In An Alien City: American Soldiers
in Wartime Calcutta (1942-1946)

Footnotes

1. Narayan Gangopadhyay, Narayan Gangopadhyay Rachanabali (Vol. III), eds. Asha Devi and Arijit Gangopadhyay (Kolkata: Mitra & Ghosh, 1980), 94. All translations are mine unless indicated otherwise.

2. The Calcutta Key (Guidebook for US Military Personnel in Calcutta, Prepared by Services of Supply Base Section Two Information and Education Branch United States Army Forces in India-Burma, 1945).
https://cbi-theater.com/calcuttakey/calcutta_key.html

3. Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay, Sharadindu Omnibus (Vol. II), ed. Pratul Chandra Gupta (Kolkata: Ananda, 1971), 1.

4. Manindra Gupta, Akshay Mulberry (Complete) (Kolkata: Ababhas, 2009), 194.

5. Director of the Service, Supply, and Procurement Division War Department General Staff. Logistics in World War II: Final Report of the Army Service Forces (A Report to the Under Secretary of War and the Chief of Staff) (Center of Military History, United States Army: Washington D.C., 1993), 46-47.

6. Yasmin Khan, “Sex in an Imperial War Zone: Transnational Encounters in Second World War India,” History Workshop Journal 76 (Spring 2012): 241, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbr026.

7. Yasmin Khan, India At War: The Subcontinent and the Second World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 324.

8. Yasmin Khan, India At War, 142.

9. Yasmin Khan, India At War, 267.

10. Yasmin Khan, India At War, 259-260.

11. Yasmin Khan, India At War, 142.

12. Ian Stephens, Monsoon Morning, (London: Benn, 1966), 102-103.

13. Burton Lester Cochran Collection (AFC/2001/001/26839), Veterans History Project, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/story/loc.natlib.afc2001001.26839/

14. Lowell H. Russell Collection (AFC/2001/001/10225), Veterans History Project, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/story/loc.natlib.afc2001001.10225/

15. Khan, India At War, 144.

16. One of the ways in which this was sought to be done was by deploying female Red Cross workers to provide much-needed care, camaraderie, and entertainment for the benefit of warweary and homesick soldiers. Virginia Allen was one such ‘G.I. Jill’ stationed in Calcutta, who served as a radiopersonality and performed in plays all over India, from 1944 to 1946. See Sara K. Eskridge, “G.I. Jinny,” W&M 83, no. 3 (Spring 2018). https://magazine.wm.edu/issue/2018-spring/index.phpI am grateful to Shayna Allen for drawing my attention to this.

17. The Calcutta Key.

18. This is not to suggest that the incidences of transgression were limited to these domains.

19. A Pocket Guide to India (For use of US Military Personnel in India, Prepared by Special Service Division, Army Service Forces of United States Army), https://cbi-theater.com/booklet/guide-to-india.html

20. A Pocket Guide to India.

21. Khan, India At War, 146.

22. A Pocket Guide to India.

23. Tathagata Niyogi, “Wartime Calcutta: Walking a Gut-Wrenching Disaster,” The Calcutta Blog, https://medium.com/the-calcutta-blog/wartimecalcutta-walking-a-gut-wrenchingdisaster-b12e9d04b3aa.

24. Srinath Raghavan, The Most Dangerous Place, 113.

25. ‘Know Your India’, C.B.I. Roundup I, no. 9, November 12, 1942, http://cbitheater.com/roundup/ roundup111242.html.

26. Malcolm Harvey Stilson Collection (AFC/2001/001/02056), Veterans History Project, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, https://memory.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/story/loc.natlib.afc2001001.02056/.

27. The Calcutta Key.

28. The Calcutta Key.

29. Personal correspondence with Prof. Amit Dey (to whom Mr. Basu had narrated this anecdote in the late 1970s) on June 28, 2020.

30. Khan, India At War, 274-275.

31. Khan, India At War, 274-275.

32.Debjani Sengupta, “‘A City Feeding on Itself’: Testimonies, Histories, and Literature on ‘Direct Action Day’, Calcutta, 1946”, 17, https://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/18707/6/06_chapter%201.pdf.

