Collection of Small Arms in India for Britain in WW2

[AlanDavid]

Hello

I am currently writing a book titled, “British Military Secondary Issue Small Arms 1920 – 1980.” In the book I will be covering the ways in which Britain appealed for the donation of small arms by the public, during WW2.

A committee was set up in the U.S.A, called the ‘American Committee for Defense of British Homes’; this was a private venture which appealed to the American public to donate small arms to the U.K. About 20,000 small arms were eventually donated. Less well known, is an appeal initiated by the British War Office via the Canadian Department of Defense and the RCMP for the collection of Luger pistols. About 2,800 Luger were eventually collected in Canada, for the War Office.

The reason for this post is to ask if anyone is aware of any appeals for small arms, in India during the war, for the United Kingdom. If you do not have any knowledge of this yourself perhaps you could suggest an organization I could contact. Please feel free to forward this to anyone you think may be able to help.

Any assistance will be most gratefully received, and acknowledged in my book. Thank you.


Regards

Alan David
Sydney
Australia

[dr.jayakumar]

i doubt they would have asked,as they had already disarmed us.may be they gave them some elephants,some soldiers and swords.we were stripped earlier by the british.they knew we had no arms,forget firearms.

[xl_target]

There is quite a bit of truth in what the good Dr. says but there were still plenty of arms in India (including firearms) back then. Successive Indian governments have done more to strip arms from Indian citizens than the British.

[shooter]

A lot of money was donated and of course one of the largest number of soldiers.

[Katana]

with shooter. I have seen as many memorials to Indian and Gorkha soldiers in Europe and South East Asia than in India itself!

Almost one half of the soldiery was provided by the Princes themselves. Whatever, whether the soldiers themselves or the arms that they bore was very unceremoniously handed over to the new Indian government. The soldiery was, of course, merged with newly formed Indian Army, some of whom still retain their old war cries! What happened to the arms is anybody's guess.

[xl_target]

ctually, only about 10% of the British Indian Army that fought in WW2 came from the princely states. The princely states provided about 250,000 of the approximately 2.5 million men who fought in the Indian army during WW2. However, we must keep in mind that the prewar British Indian Army had a total strength of about 200,000, so the contribution was not negligible.

WW2 was the last time the Indian Army fought as the British Indian Army as independence followed in 1947. After partition the British Indian Army was divided between the Indian Army and the Pakistan Army.
The Indian Army was newly formed in name only. The transition was relatively orderly, except for the units that were affected by partition. The same units (that comprised of Indian soldiers) that existed in British Indian Army continued on (many of them with the same names and unit designations that they came out of WW2 with) in the Indian Army (not counting the units in Pakistan). The Queen's Comissioned Officers were replaced by Indian Commisioned Officers (wIth a prefix of IC before their commision number). As far as the operation of the units, table of organization, etc,. little changed initially. The exception being the Gurkhas, with six of the ten Gurkha regiments staying with the Indian Army and remaining 4 going to the British Army.
The arms used in WW2 were most likely retained by the units.

[indiaone]

Dear Mr David,
You may be aware that India provided the largest contingent of volunteer Army within the Commonwealth during the Second World War. Small contingents were provided by the Princely States, known as the Indian State Forces and the rest came from the enlarged units of the British Indian Army. A large number of Indian youngsters were granted Emergency Commission as officers who manned the newly raised units. Even prior to the outbreak of the war, several Indians were trained at the Royal Military Academy , Sandhurst and were granted Kings Commission.
India provided both manpower and material for the war efforts of the Allies . Several Ordinance factories came up during the period , including an aircraft assembly plant. When India gained independence from the British it inherited a chain of Ordinance Factories and a fine Army with several winners of the Victoria Cross ,a small Naval Force and a Air force with several pilots holding the DFC. This gave a strong tradition and backbone to the Armed Forces of the Indian Republic, who have made valuable contribution in safeguarding the nations security as well as in UN peacekeeping operations in different parts of the world.
Since the Axis Power reached the borders of India, in fact at one point they crossed into India and were finally halted in the Battle of Kohima, it is unlikely that any small arms collection took place from the public. However, I will check from the official sources and shall let you have some lead. Since the Indian democracy (the largest in the world ) has people having different ideas about the gains and losses from British Rule over India it is better not to discuss the points of your reference in an open forum. Do send me your e mail address at [email protected] . I will come back to you with definite information.

[AlanDavid]

Thank you for the replies to my post. It was not my intention to instigate debate over British rule, so perhaps we should follow 'indiaone's' advise and curtail the discussion.
Out of interest if any attemps were made to collect small arms and particularly hand guns during the war, it would have probably taken the form of a letter from the district police commander to persons that had small arms registerd with the police. The letter would have requsted the gun be forwarded as a donation or for payment of a fee. This took place 4 or 5 times in the UK during the war.
INDIAONE - you have a PM.

