Great War, where animal transport was used extensively on the Western Front, the idea was that the BEF would be fully mechanised with ‘not a horse in the force’.¹² The question became how to transport the supplies the last mile for delivery to the front-line troops, especially if conditions were muddy, frozen or densely wooded. This is where the mules came in. Animal transport, in fact, turned out to be a decisive feature of the Second World War, belying the blitzkrieg image of fighter planes and tanks. Over the course of the war, the humble mule, hybrid offspring of male donkey and female horse, was a crucial element in delivering supplies. This was a surprise to some:

Few people at this stage would have guessed that once again that sturdy, strong, rather lovable yet surly animal of uncertain moods, the mule, was to provide the backbone of the pack transport units, which were to make it possible for the army to advance in the steaming jungles of Burma and on the snow-clad hills of Italy.¹³

The British Army was not the only one to make use of such animals. The Germans had only sixteen out of 103 divisions fully motorised in 1939.¹⁴ Their infantry marched on foot through France and into Russia, and most supplies were carried on horse-drawn wagons. The Soviets similarly relied on animals, and it was only the United States that got close to fielding a fully motorised army.¹⁵ The technology was far more mixed than the commonly used photographs would show us: the Maginot Line was accompanied by the mule, the Panzer by the panje cart.

In France in 1939 the British transport need was identified by one officer: ‘when the thaw comes, lorries will be too heavy. I’m going to get some mules.’¹⁶ Thus, as early as 31 August, before war was declared, General Sydney Muspratt of the India Office in London passed on a ‘tentative enquiry’ to India about ‘2000 trained pack mules about 13.1 to 13.5 hands [high] with pack saddles but without personnel’.¹⁷ A handwritten note in the file a few days later added that the figure of 2,000 was ‘the first instalment’, with a built-in assumption of casualties of one third. The expectation and all the planning was for a long and bloody stay in northern France. At this stage the request was still for animals only, but as the autumn progressed the War Office realised that animal-handling skills did not exist in the British Army; there was only a single company in the British Royal Army Service Corps (RASC) trained to work with mules, with only twenty-five animals and a small nucleus of men.¹⁸ In this way was the plan for Force K6 born.¹⁹

The orders to prepare and assemble the force went out from Indian Army Headquarters to garrisons across Punjab on 16 November.²⁰ In the main army base at Rawalpindi, at the entrance to the Khyber Pass at Landikotal and at Ambala, eighty miles from Simla on the vast North Indian plains, the companies of the RIASC checked their equipment and vaccinated their men against tetanus and the animals against glanders – a bacterial disease of the lungs that can cause death within days. The core of the force was four animal transport companies – 22nd, 25th, 29th and 32nd – with around 300 men and as many mules in each company. As the force was designed to be self-contained, there was also a reinforcement unit to fill the human gaps created by illness or casualties and an advanced remount depot (ARD), which provided the same service for animals. The 47 Supply Depot Section (SDS) under Major John Finlay would supply food, fodder and other necessities to the men and animals, an Indian General Hospital (IGH) looked after the sick men, and the Headquarters (HQ) were in overall command. Right from the start, the vision was for a force that would ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Note on terms used
• Maps
• Royal Indian Army Service Corps ranks
• Glossary and abbreviations
• Foreword
• Prologue: On the beach
• 1 Seven thousand miles to help
• 2 From the five rivers
• 3 Fony Vaar
• 4 Blitzkrieg
• 5 Mules by the Maginot and the march up the Moselle
• 6 Back in Blighty
• 7 We’ll keep a welcome
• 8 Hinges and fringes
• 9 Heroes and traitors behind bars
• 10 The great escapes
• 11 Should auld acquaintance be forgot?
• 12 Doing what comes naturally
• 13 The end of the Indian Contingent
• Epilogue: Forgetting and remembering
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements