Chapter 3: The Summer of Tigers
Entente armored cars process through the India Gate in Delhi during the 1940 war against the Bharitya Commune. The city's imperial ambitions would soon bring war back to the subcontinent.
The downfall of European Syndicalism had not only left their comrades in the rest of the world without a potent source of support. It also provoked deep debates within left-wing movements about the proper policy for dealing with the outside world, and reignited the perennial question of whether it was the duty of Syndicalists to stoke worldwide revolution or to focus on building the Syndicalist state within their own country as an example to others.
Ho Chi Minh at work, c.1944. The Indochinese Syndicalist leader became an important Syndicalist thinker, corresponding with comrades around the world.
Indochinese Syndicalist leader Ho Chi Minh was firmly of the international camp. The lessons of France and Britain were, he argued, that building Syndicalism in your own country left you vulnerable. If you did not smash your enemies, even if they seemed defeated, they may one-day return. This was the tragedy of the Union of Britain, he concluded, which had allowed the Monarchists to flee to Canada untroubled, and in doing so had allowed them to build a military, economic and cultural machine dedicated to the Union’s eradication. Even if it had taken twenty years, British Syndicalism had sowed the seeds for its own downfall.
Religious idols and other 'reactionary' antiquities being destroyed during the Indochinese occupation of Thailand. The Syndicalist occupiers unleashed a brutal terror campaign to extract wealth to fund their war effort.
Spreading revolution was therefore an ideological necessity for Indochina, but also a strategic one. Ho Chi Minh found himself surrounded by reactionary enemies. The Japanese had intervened to prop up the disintegrating Thai state. The European empires lurked in the wings. China was an ancient enemy. Distracting these enemies with Syndicalist uprisings would allow the Indochinese to consolidate their position.
Indochinese agitation efforts were widespread and successful.
Funded by the looting of occupied Thailand, Ho Chi Minh’s international brigades successfully established Syndicalist undergrounds in many of Indochina’s neighbors, sclerotic states ill suited to effectively oppose such well-organized partisans operating among their already disgruntled populations. Only in China and Japanese-occupied Korea did the authorities successfully crackdown on the Syndicalists’ efforts, but their violent tactics did much to fulfil the Indochinese objective of spreading dissent and opposition to the government.
Entire units of the Japanese military police were tasked with suppressing Syndicalist dissension in Japanese territories.
Ho Chi Minh enjoyed notable success in the Princely Federation, an already weak confederation of maharajas and Indian feudal princelings made weaker by an influx of Syndicalist refugees fleeing from the destruction of the Bharitya Commune in 1940. With an archaic economy and dazzling inequality, Syndicalism had always bubbled under the surface in the teeming metropolises of southern India. An attempted Syndicalist uprising in 1940 had only been quashed by the princes deploying soldiers to put down riots in Bombay and Hyderabad. Rumors of new Syndicalist outbreaks, spurred on by Indochinese interference, reached the Entente-aligned government in Delhi by the summer of 1944. Antiquated Delhi had reasons enough of its own to be concerned by Syndicalist agitation, but at the same time, the Federation’s troubles could also represent opportunities.
After defeating the Bhartiya Commune, the Empire regarded all of India as within its sphere of influence.
Canada and the other surviving British dominions had always had a love-hate relationship with their Indian partner. In many ways, Delhi was a 19th century relic, emerging from the chaos of the revolution consuming the old British Empire thanks to a combination of luck and inertia. In those early years, the vastness of India had made Delhi too far away for the commissars of the infant Bhartiya Commune to try and sincerely lay claim to, especially when they had trouble enough controlling their own nominal territory. Delhi’s northern neighbors in Nepal and Afghanistan had descended from their mountains to help themselves to a few richer valleys, but this made little practical difference to the distant lowlands. For Germany, Delhi in the 1920s would have been a colony too far, and for the Princely Federation, Delhi held more commonalities that it did differences, especially with Syndicalists massing on their mutual borders. Indeed, apart from Delhi's nominal allegiance to the British crown, the social and economic structure of the two countries remained practically the same.
