Families of Madras Presidency WWII Servicemen - Records & Memories
833,701 men.
Nobody in the room had heard that number before Saturday.
For eighty years the story has been that Indiaās army came from the Punjab and the hills, and that the South stayed at home. The archives say otherwise. On Saturday I said so.
I was the invited guest speaker at the Open Meeting of the Families In British India Society at the Union Jack Club in London. The talk: āThe Madras Presidencyās and South Indian Statesā Forgotten Contribution to the British Empireā. My talk in London and, as far as I can find, the first anywhere to tell this story whole. Still no book on it.
Between 1939 and 1945 the Madras Presidency and the South Indian States put 833,701 men into the war: soldiers, sailors and airmen, the Statesā own forces, and the men of the labour units behind the Burma front. More than any other part of India, the Punjab included.
Between March 1943 and the end of 1944, 2,825 of the 6,148 sailors the Royal Indian Navy added, 45.9 per cent, came from the Southern Provinces. That is from Vice-Admiral Godfreyās confidential report at the Imperial War Museum.
At the British Library I found the original of a figure I had only seen quoted: from March 1942 Travancore, Cochin and Pudukkottai raised 179 labour units for the Army, āinvolving more than 150,000 menā, the Resident for the Madras States, January 1945.
Their blood, their sweat and their bones are in Iraq and the Middle East, in Italy and in Burma: āfrom Italy to Sumatraā, as the Commander-in-Chief himself wrote.
In London there are statues for the Gurkha and for the Sikh soldier, and they deserve them. For the men of the South there is nothing with their name on it.
In February 1945 Sir Stafford Cripps cabled Madras that its gift of fighter squadrons to the RAF āwill always be remembered with gratitudeā. Britain wrote that down. Then it forgot. I am going to hold it to its word.
This will not be one talk and then silence. Every week until VJ Day, 15 August 2027, I will post one piece of evidence until these men have the honour they are owed and a place in Britainās memory. Then an exhibition.
Thank you to FIBIS and Mike Tickner for the invitation and the day, to the National Army Museum, The National Archives, UK, The British Library and Imperial War Museums, and to my mentor, Mr. N. Mishra, DIS, an alumnus of the Royal Military College of Science and the University of Oxford, who has been an elder brother more than a mentor.
Can you help? If someone in your family served in a Madras unit, the Royal Indian Navy or the air forces, in the Second World War or before, I want to hear about them: letters, photographs, medals, memories. Email and QR code on the handout. If you think these men should be remembered, repost this; one family who sees it may be keeping the letters.
The Southās forgotten service, no. 1 of a weekly series to VJ Day 2027. Next: Wednesday.
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