33. Janam Mukherjee, “Hungry Bengal: War, Famine, Riots, and the End of Empire 1939-1946,” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2011), 226.

34. Peter R. Moore, “Calcutta’s War Police”, The Telegraph, March 21, 2010, https://www.telegraphindia.com/states/west-bengal/calcutta-s-warpolice/cid/1269986.

35. The Calcutta Key.

36. The Calcutta Key.

37. Khan, India At War, 150.

38. Khan, India At War, 241.

39. E.E. Prebble, ‘Venereal Diseases in India,’ Sexually Transmitted Infections 22, no. 2 (June 1946): 55-62, https://doi.org/10.1136/sti.22.2.55.

40. Khan, India At War, 149.

41. For understanding the discernible divergence in the experiences of White and African American troops stationed in the city due to the US military’s policy of racial segregation, see Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in United States and India (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2012), and Gerald Horne, The End of Empires: African Americans and India (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008).

42. The Calcutta Key.

43. See “Bob Fagelson’s Images of India,” China-Burma-India: Remembering the Forgotten Theater of World War II, http://cbi-theater.com/bf-india/india.html; “Glenn Garrelt’s India,” China-Burma-India: Remembering the Forgotten Theater of World War II, https://cbi-theater.com/glenn/india.html.

44. John H. Smith, “Images of India: 1944-1946,” in China-Burma-India: Remembering the Forgotten Theater of World War II, https://cbi-theater.com/164th/.

45. Clyde Waddell, A Yank’s Memories of Calcutta (Houston: Self-published, 1947), http://hdl.library.upenn.edu/1017/d/medren/9949134203503681.

46. Waddell, A Yank’s Memories of Calcutta.

47. Waddell, A Yank’s Memories of Calcutta.

48. Nickname given by G.I.s to women who dried dung-cakes to later use them as fuel.

49. Waddell, A Yank’s Memories of Calcutta.

50. Malcolm Harvey Stilson Collection (AFC/2001/001/02056).

51. Malcolm Harvey Stilson Collection (AFC/2001/001/02056).

52. Waddell, A Yank’s Memories of Calcutta.

53. ‘Weather SOARS ABOVE ZERO’, CBI Roundup I, no. 44, July 15, 1943, https://cbi-theater.com/roundup/roundup071543.html.

54. Khan, India At War, 148.

55. Jack Shelton, ‘Smokey Takes A Furlough’, Hellbird Herald I, no. 2, February 20, 1945, https://cbi-theater.com/superfort/hellbird_022045.html.

56. ‘Dear Mom, I Got A Valet’, LIFE, November 30, 1942, https://cbi-theater.com/life-roundup/life-roundup.html.

57. Khan, India At War, 148-149.

58. ‘Dear Mom, I Got A Valet’, LIFE, November 30, 1942.

59. ‘Surface Defends Indian Net Title’, CBI Roundup II, no. 17, January 6, 1944, https://cbi-theater.com/roundup/roundup010644.html.

60. ‘Ringside at Calcutta’, Yank (The US Army Weekly) CBI Edition, June 2, 1945, https://cbi-theater.com/yankcbi/yank_cbi_5.html#RINGSIDE.

61. Personal correspondence with Prof. Amit Dey (Mr. Ali’s nephew) on June 17, 2020.

62. Khan, India At War, 156.

63. Khan, India At War, 151.

64. “List of Calcutta Jewish women who married American and British Servicemen: Compiled by Nancy Pine and Flower Silliman,” Recalling Jewish Calcutta, http://www.jewishcalcutta.in/items/show/1400.

65. Khan, India At War, 151.

66. Khan, India At War, 267.

67. Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism, 152.

68. Khan, India At War, 267.

69. Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism, 152.

70. Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism, 154.

71. Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism, 156.

72. Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism, 153.

73. Mukherjee, “Hungry Bengal,” 235.

74. Mukherjee, “Hungry Bengal,” 235.

75. Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism, 156.

76. Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism, 156.

77. Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism, 157.

78. Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism, 157.

79. Horne, The End of Empires, 166.

80. Khan, India At War, 268.

81. Gupta, Akshay Mulberry, 208.

82. Khan, India At War, 202.

83. Mukherjee, Hungry Bengal, 163.

84. 1 maund = 80 pounds (approximately).

