Introduction: Welcome to the Quillette Podcast. I’m Iona Italia and I’m your host this week. My guest is historian and film-maker Phil Craig. Phil is the author or co-author (with Tim Clayton) of a number of books, including three books on the events of the Second World War: Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain; The End of the Beginning: From the Siege of Malta to the Allied Victory at El Alamein; and his latest, which forms the focus of our conversation: 1945: A Reckoning: War, Empire and the Struggle for a New World. As vivid and immersive as a well-written novel, 1945: A Reckoning charts the key events that took place in theatres of war that spanned the globe from Berlin to Borneo, through the eyes of five key figures: Subhas Chandra Bose, the revolutionary who was willing to ally with the Nazis in his attempts to achieve Indian Independence; Kodendera Subayya Thimayya (known as “Timmy”), a general in the Indian Army; Angela Noblet, a nurse who witnessed the Bengal famine; Douglas Brock Peterkin, a doctor who took part in the liberation of Belsen; and Arthur Titherington, a Japanese prisoner-of-war. Among other things, we touch on the liberation of the concentration camps, the Indian Independence movement, both the benefits and oppressions of British colonial rule, the battle for control of Vietnam, and the disastrous British-Australian expedition to Indonesia. I hope you enjoy my discussion with Phil Craig.

Iona Italia: So Phil, you centre this book around five main characters. Timmy, who is—I’m going to forget his full name. What is his actual full name?

Phil Craig: His full Indian name is Kodandera Subayya Thimayya.

II: Okay, thank you. Also known as Timmy.

PC: And I’m in WhatsApp touch with his grandson, so I think I have that pronunciation right.

II: And then there is Subhas Chandra Bose, the rather controversial Indian nationalist. And then there’s Angela Noblet, a nurse. Arthur Tithrington, who was a Japanese prisoner of war, and Douglas Brock Peterkin, a doctor. Can you tell me, when did you first get the idea? Did you always think that you would centre it around a cast of characters and why did you choose that particular cast of characters?

PC: All the books I’ve done about the Second World War—this is the third—have used this approach. It really does grow out of a documentary tradition, which is my background. The very first book in this trilogy was based on a BBC One series I made over twenty years ago. One thing you learn in television is you try and lead your storytelling with emotion and there’s nothing more emotional than the human face, the human story. You may have things to say that are analytical, about the military situation, the politics. And I have plenty of things to say about all those things. But if you can get people interested in people and lead that way …

A perfect example of that approach, I think, is Angela, you mentioned the nurse, the woman I was destined to meet and marry, but sadly I never did. I’m rather in love with her. I think that’s obvious from the way I write about her. A remarkable person. Anyway, amongst the various adventures and things that happened to her is that she’s an eyewitness to the Bengal famine, which is a hugely important and terrible part of this story. Rather than writing an essay about the famine, I wanted to get the reader involved by a moment of personal experience. She has this remarkable moment where she sees people trying to get food from a goods train by poking sticks up through the floors into the sacks of rice and catching the trickle that comes out. It’s a very affecting story for her and I hope for the reader too. You suddenly see there the human reality of something as massive as the Bengal famine and then that gives you the excuse. You’ve hooked them so you talk a little bit more about the story of the famine.

So that’s a long-winded way of trying to explain my style. I actually had many more characters than the five you mentioned at the beginning. I threw quite a lot away because I thought, there’s a lot going on, so I dropped quite a few people.

But I guess I wanted people who were in interesting places and fresh voices. It’s good to get people who have not been exposed that much. Bose is very, very famous in India. But to be honest, outside India, not many people know much about him. And the others, I think, are largely unknown. So yeah, that’s the rationalisation for the narrative style that I’ve chosen to follow.

II: I’d like to start with maybe Bose and Timmy. So these are two figures who both played a kind of military—in Timmy’s case, definitely a military role—and in Bose’s case, a quasi-military role. They were both Indian patriots. They were both in favour of Indian independence. They lived at the same period. Timmy actually had a brother who fought in Bose’s Indian National Army. And yet they pursued completely different career paths and took completely different attitudes towards how to strive for Indian independence and how to work with the British. Can you talk a little bit about those two contrasting strategies?

PC: I couldn’t believe it. I was looking for a way of telling the story of how India progressed to independence through the war. Because the biggest story of this book is the empire and what’s going to happen to the empire and how the empire, the British themselves, will respond to growing clamours for decolonisation right across the world. Bose, I knew I wanted to write about because he’s such an interesting and incredibly ambiguous character. I really wanted to write about him. But Timmy is the perfect intercut—another television term. If you can juxtapose two people through a storyline, it gives the story energy. And these two men, as you say, they were both about the same age. They both grew up determined to see India become independent in their lifetime. They were both very gifted in different areas.

