Death of Subhas Chandra Bose

1945 death of Indian nationalist leader

Indian nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose died on 18 August 1945 from third degree burns sustained after the bomber in which he was being transported as a guest of Lieutenant General Tsunamasa Shidei of the Imperial Japanese Kwantung Army crashed upon take off from the airport in Taihoku, Japanese Formosa, now Taipei, Taiwan. The chief pilot, copilot, and General Shidei were instantly killed. Bose, who had become soaked in gasoline before exiting the burning bomber, was transported to the Nanmon Military Hospital south of Taihoku, where his extensive upper body burns were treated for six hours by the chief surgeon Dr Taneyoshi Yoshimi, two other doctors Dr Truruta and Dr Ishii, and half a dozen technical staff and nurses. Bose went into a coma and died between 9 PM and 10 PM Taihoku time. Bose's chief of staff, Colonel Habib ur Rahman, who had travelled with him, and who lay nearby with severe burns, recovered. Ten years later he testified at an inquiry commission on Bose's death, the burn marks on his arms conspicuously visible. General Shidei's descendants commemorate his death every year at the Renkōji Temple in Tokyo, where Bose's ashes are also deposited. Many among Subhas Chandra Bose's supporters, especially in Bengal, refused at the time and have refused since to believe either the fact or the circumstances of his death. Conspiracy theories appeared within hours of his death and have persisted since then, keeping alive various martial myths about Bose.

During the last week of April 1945, Subhas Chandra Bose along with his senior Indian National Army (INA) officers, several hundred enlisted INA men, and nearly a hundred women from the INA's Rani of Jhansi Regiment left Rangoon by road for Moulmein in Burma. Accompanied by Lieutenant General Saburo Isoda, the head of the Japanese INA liaison organization Hikari Kikan, their Japanese military convoy was able to reach the right bank of the Sittang river, albeit slowly. (See map 1.) However, very few vehicles were able to cross the river because of American strafing runs. Bose and his party walked the remaining 80 mile (129 km) to Moulmein over the next week. Moulmein then was the terminus of the Death Railway, constructed earlier by British, Australian, and Dutch prisoners of war, linking Burma to Siam (now Thailand). At Moulmein, Bose's group was also joined by 500 men from the X regiment, INA's first guerrilla regiment, who arrived from a different location in Lower Burma. A year and a half earlier, 16,000 INA men and 100 women had entered Burma from Malaya. Now, less than one tenth that number left the country, arriving in Bangkok during the first week of May. The remaining nine tenths were either killed in action, died from malnutrition or injuries after the battles of Imphal and Kohima. Others were captured by the British, turned themselves in, or simply disappeared. Bose stayed in Bangkok for a month, where soon after his arrival he heard the news of Germany's surrender on May8. Bose spent the next two months between June and July 1945 in Singapore, and in both places attempted to raise funds for billeting his soldiers or rehabilitating them if they chose to return to civilian life, which most of the women did. In his nightly radio broadcasts, Bose spoke with increasing virulence against Gandhi, who had been released from jail in 1944, and was engaged in talks with British administrators, envoys and Muslim League leaders. Some senior INA officers began to feel frustrated or disillusioned with Bose and to prepare quietly for the arrival of the British and its consequences. During the first two weeks of August 1945, events began to unfold rapidly. With the British threatening to invade Malaya and with daily American aerial bombings, Bose's presence in Singapore became riskier by the day. His chief of staff J. R. Bhonsle suggested that he prepare to leave Singapore. On 3August 1945, Bose received a cable from General Isoda advising him to urgently evacuate to Saigon in Japanese controlled French Indochina (now Vietnam). On 10August, Bose learnt that the Soviet Union had entered the war and invaded Manchuria. At the same time he heard about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Finally, on 16August, after being informed of the unconditional surrender of Japan, Bose decided to leave for Saigon along with a handful of his aides.

