The long road home

Nine years of real-life adventure in the 1940s make this a gritty read

Nine years of real-life adventure in the 1940s make this a gritty read

Burma to Japan With Azad Hind
by Ramesh S Benegal, published by Lancer
Price: Rs 395
****

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour on December 7 1941, it set off a chain of events that changed the lives of many.

One of these was Ramesh S. Benegal, a 16-year-old high school student in Rangoon, Burma, where he was born. His father had died two and a half years before, leaving behind a widow and three sons of whom Ramesh was youngest.

The blackout in Rangoon during the war had been a farce. As deputy of the air raid warden, Ramesh would shout at people who left their lights on at night but they would shout back and defiantly leave their windows open. When the Japanese attack began, everything changed and Rangoon was bombarded.

By February, Singapore, the great bastion of the British, fell to the Japanese who now marched on to Rangoon to gain access to the strategic Burma Road. The British were fleeing north, destroying bridges as they went to cut the enemy off but in the bargain, shutting the overland escape route for civilians.

Under threat of attack, the family was forced to separate. What followed in the next nine years was a series of amazing adventures of hardship, occasional comfort, and survival against all odds that Ramesh Benegal wrote about years later in this book which was published some years after his death.

To read it is to enter a time machine and participate in a faraway world of historical events and people, and a rollercoaster of experiences. From rural Burma they tracked back, down the Irawaddy and in fear of dacoitsand of being mistaken for the British-Indian troops who had raped and pillaged along the path of retreat to sadly-bombed Rangoon; then on to Thailand and Singapore. On the voyage to Japan, they were torpedoed and miraculously survived, fewer than 150 of 2,500.

There are fascinating glimpses of the Japanese: the Kempe Tai police with such powers that they might first salute an errant superior army officer, then slap him, then salute him again before dismissing him; the Japanese officer who turns out to have understood the rude things said about him in Tamil (having been a dentist in Madras for 20 years); living next door to a house in which "comfort girls" of the army forcibly recruited from Korea and Burma had been stationed; the difference between the Japanese in the occupied territories and the refined, polite and gentle citizens they were at home; losing prized possessions to thieving British POWs after the war.

Most fascinating of all, even more than of the view of the Japanese Air Force Academy where a group of young Indian boys including Ramesh received training, even more than the ringside view of the cold-blooded evil of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was his account of his meetings with Subhas Chandra Bose.

Besides high drama this book has strong emotion too. The circumstances of Ramesh being finally reunited with his family are extraordinary and moving. Saddest of all was the phase of being branded traitor, treated as a POW, and later even being refused entry into the Indian Air Force on account of his proud association with the Indian National Army.

An epilogue by Air Marshall Rajwar, Air Commodore R.S. Benegal's Navigator during the 1971 war, provides perspective, including the events that led to his being awarded the Maha Vir Chakra and Athi Vishith Seva Medal.