85. ‘Sky-High Prices in India Justify Wages of G.I.’s, U.P. Man Writes’, CBI Roundup I, no. 38, June 3, 1943, https://cbi-theater.com/roundup/roundup060343.html.

86. See Chittaprosad, Hungry Bengal: A Tour Through Midnapur District, by Chittaprosad, in November, 1943 (Bombay: New Age, 1943); Famine Inquiry Commission of India, Report on Bengal (New Delhi: Government of India, 1945); Tarashankar Das, Bengal Famine (1943) as Revealed in a Survey of the Destitutes in Calcutta (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1949); Paul Greenough, Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal, The Famine of 1943-44 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

87. The Calcutta Key.

88. Waddell, A Yank’s Memories of Calcutta.

89. Malcolm Harvey Stilson Collection (AFC/2001/001/02056).

90. Kermit A. Bushur Collection (AFC/2001/001/29937), Veterans History Project, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, https://memory.loc.gov/diglib/vhp-stories/loc.natlib.afc2001001.29937/.

91. For a detailed account of how the UNRRA food aid to Bengal was blocked, see Manish Sinha, “The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and the Question of Food Aid During the Bengal Famine of 1943,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 73 (2012), 1042-1052.

92. ‘Bengal Relief Funds Still Trickle Through’, CBI Roundup I, no. 12, December 3, 1942, https://cbi-theater.com/roundup/roundup120342.html.

93. Khan, India At War, 213-214.

94. Niyogi, ‘Wartime Calcutta: Walking a Gut-Wrenching Disaster’.

95. Thomas Ray Foltz, “My Life As A G.I. Joe in World War II,” https://cbi-theater.com/gijoe/gijoe.html.

96. Mukherjee, Hungry Bengal, 339.

97. For a detailed treatment of this theme of exacerbating communal violence during the 1940s, see Anwesha Roy, Making Peace, Making Riots: Communalism and Communal Violence, Bengal 1940-1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

98. See Jeremy Black, World War Two: A Military History (London and New York: Routledge, 2003); David Reynolds, From World War to Cold War: Churchill, Roosevelt and the International History of the 1940s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Thomas U. Berger, War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

99. Tarak Barkawi, “Connection and Constitution: Locating War and Culture in Globalization Studies,” Globalizations 1, no. 2 (December 2004): 168, https://doi.org/10.1080/1474773042000308532.

100. A Pocket Guide to India.

101. Malcolm Harvey Stilson Collection (AFC/2001/001/02056).

102. Malcolm Harvey Stilson Collection (AFC/2001/001/02056).

103. A Pocket Guide to India.

104. Kennison Cook, ‘Revised List of “Things We Can Do Without”’, CBI Roundup I, no. 20, January 28, 1943, https://cbi-theater.com/roundup/roundup012843.html.

105. The Calcutta Key.

106. See Eugene B. Vest, “Native Words Learned by American Soldiers in India and Burma in World War II,” American Speech 23, no. 3/4 (Oct.-Dec., 1948), https://www.jstor.com/stable/486923.

107. Carl W. Weidenburner, ‘China-Burma-India Christmas,’ in China-Burma-India: Remembering the Forgotten Theater of World War II, https://cbi-theater.com/christmas/cbixmas.html.


Figures

FIGURE 1. Photograph and caption by Clyde Waddell. (Available in the public domain and free of known copyright restrictions) https://openn.library.upenn.edu/Data/0002/html/mscoll802.html

FIGURE 2. Photograph and caption by Clyde Waddell. (Available in the public domain and free of known copyright restrictions) https://openn.library.upenn.edu/Data/0002/html/mscoll802.html

FIGURE 3. Photograph and caption by Clyde Waddell. (Available in the public domain and free of known copyright restrictions) https://openn.library.upenn.edu/Data/0002/html/mscoll802.html

FIGURE 4. Courtesy: Carl W. Weidenburner.China-Burma-India Christmas https://cbi-theater.com/christmas/cbixmas.html,
in China-Burma-India: Remembering the Forgotten Theater of World War II https://cbi-theater.com/.










In An Alien City: American Soldiers
in Wartime Calcutta (1942-1946)

by Suchintan Das






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