Reliable strands of historical narrative about Bose's last days are united up to this point. However, they separate briefly for the period between 16 August, when Bose received news of Japan's surrender in Singapore, and shortly after noon on 17 August, when Bose and his party arrived at Saigon airport from Saigon city to board a plane. (See map 2.) In one version, Bose flew out from Singapore to Saigon, stopping briefly in Bangkok, on the 16th. Soon after arriving in Saigon, he visited Field Marshal Hisaichi Terauchi, head of the Japanese forces in Southeast Asia, and requested him to arrange a flight to the Soviet Union. Although until the day before, the Soviet Union had been a belligerent of Japan, it was also seen, at least by Bose, as increasingly anti British, and, consequently, a possible base of his future operations against the British Raj. Terauchi, in turn, cabled Japan's Imperial General Headquarters (IGHQ) in Tokyo for permission, which was quickly denied. In the words of historian Joyce Chapman Lebra, the IGHQ felt that it "would be unfair of Bose to write off Japan and go over to Soviet Union after receiving so much help from Japan. Terauchi added in talking with Bose that it would be unreasonable for him to take a step which was opposed by the Japanese." Privately, however, Terauchi still felt sympathy for Bose—one that had been formed during their two year long association. He somehow managed to arrange room for Bose on a flight leaving Saigon on the morning of 17 August 1945 bound for Tokyo, but stopping en route in Dairen, Manchuria—which was still Japanese occupied, but toward which the Soviet army was fast approaching—where Bose was to have disembarked and to have awaited his fate at the hand of the Soviets. In another version, Bose left Singapore with his party on the 16th and stopped en route in Bangkok, surprising INA officer in charge there, J. R. Bhonsle, who quickly made arrangements for Bose's overnight stay. Word of Bose's arrival, however, got out, and soon local members of the Indian Independence League (IIL), the INA, and the Thai Indian business community turned up at the hotel. According to historian Peter Ward Fay, Bose "sat up half the night holding court—and in the morning flew on to Saigon, this time accompanied by General Isoda " Arriving in Saigon, late in the morning, there was little time to visit Field Marshal Terauchi, who was in Dalat in the Central Highlands of French Indo China, an hour away by plane. Consequently, Isoda himself, without consulting with higher ups, arranged room for Bose on a flight leaving around noon. In the third sketchier version, Bose left Singapore on the 17th. According to historian Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, "On 17 August he issued a final order of the day, dissolving the INA with the words, 'The roads to Delhi are many and Delhi still remains our goal.' He then flew out to China via French Indo China. If all else failed he wanted to become a prisoner of the Soviets: 'They are the only ones who will resist the British. My fate is with them'." Around noon on 17 August, the strands again reunite. At Saigon airport, a Mitsubishi Ki 21 heavy bomber, of the type code named Sally by the Allies, was waiting for Bose and his party. In addition to Bose, the INA group comprised Colonel Habibur Rahman, his secretary; S. A. Ayer, a member of his cabinet; Major Abid Hasan, his old associate who had made the hazardous submarine journey from Germany to Sumatra in 1943; and three others. To their dismay, they learned upon arrival that there was room for only one INA passenger. Bose complained, and the beleaguered General Isoda gave in and hurriedly arranged for a second seat. Bose chose Habibur Rahman to accompany him. It was understood that the others in the INA party would follow him on later flights. There was further delay at Saigon airport. According to historian Joyce Chapman Lebra, "a gift of treasure contributed by local Indians was presented to Bose as he was about to board the plane. The two heavy strong boxes added overweight to the plane's full load." Sometime between noon and 2 PM, the twin engine plane took off with 12 or 13 people aboard: a crew of three or four, a group of Japanese army and air force officers, including Lieutenant General Tsunamasa Shidei, the Vice Chief of Staff of the Japanese Kwantung Army, which although fast retreating in Manchuria still held the Manchurian peninsula, and Bose and Rahman. Bose was sitting a little to the rear of the portside wing; the bomber, under normal circumstances, carried a crew of five. That these flights were possible a few days after Japan's surrender was the result of a lack of clarity about what had occurred. Although Japan had unconditionally surrendered, when Emperor Hirohito had made his announcement over the radio, he had used formal Japanese, not entirely intelligible to ordinary people and, instead of using the word "surrender" (in Japanese), had mentioned only "abiding by the terms of the Potsdam Declaration." Consequently, many people, especially in Japanese occupied territories, were unsure if anything had significantly changed, allowing a window of a few days for the Japanese air force to continue flying. Although the Japanese and Bose were tight lipped about the destination of the bomber, it was widely assumed by Bose's staff left behind in Saigon that the plane was bound for Dairen on the Manchurian peninsula, which, as stated above, was still under Japanese control. Bose had been talking for over a year about the importance of making contact with the communists, both Russian and Chinese. In 1944, he had asked a minister in his cabinet, Anand Mohan Sahay to travel to Tokyo for the purposes of making contact with the Soviet ambassador, Jacob Malik. However, after consulting the Japanese foreign minister Mamoru Shigemitsu, Sahay decided against it. In May 1945, Sahay had again written to Shigemitsu requesting him to contact Soviet authorities on behalf of Bose; again the reply had been in the negative. Bose had been continually querying General Isoda for over a year about the Japanese army's readiness in Manchuria. After the war, the Japanese confirmed to the British investigators and later Indian commissions of inquiry, that plane was indeed bound for Dairen, and that fellow passenger General Shidea of the Kwantung Army, was to have disembarked with Bose in Dairen and to have served as the main liaison and negotiator for Bose's transfer into Soviet controlled territory in Manchuria. The plane had flown north. By the time it was near the northern coast of French Indo China, darkness had begun to close in, and the pilot decided to make an unscheduled stop in Tourane (now Da Nang, Vietnam). The passengers stayed overnight at a hotel, and the crew, worried that the plane was overloaded, shed some 500 pounds of equipment and luggage, and also refueled the plane. Before dawn the next morning, the group flew out again, this time east to Taihoku, Formosa (now Taipei, Taiwan), which was a scheduled stop, arriving there around noon on 18 August 1945. During the two hour stop in Taihoku, the plane was again refueled, while the passengers ate lunch. The chief pilot and the ground engineer, and Major Kono, seemed concerned about the portside engine, and, once all the passengers were on board, the engine was tested by repeatedly throttling up and down. The concerns allayed, the plane finally took off, in different accounts, as early as 2 PM, and as late as 2:30 PM, watched by ground engineers.

