ABSTRACT

Calcutta had emerged as one of the most important fulcrums for coordinating the movement of men, material, and money during the Second World War. The advent of U.S. troops in the city from 1942 onwards led to an unprecedented cultural encounter. This paper argues that the actual lived experiences of the American soldiers in Calcutta provided a stark contrast to their prescribed norms of conduct. This paper further contends that with their arrival, civilian-military relations were substantially reconfigured and the image of the British Empire was considerably damaged. An attempt has been made to set in relief the divergent experiences of the White American and African American troops besides mapping their experiences of and responses to the Bengal Famine. Lastly, this paper seeks to interrogate the globalizing nature of the Second World War by looking at Calcutta as a site of spontaneous and uneven cultural exchange where the U.S. soldiers functioned as national emissaries and wartime cultural conduits.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Suchintan Das is pursuing an undergraduate degree in History from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. He is a Rhodes Scholar-Elect from India for 2021 to the University of Oxford where he intends to study German civilian internment in India during the Second World War.

“The last time when war had broken out…prices had gone up; food grains had become costlier. But it was nothing like the ominous possibility that looms large this time. Calcutta is being bombed, aircrafts keep flying over our heads, everything seems to be so different now.” — Narayan Gangopadhyay, Upanibesh¹

“If you come here with an open mind you will find Calcutta is “Teek-Hai” (Okay). Of course, it’s just like visiting any big city back home: you can have a good time, or a bad time, depending on how well you take care of yourself.” — Brig. Gen. R.R. Neyland, The Calcutta Key²

INTRODUCTION: G.I. JOE IN THE CITY OF JOY

Death had been made “a part and parcel of everyday life”, reflected the author Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay, when describing the grim realities of the Second World War in Calcutta.³ It was during this time, the author Manindra Gupta recounted in his memoirs, that “American soldiers of both races—white and black—with their plentiful equipment, appeared like aliens from another planet in the city.”⁴ Calcutta was a major city of the British Indian Empire—the erstwhile capital—which had become uniquely vulnerable to Japanese aggression after the fall of Singapore in February 1942. Defence of India in general, and Calcutta in particular, was of paramount strategic importance for ensuring an Allied victory. Apart from being the nerve centre of logistics and communications in eastern India, Calcutta was the major British port overlooking the Bay of Bengal, and was also the closest Indian city to Burma and China.⁵ Moreover, as Yasmin Khan notes, even though it was neither a home front nor a war zone, “India was nevertheless critical to the war effort as a source of military manpower and industrial production.”⁶ It was in this context that Calcutta emerged as one of the most important fulcrums for coordinating the movement of men, material, and money in the China-Burma-India theater (hereinafter CBI). The city doubled as a necessary transit point for Allied troops pouring into Assam and Burma from across the subcontinent, and more importantly as a centre of rest and recreation for troops returning from assignments at the front. The arrival of American troops (popularly known as G.I.s) from February 15, 1942 onwards set in motion a series of administrative, economic, and demographic changes in Calcutta.⁷ With this influx, the cosmopolitan character of the city was heightened and the stage was set for an unprecedented cultural encounter that took many forms and had many faces. Calcutta, its urbanscapes, amenities, people, and the alien U.S. troops were the primary protagonists in this encounter.

The normative experience of an average American G.I. in Calcutta was sought to be shaped by the guidelines issued and restrictions enforced by the U.S. Military Command, the British Colonial Government, and the American Red Cross (hereinafter ARC). Needless to say, their actual lived experiences in wartime Calcutta differed substantially. The first section of this paper aims to contextualize and juxtapose these varied experiences, as recorded (penned and photographed) and remembered by the American troops. In the second section, their perceptions of Calcutta and interactions with its people will be examined to understand to what extent and how civilian-military relations were sought to be reconfigured. The policy of racial segregation in the U.S. military will be treated as an important fault-line to find out if there was a discernible divergence in the experiences of White and African American troops stationed in the city in the third section. An endeavour will be made to gauge how far the American soldiers were aware of the Bengal Famine and how they responded to it in the fourth section. Lastly, by way of a conclusion, this paper will try to interrogate the ‘globalizing’ nature of the Second World War, by looking at Calcutta as a site of spontaneous cultural exchange where U.S. soldiers functioned as national emissaries and wartime cultural conduits.