In the glory days of British India, the maharajas had directly ruled 1/3 of the subcontinent as British vassals, and the British the other 2/3 directly. Now Delhi was very much under their control, and there was little authentic love between them and the rest of the Imperial 'family'
This similarity was not lost on the leaders of the rest of the Empire. In Canada, they muttered darkly about Delhi's backwardness and inefficiency. They doubted the sincerity of its maharajahs' affections, and the durability of their loyalty. They feared that should difficulties arise, they would jump ship as quickly as their southern brethren had. At the same time, certain segments of the imperial ruling classes had always bristled at being forced into accommodation with non-European 'native' princes they saw as little more than uncivilized despots. Nonetheless, they could do precious little about it with Entente power at its lowest ebb, so the insincere diplomatic dance continued. In Delhi, the British colonial bureaucrat-advisor class continued their slow, stately existence, progressing with the seasons between the winter and summer capitals much as they had done under the old Raj, while the maharajahs ruled in their palaces, and gave an Indian legitimacy to the whole affair. Of course, for the many millions of ordinary Indians, none of it much made difference at all.
The young maharaja of Bastar c.1937, with British advisors. After the Revolution of 1925, the British colonial class continued to administer Delhi as soldiers and civil servants.
Ultimately, whatever disquiet they had with Delhi’s rulers, the leaders of the Entente were concerned foremost about syndicalism and (perhaps more calculatingly) could see the advantage in an India that was once again fully under their total control. Throughout the summer of 1944, many of the Canadian units being withdrawn from pacified Britain were transferred to India in case the Syndicalist agitation in the Princely Federation metastasized to full-on revolution. This included armor divisions, mostly formed of CMW Calgary tanks, and motorized units that the antiquated armies of the Princely Federation were ill equipped to counter, as well as heavy air support in the form of Canadair Peregrine dive-bombers.
Built in Canadian and Australasian CMW factories, the Crown Motor Works Calgary was a versatile and durable medium-tank design, though perhaps not the equal of contemporary German panzers. A variety of versions were produced, and many saw service during the Liberation of Britain and the Indian Wars.
Entente air strategy favored close air support, and Royal Canadair, one of the gigantic 'directed' corporations created by the Canadian economic plans of the 1930s, produced dive bombers like the Canadair Peregrine in great numbers. Where hostile forces lacked opposing air cover, as in India, they were brutally effective.
Massing Entente forces and the threat of Syndicalism in the Princely Federation saw tensions reach a boiling point in India during the hot summer of 1944.
The Yamuna River Bridge Incident of July 19 1944 remains both controversial and opaque. The simple facts are these: in the early hours of that Wednesday morning, a rail bridge crossing the Yamuna River, a tributary of the Ganges near the north-west border of Delhi and the Princely Federation, was demolished by explosives. A goods-train crossing the bridge at the time tumbled into the river, killing three engineers. Delhian radio had been warning of Syndicalists slipping into the country across the long and porous border with the Federation for weeks, and officials in Delhi immediately seized upon the bridge attack as evidence that the Princely Federation could no longer control its Syndicalist problem. Others have argued that in the context of wider tensions and an Entente military build-up, the bridge was blown up in a false flag operation to justify war, by Delhi either unilaterally or in cahoots with Imperial Intelligence. Either way, despite muted appeals for calm from Berlin and Tokyo, Entente forces were soon rolling into Princely territory to ‘stabilize’ the troubled country.
Canadian aircraft and armor pound Princely positions along the entire Indian front, July 20 1944.
The Princely Federation’s military proved no match for Canadian divisions hardened by combat with Mosely’s Totalists. Soon, the Entente was advancing on all fronts.
Australasian troops also took part in the invasion of the Princely Federation
With Bombay having fallen to the Entente by the beginning of August, and battle raging around Hyderabad, the princes attempted to reach settlement with Delhi. A naked land grab might have been acceptable to the maharajas in Delhi, but the imperial leadership saw little point in anything but total victory. The Federation’s armistice was rebuffed.
By the early days of September 1944, the Federation’s remaining forces found themselves almost encircled into the vicinity of their capital by an Entente pincer strategy. As the geography of India narrowed with their southern retreat, the defenders were left with little room to maneuver.
Twilight of the Princely Federation. Many of its defeated leaders fled across the narrow Palk Strait to German Ceylon.
By the end of the month, defeat of the Princely Federation seemed near. The Madras Republic, the Federation’s Tamil ally, was officially annexed by Delhi on 2 October 1944. By November 1, 1944, the Princely Federation was no more.
Victory. Once more, the mahrajas could look to all of India as their personal domain, the deluded Syndicalists of the Bhartiya Commune and the upstart burghers of the Princely Federation relegated to the dustbin of history. But though they didn't realize it, that victory would come at a great cost, for to achieve it the rulers of Delhi had opened a door they could not easily close again. Even as Canadian and Australasian forces paraded through Delhi as allies, far away, shadowy forces spoke of an empire remade on their own terms...
For the people of India, this peace would prove strictly temporary.