Captain Mani’s War
In March 1944, the Japanese invaded northeast India. There followed some of the fiercest battles of World War II, with as many as 60,000 Japanese and more than 17,000 Allied soldiers killed. The battles of Imphal and Kohima marked Japan’s greatest land defeat of the War, shattering their ambitions to invade India and turning the tide in the Burma campaign.
While the Allied 14th Army was staffed with British soldiers as well as many trained soldiers from the traditional Indian fighting clans, it was the first time recruits from all over India were tested. They more than proved their mettle. Documenting the War was an extraordinary Indian journalist called PRS Mani, who had left his AIR broadcasting job to become a public relations officer for the 14th Army and subsequently the Southeast Asian Command.
Throughout this period, he lived closely with the soldiers on the front, risking his life as they did, facing danger, hunger, exhaustion, fear, homesickness, and also found solace in friendships and camaraderie. His vivid dispatches, distributed by the Army’s public relations department and relayed also in the Indian and British media, are the only eyewitness accounts of these battles written by an embedded Indian war correspondent.
Superbly written, these dispatches remain one of the great works of war writing by an Indian and one of the few eyewitness accounts of India’s war in the Northeast against Japan. This is the first time his dispatches have been published in book form.
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