THUS SPOKE UNCLE SAM:
PRESCRIPTIONS, PROSCRIPTIONS, AND TRANSGRESSIONS

From 1942 onwards, more American soldiers came to India “than would actually see fighting on the fronts of Burma.”⁸ Some 150,000 G.I.s poured into India between 1942 and 1945 with the veritable goal of ‘saving China’, large parts of which were under Japanese occupation.⁹ They were to be stationed in India with the primary tasks of airlifting war material and food aid into China, besides constructing a land supply route through Burma—the Ledo Road—so as to relieve the beleaguered Chinese.¹⁰ In doing so, the American G.I.s “found themselves in alien and unknown landscapes, dealing with Indian traders, merchants and craftsmen, trying to thrash out a war plan in a densely populated, and unfamiliar, part of the world.”¹¹ As Ian Stephens recounted, by 1943, Calcutta:

Bewilderment inflected the average U.S. soldier’s first impression of India. As Yasmin Khan put it, “The ‘real’ India was a contrast to the jolly, sanitised newsreels which troops had been shown prior to their departure, in which they had been promised tropical fruits, constant sunshine and cheap shopping.”¹⁵ This reaction was anticipated well by the U.S. Military Command. Together with the American Red Cross in India and the British Colonial Administration, they sought to mitigate the shock and decisively shape the experience of the American troops in India.¹⁶

For this purpose, they came up with pocket guides, written in a manner of providing friendly advice, and containing norms of conduct the G.I.s were supposed to adhere to, during their stay in India. These guides were quite detailed, providing extensive information about almost everything that the American soldiers in India needed to know—ranging from commentaries on the Indian caste system to locations of nearby departmental stores. Needless to say, there were pocket guides for Calcutta as well, one of which, called The Calcutta Key, listed out the following prescriptions which deserve to be quoted in full:

Incidences of transgression were not infrequent and can be examined under four diagnostic rubrics—politics, shopping, delinquency, and prostitution.¹⁸ A Pocket Guide to India declared, “India is a complex country, difficult for people like ourselves to understand. It is a country whose people are going through a far-reaching political upheaval. They, as we did over 160 years ago, seek to gain political independence.”¹⁹ Notwithstanding this obvious parallel, American troops were expected to steer clear of Indian politics. Political discussions on the Indian situation were outright discouraged. According to one guide:

The Indian nationalist leader Jayaprakash Narayan appealed to these “soldiers of freedom” to “understand and appreciate the [Indians’] fight for freedom” and to let “[their] countrymen, [their] leaders and [their] government know the truth about India.”²⁴ The truth, however, was not always conveyed to the G.I.s by the U.S. Military Command. For example, they were told that “Indians want U.S. to win. No group in this country has any love for the axis.”²⁵ At this time, one of the most prominent Indian political figures, Subhas Chandra Bose, was parleying with the German government in Berlin, and his speeches from the Azad Hind Radio Centre were regularly reaching his followers in India, who did not necessarily desire an Allied victory. Moreover, American soldiers did talk politics with the local people, when the need arose. In his memoirs, veteran G.I. Malcolm Harvey Stilson recounted conversing for long periods on war, peace, business, art, politics, and more while purchasing gems from a Calcutta jeweller.²⁶

FIGURE 2: “The G.I. tourist here ponders the purchase of a ‘rare gem’ --- a typical camera study of life on Chowringhee during the war. Firpo’s famous restaurant is in the background, and dhoti-clad Indians and a British officer in shorts lend a bit of atmosphere.” Photograph and caption by Clyde Waddell.