Regards
AlanD
Sydney

[Sakobav]

aland

Point every one is making is that under British rule and then carried over till now Guns were meant for only privileged few..so question of requesting weapons from the 'privileged folks' doesnt arise - India's contribution was men, material and money..


Best

[dr.jayakumar]

There is quite a bit of truth in what the good Dr. says but there were still plenty of arms in India (including firearms) back then. Successive Indian governments have done more to strip arms from Indian citizens than the British.

british law was the backbone to disarm,and the govt is still keen on that.i still have doubts that we have won our freedom.i strongly beleive we are still ruled not independent.i don't want to bring politics into this,but this is what i feel.

[waulakh]

dear alan,
my father was granted an arms licence in 1932 for a revolver and a 12 bore gun by the
district magistrate of ferozepur district in punjab.he had a webley revolver and a webley
12 bore endorsed on it. according to him there was no such demand or request by the then
british government for the donation of small arms.may be it was done in the USA because
the number of arms owners was much more compared to India.of course there was the
appeal for cash donations.
regards.

[AlanDavid]

Thank you waulakh. This is exactly the specific information I am looking for.

Does any one have a Father or other relative who remembers being asked to donate a gun -a hand gun in particular - during the war?

Regards
AlanD
Sydney

[sat]

This book should answer some of your questions.

CHURCHILL‘S SECRET WAR: THE BRITISH EMPIRE AND THE RAVAGING OF INDIA DURING WORLD WAR II
By Madhusree Mukerjee
Basic Books, $29.95, 400 pages

http://www.flipkart.com/churchill-secre ... 0465002013

http://www.bookadda.com/product/churchi ... 9380658478

reviews - http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... ld-war-ii/

from the book...

The year 2010 has been rough on the reputation of Sir Winston Churchill, the wartime leader of Great Britain. In the spring, “Winston’s War,” a book by the respected military writer Max Hastings (author of “Armageddon” and “Retribution,” among other works) tore so many holes in Churchill’s reputation as a strategist that one reviewer wondered that had he died in 1942, “Germany might have been defeated sooner.”

Now comes the India-born Madhusree Mukerjee with a savage indictment of Churchill’s policies towards her homeland - then part of the British Empire - that likens his conduct to that of the genocidal barbarism of the Nazis. Drawing heavily on British Foreign Office documents, she asserts that his conduct, directly or indirectly, led to the deaths of 3 million Indians during the war, chiefly through starvation. She points out a cruel irony: While Britain and its Allies fought to “free” European nations from “captivity,” Churchill and other British leaders strongly opposed the nascent Indian independence movement, imprisoning such leaders as Mahatma Gandhi.

The horrific story that Ms. Mukerjee relates has been largely ignored in the vast volume of Churchillania produced in the last half-century. Her first sentence quotes a truly audacious lie from Churchill’s six-volume history of the world war: “No great portions of the world population was so effectively protected from the horrors and perils of the World War as were the peoples of Hindustan,” he wrote. (By Hindustan, or Land of the Hindus, he meant India.) Left unmentioned, among many other things, was a 1943 famine in the eastern Indian province of Bengal, in which 1.5 million persons perished, by official estimate, or 3 million, by Indian statistics.

Some of Churchill’s disdain for the Indian separatists stemmed from World War I, when Subhas Chandra Bose of the Indian National Congress offered to mesh Indian goals with those of Germany. At the time, German policy strongly supported Indian independence. Its agents went so far as to dispatch a shipload of arms to Bengal revolutionaries, a plot foiled by the British Secret Service. Bose tried again in the 1940s, arguing that with proper help, a force of 50,000 persons could topple the British Raj. But Hitler refused to link “the destiny of my people” with what he called “a coalition of cripples.” Nonetheless, Gandhi and other separatists saw the war as a means of ending the control Britain had exerted over India for centuries. (Churchill so feared the still-active Bose, exiled in Turkey, that he ordered the Special Operations Executive to murder him. SOE failed.)

As Ms. Mukerjee documents, Britain feasted on India for centuries, with its imperial instrument, the East India Company, exacting fortunes of commodity riches, plus exorbitant taxes levied on the populace. “John Company,” as the enterprise was known, even maintained its own army. The idlyllic “Jewel in the Crown” depicted in books and movies ignore the misery that was its economic foundation. Life expectancy was only 24 years as late as 1920, when the age began a slow increase.

