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Planning in East Asia had been lackadaisical and overconfident at best (181). However, the declaration of war by Japan turned the Raj’s war planning on its head. That experience would soon be used against Erwin Rommel and the German Afrika Korps, and Indian units would go on to serve in Italy. Indian divisions first saw action in both North Africa as well as in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa, where they gained valuable combat experience against the Italians (121). While Lend-Lease eased some of the supply bottlenecks India experienced, British planners and the Raj had initially declined to mobilize the Indian economy because they doubted it could be made to produce wartime goods without unduly competing with Britain (89).Įarly in the war, India’s military was more focused on British interests in the Middle East, especially as British planners feared the possibility of Russian military action in Asia, particularly to threaten India by an invasion in Afghanistan. Indian troops needed vast amounts of equipment at a time when Britain was hard-pressed to outfit its own troops (70). This process was accompanied by considerable growing pains.
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The Indian Army went through a substantial transformation in size, from just under 195,000 in 1939 to over two million in 1945 (64).
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Iran and Iraq were of particular strategic interest to Britain and India, both for its oil supplies and the fact that the Persian Gulf allowed for access by sea to India. This area included East Africa, the Persian Gulf, and other parts of Britain’s Asian empire as far east as Singapore. Raghavan makes clear that while Indians were subordinated to imperial planners in London, the Raj was responsible for its own sub-imperial sphere (35). With this coalition, Linlithgow could ready India for war. As a consequence, Jinnah was able to press for the British to support ‘autonomous and sovereign’ Muslim states, a vague formulation that would nevertheless be important in the postwar period.
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While expecting that the Congress could be made to fall into place, Linlithgow went to work assembling other forces that would support the British, including the Muslim League led by Ali Jinnah (30). Raghavan focuses on three key themes: the difficulty in earning Indian cooperation in a war which Indians had not chosen to fight the profound transformation of India’s economy during the war and the ways in which Indian and Pakistani nationalists used their participation in the war for their own ends.īritain’s unilateral declaration of war angered the Indian National Congress, and Alexander Linlithgow, Viceroy of India, knew that India was vital to the maintenance of British interests in the Persian Gulf and East Africa. Raghavan describes his book as a way to better understand how India shaped and was shaped by the war, using military history, diplomacy, economics, and domestic politics in India to describe these changes. Srinath Raghavan’s India’s War: World War II and the Making of Modern South Asia examines India’s role in the Second World War, a topic which has been largely neglected by historians. As India assumes the role of one of the global powers, there has been a growing demand for more scholarship about the rise of modern India.