Calcutta, with its attractive marketplaces, offered ample opportunities for the stationed soldiers to shop for their daily needs and also to indulge themselves with the occasional souvenir. The Calcutta Key (hereinafter the Key) warned the G.I.s about the perils of bargaining. In fact, it was quite categorical in its suggestion:

In spite of repeated reminders to the American troops in Calcutta to put their best foot forward, occasional delinquent behaviour on their part had the possibility of heralding ominous repercussions. For instance, Benod Behari Basu (younger brother of the Bengali revolutionary Benoy Krishna Basu and later known as the Father of Boxing in Bihar), remembered having knocked out an American G.I. with a sharp blow to the chin, for passing objectionable comments about a few Indian women at Esplanade. A crowd gathered quickly, and the fellow American soldiers left the site with their injured mate, without confronting Mr. Basu.²⁹ Such incidences were hardly rare. As Yasmin Khan notes, “[p]etty conflict between soldiers, local townsmen, and villagers featured routinely in newspapers by 1944, and was particularly noted as a problem in Bengal and Assam.”³⁰ Incidences of serious crimes were not absent either. When an Anglo-Indian boy, Eglind Roze, attempted to steal an American military-vehicle parked near the ARC Burra Club at Dalhousie Square, he was shot to death by a few American soldiers. His family had to be immediately compensated to avoid a public embarrassment of the U.S. Military Forces.³¹

One of the leading faces of Hindu belligerents in the Calcutta Riots of 1946, Gopal Mukhopadhyay, later claimed to have procured two American pistols and a few grenades from American G.I.s, back in 1945: “If you paid two hundred and fifty rupees or bought them a bottle of whiskey, the soldiers would give you a .45 and a hundred cartridges.”³² Illegal sale of arms and ammunition was certainly not approved of by the U.S. military command. At least a few American soldiers were involved in this practice nevertheless. In Calcutta, the docklands, which were considered absolutely essential in the war effort, emerged as the prime centre of contraband and conflicts. As a policeman stationed in that area later recounted:

THE CITY OF DI(STINK)TION: PEOPLE, PLACES, AND PERCEPTIONS

Calcutta was not just a centre for coordinating war efforts in eastern India, as it also offered many wartime distractions for G.I.s who were stationed in the city. The sights, smells, and sounds that the American soldiers came across here shaped their perceptions of the city to a great extent. They came in frequent contact with civilians and often developed friendly relations with them.⁴¹ While the British troops were more reserved in their dealings with Indians, American G.I.s were much more easy-going and tended to blend in better with the local populace. The Key offered some sound advice in this regard:

FIGURE 3: “A Group of GI’s take a close look at the snake-wallah’s hooded cobra. Both the snake and his master are good specimens. The fangs of course have been removed so the reptile can strike at will, scaring no one.” Photograph and caption by Clyde Waddell.

The commotion and filth of the city hardly went unnoticed. The first thing that the American troops registered upon their arrival in Calcutta was the din of the railway station. In the words of Malcolm H. Stilson, “The station is a cavernous place in which thousands of people literally dwell, and where everything from coition to childbirth takes place.”⁵⁰ The absence of sanitary conditions in Calcutta annoyed the G.I.s, who found the clean gurudwara to be a welcome respite, and developed much admiration for the Sikhs. This sentiment was so strong that Stilson went to the extent of calling Calcutta “a city of di(stink)tion” in his memoirs. One of his poems captured this emotion quite effectively:

One crucial axis along which American-Indian interactions took place in wartime Calcutta was that of providing and receiving service. According to Yasmin Khan, “American soldiers and airmen in India often had their own ‘native bearers’, locally recruited manservants who swept, dusted, polished shoes and, fetched and carried tea and snacks, thus helping, as one G.I. magazine joked, ‘make a perfectly lazy man out of a soldier’.”⁵⁴ More often than not, these bearers were christened with ‘comical’ nicknames, and the G.I.s joked about their mannerisms and unsuccessful attempts to pick up a few English expressions in a bid to secure greater wartime opportunities and camaraderie from the relatively friendlier Americans:

The soldier-bearer relationships often grew mutually paternalistic. According to Yasmin Khan:

Another prominent site for wartime distraction and American—Indian interaction in Calcutta was The Grand Hotel. The destination provided a space where the soldiers could “‘Forget the War!’, with Teddy Weatherford on the piano in the American Cocktail Bar, Chinese jugglers, raffles, quizzes, and ‘handpicked dance hostesses’.”⁶² As mentioned earlier, the American soldiers provided a stark contrast to their British counterparts, both within and beyond the city. Among other places of elite colonial recreation, “[i]n the clubs of Simla, the rumours of increasing American designs on South Asia, the strength of American imports and the sexual irresistibility of American men all mingled together to create profound wariness about the new allies.”⁶³ Some G.I.s even got married to Jewish women in Calcutta.⁶⁴ Yasmin Khan has rightly argued that “[t]he purchasing power and superhero stature of the American GIs made much of the Raj look fossilised and diminished.”⁶⁵ This metaphor can be pushed a bit further to claim that the dynamism and affability of the American soldiers in their interactions with the Indians made much of the Raj appear rather debilitated and overtly paranoid. Through their varied interactions with the local Indian populace in Calcutta, the American soldiers ended up substantially reconfiguring civilian—military relationships—undermining the unmitigable distance and inescapable hierarchy that existed between the colonial officers who commanded the British Indian Army and the ordinary Indian people.

JIM CROW IN CALCUTTA: TWO ARMIES OR ONE?

Out of about 150,000 American troops who were stationed in India during the Second World War, 22,000 were African Americans.⁶⁶ Given the volatile political situation in India, the British Colonial Government had apprehensions about the reception that these troops were likely to receive in the subcontinent. The problem, however, was entrenched in the structure of the U.S. Military Forces. According to Nico Slate:

In 1945, a swimming pool for U.S. servicemen was opened on a segregated basis. In reality, it was reserved for White Americans almost all the time. Racial stereotypes such as the supposed greater adaptability of African Americans to the tropical climate were cited to justify this:

African American soldiers in Calcutta were perceived as naturally delinquent by the colonial administration. As Janam Mukherjee notes, “[the] disparagement of American black soldiers may have been a recurrent theme in explaining the chaos on the docks.”⁷³ In their report on an incidence of shelling at the Calcutta Dockyards, the Commissioners for the Port of Calcutta noted that the “behavior of the American Negro troop… was disgraceful.”⁷⁴ The trope of the ‘fiendish black man’—slovenly and cowardly in their demeanour— loomed large in the British colonial imagination. Crimes, real and imagined, were more frequently attributed to the African American soldiers:

On the contrary, their relations were largely characterised by mutual respect and amity. According to one officer, “Negroes frequently are invited to attend native civilian parties to which White troops are not invited.”⁷⁷ Others reported that Black troops were “invited to the best Indian homes.” Nico Slate went so far as to suggest that “African American soldiers and Indians were able to forge solidarities, based in part on colored cosmopolitanism and a shared opposition to racial oppression.”⁷⁸ According to Gerald Horne, the official history of the CBI also noted that the African American troops ‘mingled more frequently with the Indians than did their white comrades.’⁷⁹ Yasmin Khan put this very succinctly:

HARD TIMES: SCARCITY, STARVATION, AND THE SOLDIERS

Besides opportunities for such cultural contacts, the war also brought immense hardship in its wake. Apprehensive of an impending Japanese invasion, the colonial administration of Bengal undertook a ‘denial scheme’ and adopted a scorched earth policy at a time of war-induced food shortage. Black marketeering and hoarding added to people’s miseries. Author Manindra Gupta witnessed truckloads of food grains procured from different districts of Bengal by the colonial government and the Ispahani Merchant Company being stored with the cosmetic protection of tarpaulins in the Botanical Garden at Shibpur. Heaps of these undistributed food grains became infested with funG.I. during the early monsoons of 1943 and were consequently rendered inedible—worse than even animal feed.⁸¹ Freehand military requisitioning greatly aggravated this scarcity. As Yasmin Khan notes, “Initially, American quartermasters in India dealt directly with food suppliers, negotiating prices and buying directly, with dire consequences for some local markets.”⁸² Janam Mukherjee provides an example of this:

The unfolding of this unfathomable human tragedy did not go unnoticed by the American troops in the city. The Key’s description of the omnipresent ‘homeless man’ personified suffering on the streets and alleys of Calcutta:

Corpses piled up on the streets of Calcutta and the Municipal Corporation was overburdened, which caused the U.S. Military Forces to step in at this juncture. In the words of Kermit A. Bushur:

CONCLUSION: ‘GLOBALIZING’ EFFECTS OF A GLOBAL WAR?

However, these interactions were not underwritten by cultural anxiety and suspicion alone. These were opportunities for forging lasting cultural contacts and often provided impetus for coming to terms with otherwise incomprehensible cultural differences. An intriguing parallel drawn by Stilson while recounting his visit to the Kalighat Temple will illustrate this point further:

This is the mother side of the great, many armed Kali, goddess of childbirth. And I think back to the cathedral in San Antonio, Texas, where the Catholic women prayed to the statue of the virgin Mary to grant them children.¹⁰²

The American soldiers were constantly reminded that they had a purpose beyond fighting in a foreign country. They were also supposed to don the hats of envoys representing the goodwill of the United States.¹⁰³ No matter how annoyed they were with “Indian children ranging from two to seventy years old” bickering after them for “Baksheesh”, they had to remember this sermon:¹⁰⁴

What you may not have stopped to realize is that after the war, in any permanent plan for peace that includes (and must include) Southeast Asia, India must and will assume a prominent role. You are a practical person from a practical nation. You can see that it makes common sense for anyone to cultivate a lasting friendship with India. Go to it, then. YOU - you’re the one who is going to do it. It is part of YOUR JOB.105

In a global war such as this, soldiers were not merely combatants. They were links between cultures which were literally oceans apart. In spite of the uneven nature of their interactions with local inhabitants across different theaters, they functioned as wartime conduits for the flows of ideas and information, cultural traits and habits, and perceptions regarding peoples, places, and nations. Notwithstanding the diversity in their experiences, these soldiers had one thing in common. They brought back stories of their military lives in alien cities, loan-words from alien tongues, and more importantly, they transmitted hybrid cultural motifs.¹⁰⁶ Very few documents can testify to this better than Warren Weidenburner’s 1944 Christmas V-Mail to his father Joseph, depicting Santa Claus riding a sledge-cart drawn by a pair of excited Indian oxen.¹⁰⁷

FIGURE 4: Warren Weidenburner’s 1944 Christmas V-Mail to his father Joseph, depicting Santa Claus riding a sledgecart drawn by a pair of excited Indian oxen. (Courtesy: Carl W. Weidenburner)

The Second World War was not just a global war; it was a globalizing phenomenon in many respects. Cities like Calcutta became wartime sites of spontaneous cultural exchange among participants who operated within contrasting contexts and under varied constraints. The kaleidoscopic experiences of American G.I.s stationed there bore this out again and again. While their encounters with the local inhabitants were framed in terms of military obligation, possibility of adventure, wartime recreation and cultural immersion, the experiences of these encounters for the people of Calcutta were put into sharp relief by warinduced economic hardship, colonial coercion, subversive politics, and communal violence. A city which was starved and bombed for most of the war years and was greatly unfamiliar could still be “Teek-Hai” for soldiers engaged in an unprecedented and uneven global conflict, far from their homeland.