That was the punitive strategy of the previous century, referred to as ‘Butcher and Bolt’. Now the Audax served the same end in a matter of hours, and they called it ‘Watch and Ward’.
Manek straightened in his pilot’s seat and raised his face into the slipstream. The formation slowed in the air and climbed down to pinpoint their target. He signalled bombardier mode to the cockpit behind him, and his navigator sank onto his knees, to stretch out prone beneath Manek’s seat and access a hatch and a bombsight in the floor. The flight passed over and banked. Manek was the last to go, and he watched as one by one the other planes dropped low, and he saw the rips of light open and close, doing invisible damage among the dirt houses. Tiny figures scattered out beyond the village wall.
His mind passed over Arjan Singh’s crash. It passed over his parachute harness. It passed over the photograph in his pocket. He pushed down the stick, read the ground and target as if they were part of his instrument deck, and felt his engine sigh at the load’s release. Behind him, the shaggy head of the explosions rose from the ground. Above, the other aircraft dallied, innocent as doves. He rejoined them and turned back to Miranshah, at a loss for feeling.
His fight had begun at last. Against whom, he wasn’t certain.
4
Madras, February 1942
The defence of India – or the first visible sign of it in Guindy – was a fence raised by a gang of workers using a batch of defective propeller blades as fence posts. It was at the back of the Guindy campus, against the fields, where the army had built a new R&R centre for troops behind a sign that read ‘Holiday Homes’. British soldiers had already moved in, and soon they were crowding the edge of the college football field, smoking cigarettes and hailing nervous students to come play a game.
The war was headed to India, and not from the direction anybody had anticipated. There was meant to be fighting in Europe, fighting in Africa, and war on and under the sea. Indian divisions were splayed out from the North-West Frontier through Iraq and up to Libya, holding back an enemy in the west. But nobody was prepared for war to reach Madras, and from Japan.
Only when the time came to start cramming did Bobby realise how loud the noises of war had grown. They weren’t the noises he had expected. The suburban soundtrack of a distant hammer knocking became ten hammers sounding all around the students’ heads. Glass panes came out of all the windows and were piled into sea-green slabs as the college handymen boarded the holes over with ply. Air-raid precautions had been ordered, and the campus juddered with construction: a pair of concrete tanks was sunk to store water for fire-fighting; a block of congested rooms was built to house air force mechanics on emergency training. Contractors yelled at men high up on scaffolding. Cement mixers gargled gravel through the night, drowning the murmur of the waves all the way from Elliot’s Beach.
Nobody could study. Nobody tried. It was urgent and necessary to talk all the time, assuring each other that they too could not focus, and acknowledging that their entire class was doomed in its exams. It was their final year, and of course there had never been a class that finished at Guindy without sensing, in that end, the end of all things. The previous year, the college had set an accelerated three-year syllabus to produce more engineers for the Army; the year before that, it had admitted women.1 But arguably, with the advent of a world war, Bobby’s year had the winning hand.
That the new belligerence came from Japan was not in itself a surprise. The nation had spent decades bridling inside a thicket of European colonies and seething over the dilemma of a late-modernising power: for its population and imperial reach to grow, Japan needed food, oil and resources, but to gain those resources, it needed to expand its empire.2 In 1936 the military government had seized some territory from the crumbling state in China. It was instantly condemned by Western countries that had themselves spent a century exploiting China, and the USA began to supply the Chinese resistance with goods and weapons, routed through India and Burma.
It wasn’t until the West fell back into war, however, that Japan saw its destiny unclouded. By late 1941, European powers had spent more than two years at each other’s throats. In the last world war, Japan had protected British shipping from the Germans. Now it was willing to try the reverse. On 8 December, hours before its navy bombed the US fleet in Pearl Harbor, Japan landed an army at Kota Bahru, at the northern end of British Malaya. Two days later, off the Malayan coast, its air force sank HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, the proudest battleships of the Royal Navy. With appalling suddenness, as the United States was lamed in the Pacific, Britannia ceased to rule the waves in the Indian Ocean. Japan lunged at the colonial sprawl. Its troops crossed from French Indo-China into British Malaya, captured the island of Hong Kong, took the Dutch East Indies and the American-controlled Philippines, and advanced on the fortress of Singapore. If it could hold back the West just long enough to exploit those colonies – of their oil, rubber, timber, grain, minerals and men – it could supply its own defence against the West’s inevitable retaliation. Calling itself the liberator of each new colony, it accumulated, in haste, one of history’s largest empires.
Each advance through Asia was announced with a bombardment, and refugees arrived in India each day to describe it. In Penang, naive crowds had filled the market rows, waving at the Mitsubishis passing high above the town. The formations passed again and again, inscrutable, until they flew low and shredded the crowds with their machine guns. Fire spread in the native town, and European residents received quiet orders to evacuate; at the docks, while they poured into ships for Singapore, armed volunteers held back the terrified Asians. The city was surrendered without any effort at defence.
The bombers reached Burma as early as December 1941. In Rangoon, 150 aircraft appeared all at once in the clear winter sky. Incendiary bombs began to fall in the labour settlements; built from cheap materials, they burned like tinder. It was Indians, most of them Tamils, who made up the labour in the town and the rubber plantations of Burma. They had been the first to migrate and work beneath the scaffold of the British Empire, taking orders from Malayali contractors a few rungs up, who took theirs from the White men at the top. The Japanese army blew through that scaffold like a gale; the British ruling class was the first to abandon it, and the Indian labourers were the most exposed as the structure collapsed. Migrant Chinese, whose anti-Japanese activism had been recorded by spies, were at great risk of reprisals, but their civic organisations supported them through escape or occupation. The Indians scattered and flew, blown like chaff before the brewing storm.
As in Penang, they poured into the streets, and the Mitsubishi Zeros flew in low to maul them. Two thousand were killed in Rangoon the first day, and the homes left standing were festooned with human gristle. Hundreds of thousands prepared to flee from the southern provinces toward Mandalay and the ports on the Bay of Bengal, obstructing (as the Japanese intended) Army traffic and government logistics.
The good news was that Manek’s squadron had been ordered back from the Frontier, scrambled to the defence of the Indian coast. For a few weeks, the Winged Arrows held to their old routine, dropping their bombs at one end of India while they listened for the sound of bombs falling at the other. Manek sat by the radio, rapt, contemplating for the first time an