Consequently, the British Indian forces along with the Soviet and Free French forces invaded the western Asian states of Persia, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria while overthrowing Axis-friendly governments to essentially secure one resource – oil. The Indians and the Allied forces battled Rommel’s forces and ultimately secured the strategic Suez Canal supply line. “The whole empire has been stirred by the achievement of Indian forces in Eritrea,” was British PM Churchill’s reaction to the victory in a letter to the then-Indian Viceroy Lord Linlithgow.īefore long the Indian forces would go on to face Field Marshall Erwin ‘Desert Fox’ Rommel and his Afrika Korps. These operations were the first decisive victories of the Allied forces since the beginning of the war. The forces then marched onto Italian East Africa and decimated the Italian army under the Duke of Aosta.

The call of war came in from North Africa wherein the British Commonwealth forces attacked Italian positions in Egypt and Libya.

It was then in the December of 1942 when the first Indian forces were pressed into action. Interestingly, though not shown in Nolan’s war epic, Dunkirk, these four companies were part of the Dunkirk evacuations. The first Indian Army formation to participate in the war was Force K6 of the Royal Indian Army Service Corps, stationed in France. As Professor Annu P Matthew states, “I was astounded by the number of people who sacrificed and died, and the fact that this is not part of our history books in India, South Asia, or globally,” in her essay, The Unremembered: Indian Soldiers of WWII.

Yet while countless odes and tributes have been paid to the American or British or the Soviet soldier, the Indian soldiers’ sacrifices were limited to military records and out of the public conscience. Deployed mostly in the arid terrains of Waziristan, this army would eventually swell up to 25,00,000 soldiers by 1945 and as per military historian Harry Fecitt, “It was the largest all-volunteer army in the history of human conflict.” The second world war transformed the Indian armed forces from “essentially a national guard to what it is today – a modern fighting machine but one with long regimental stories, honours and colours”, says author R Prasannan. That nation was India.Īt the onset of the second world war in 1939, the British Indian Army was a small force of roughly 1,60,000 soldiers. Yet while the world honoured those who saved it from the Axis, the contributions of one nation were largely forgotten. It was on 30th April at 3:15 pm when Adolf Hitler shot himself inside his hideout, the Führerbunker, in Berlin as the Soviet Red Army marched into the city thus, bringing an end to a war he and the Axis powers initiated roughly six years ago.

William slim defeat into victory