Churchill’s attitude toward Indians was outright racist. He told one associate, “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” Any talk of harmony between competing Hindus and Moslems he considered to be “distressing and repugnant.” His chief adviser on Indian affairs, Lord Cherwell, was so deeply racist that the presence of any black persons evoked “physical revulsion which he was unable to control.” And it was Cherwell to whom Churchill turned when dealing with the logistics of shipping and allocating food supplies. Churchill told War Cabinet members that he would rather “give up political life at once, or rather go out into the wilderness and fight, than to admit a revolution which meant the end of the Imperial Crown in India.”

But Britain did not hesitate to rely on India for soldiers, recruiting some 50,000 men a month. A largely-Indian army won early victories against the Italians in Italy and seized control of vital oil fields in Iran and Iraq. Britain continued to rely on India for much of its food, some two-thirds of which had to be imported. One can appreciate Churchill’s dilemma: He needed shipping and food to keep Britain alive. So his expedient was to let India more or less fend for itself and ship vast quantities to Britain even as people starved. But by 1943, American shipbuilding had progressed to the point where not enough cargo could be found to fill vessels destined for Britain. So they lay idle. “If ever during the war was a window open for saving lives in Bengal - at no discernible cost to the war effort - this was it.”

To make matters even worse, a catastrophic famine stunned Bengal in 1943. Descriptions of the resultant mass starvation are sickening, and Ms. Mukerjee fills page after page with details that compelled me to put down her book on several occasions and go for a walk.

------------------------------------------
Does not fit in the category of small arms, Maharawal Bijai Singhji of Dungarpur, Rajasthan donated two DH- 5 aicraft to the british royal air force.

Uunfortunately both the aircraft crashed and none survive today. A flyable replica model was made by an american and is now presently in a aircraft museum in New Zealand .

In Dungarpur they have made a scaled down model of the DH- 5 which is housed in Dungarpur mews and is only second model of its type in the world.



------------------

Am calling a few elders to enquire about small arms donations, my (my wife's also) grandfather was at Sandhurst in the 20's, he was a Lt General at the time of Independence, he had several run in with British officers & Indian politicians, Nehru included, this has been written about in the book 'Leadership in the Indian Army' biographies of twelve soldiers by Major General VK Singh.

[Katana]

Sat,

We all know what the British did to the Indian populace during the fag end of the War. In fact, running two parallel administrations was one of them (I guess you would understand what I am referring to) to keep the simmering discontent in India down. That in itself was a master stroke of political ideas. Moreover, after all these years of studying my fathers and grandfathers books, papers and correspondence on the political history of British India I can feel that the British were in the process of creating an India entirely for themselves (also in collusion with some of our own people)should they have lost the War. That may have meant shifting the political base of Britain entirely to India. Should this have actually happened I'm sure it would have further sucked our country into an unknown morass.

From my own knowledge, the only person during those times, who came close to understanding this strategy was Sardar Patel.

Anyway, this is my own thinking.

[Bespoke]

Alan,

There was a request to princely states of India to supply of arms for the War. Princely state armies were lately amalgamated into Indian Army.
You can try this forum http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/ they might be able to point you in the right direction.

Sat,
Thanks for Interesting links.

IMO Churchill was not always a nasty racist as most of us are made to believe for the reasons that during World War II the war office was divided in two groups one Lead by Winston Churchill with First sea lord Sir Andrew Cunningham and General Sir Hastings Ismay war cabinet military secretary and other group was lead by Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke with Marshal of RAF Sir Charles Portal and Maj General Sir Leslie Hollis war cabinet secretary and both the sides made nasty accusation at each other . There was a lot of Anti-Churchill stories flying around after the war made famous by Indian Freedom movement leaders and Labour party lead by Clement Attlee.
The following speech is evident .Churchill while speaking in the British Parliament said:

".....It is a matter of regret that due to the obsession of the present times people are distorting the superior religious and social values, but those who wish to preserve them with respect, we should appreciate them as well as help them. Sikhs do need our help for such a cause and we should give it happily. Those who know the Sikh history, know England's relationship with the Sikhs and are aware of the achievements of the Sikhs, they should persistently support the idea of relaxation to Sikhs to ride a motorbike with their turbans on, because it is their religious privilege."
Churchill, further added:
"...British people are highly indebted and obliged to Sikhs for a long time. I know that within this century we needed their help twice and they did help us very well. As a result of their timely help, we are today able to live with honour, dignity, and independence. In the war, they fought and died for us, wearing the turbans. At that time we were not adamant that they should wear safety helmets because we knew that they are not going to wear them anyways and we would be deprived of their help. At that time due to our miserable and poor situation, we did not force it on them to wear safety helmets, why should we force it now? Rather, we should now respect their traditions and by granting this legitimate concession, win their applaud."