For a while, Bose followed a path that many future leaders of independent nations followed, the constitutional politics. He was a protester, he was an agitator, but he led the Congress Party for a while. Had he made different choices, he could have ended up as the first prime minister of an independent India. In fact, I’d say he had a good chance of doing that. But he went a certain way. He went down the route of … well, I would say he fell for the glamour of the dictators, the men of action of his time. And that’s his tragedy, in my view.

Timmy is a very interesting character though because he rises through the Indian Army, which is an amazing institution. I said I fell in love with Angela Noblet. I kind of fell in love with the Indian Army. I didn’t know much about it until I started working on this book. It’s such a remarkable institution and it becomes such a very important and powerful force not only in the victory over the Japanese but in creating the architecture of the new independent India.

And that’s what Timmy decided was his life’s work. He was tempted to leave—as you said, his own brother followed Bose. For those who don’t know, Bose makes a deal with first the Germans then the Japanese. He forms and leads this independent army. And a lot of Indians who see the world the way Timmy does do go across and follow Bose. Timmy’s own brother, as you say, and they’re very close. And there’s a real chance he’ll even have to fight his brother on a battlefield. This is American Civil War stuff, brother against brother. Very intense.

But Timmy doesn’t really believe Bose and his promises. He doesn’t think the route to independence should lie through a Japanese victory. He doesn’t trust the Japanese. The Japanese don’t help by the consistently terrible way they behave towards Indians and indeed anybody that they temporarily conquer.

But having said that, we shouldn’t forget that when they initially sweep through the region, they’re very popular. Something British people don’t like to talk about, but they were very popular. It was a thrilling moment for people who saw the world like Bose did and also many nationalists in the other parts of the region.

So, Timmy is torn, he’s conflicted. In the end, his loyalty to the army and his vision of the future wins out, but he’s very matey with the Nehru family, Motilal Nehru, who is the father of the future prime minister, and he advises him to stay in the army no matter how badly the British treat him. He does have all sorts of scrapes. He nearly walks out lots of times but he stays with it because he has faith in the institution. And I think he sees that if India is to be truly independent, it will need an army. He wants to lead it—and indeed he does. So I would say he should be celebrated in modern India but he’s virtually unknown there and I would say Bose should not be and yet he’s probably the most famous Indian of that time and widely celebrated. And how that happens and how history works and why it’s just really unfair and annoying sometimes is another reason I’ve tried to encode into the book.

II: Yeah, Timmy is a builder. He is using his training in the army, and his training by the British to build something which he can use, which the Indians can use, after the British have gone, which can become the foundation of an Indian state. It’s a very positive way of approaching things.

The story of Bose was reminding me so much of so many contemporary resonances. Bose, of course, went to Cambridge and you say at one point that Oxford and Cambridge universities contributed more to the revolutionary decolonial ideology than did the Marxists and the actual revolutionaries elsewhere, the Marxists and the Comintern and people like that. There were more sympathisers with decolonisation among the intellectuals of Oxford and Cambridge than there were among Indians. And that is very resonant, of course, right now, seeing people marching in Sydney in favour of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which I just can’t even fathom.

PC: Well, I share your surprise and disappointment at that sort of thing, of course I do. It’s a slightly flippant remark, but I actually think it’s probably true. There are lots and lots of people who … I think I say at some point, the British, when they’re not locking people up, and yes, occasionally hanging them, let’s be honest, when they’re not locking people up, they’re capable of being … “seduced” is a word that Bose himself uses. They offer the gifted young people of their empire the chance to “come and talk and maybe we can find a way forward” and some of it is the classic divide-and-rule that maybe it’s insincere. What is it Gandhi used to say? “A cheque that can’t be cashed on a crashing bank,” the British promises.

But in the end had Bose not thrown in his lot with the fascists and the Japanese militarists I think it’s a very good chance he would have certainly been a rival to Nehru as the first prime minister. And he had many attractive qualities. That’s why he’s such a great character. He’s really worshipped. He expected to be, and he is. He saw himself always as much a prophet as a political figure. And his writing is maybe, to our taste, a little cloying and a little over the top. But it found and finds a very ready audience. He’s really very much admired in modern India.

He’s credited with a lot of things he didn’t do and victories that he never had, which is just, I’m afraid, the way history works. If enough people want to believe something, whether that thing is that Bose drives the British out of India, or that thing is there is a genocide happening in Gaza, people will believe it because an awful lot of them want to. Whether or not it’s true, you can’t—well, I would say both of those things are not true.

II: You cite Salman Rushdie who says, “What is true and what is real are not the same.”

PC: I love that quote. I put it in the book and yes, something does not have to be true to be real. So all of the things that Bose is remembered for, many of them are not true. But they’re certainly real. They’re really important. There’s a ten-part series that Amazon made. Hugely successful, beautifully made, emotionally manipulative, lachrymose, but very exciting drama about Bose and his army, which is full of stories that really are not true in my opinion, but certainly highly exaggerated. And yet his heroic worship, maybe because it’s easier now to hero-worship somebody.