Just as the bomber was leaving the standard path taken by aircraft during take off, the passengers inside heard a loud sound, similar to an engine backfiring. Airport mechanics saw something fall out of the plane. It was the portside engine, or a part of it, and the propeller. The plane swung wildly to the right and plummeted, crashing, breaking into two, and exploding into flames. Inside, the chief pilot, copilot and General Shidea were instantly killed. Rahman was stunned, passing out briefly, and Bose, although conscious and not fatally hurt, was soaked in gasoline. When Rahman came to, he and Bose attempted to leave by the rear door but found it blocked by the luggage. They then decided to run through the flames and exit from the front. The ground staff, now approaching the plane, saw two people staggering towards them, one of whom had become a human torch. The human torch turned out to be Bose, whose gasoline soaked clothes had instantly ignited. Rahman and a few others managed to smother the flames, but also noticed that Bose's face and head appeared badly burned. According to Joyce Chapman Lebra, "A truck which served as ambulance rushed Bose and the other passengers to the Nanmon Military Hospital south of Taihoku." The airport personnel called Dr. Taneyoshi Yoshimi, the surgeon in charge at the hospital at around 3 PM. Bose was conscious and mostly coherent when they reached the hospital, and for some time thereafter. Bose was naked, except for a blanket wrapped around him, and Dr. Yoshimi immediately saw evidence of third degree burns on many parts of the body, especially on his chest, doubting very much that he would live. Dr. Yoshimi promptly began to treat Bose and was assisted by Dr. Tsuruta. According to historian Leonard A. Gordon, who interviewed all the hospital personnel later: Soon, in spite of the treatment, Bose went into a coma. He died a few hours later, between 9 and 10 PM. Bose's body was cremated in the main Taihoku crematorium two days later, 20 August 1945. On 23 August 1945, the Japanese news agency Domei announced the death of Bose and Shidea. On 7 September a Japanese officer, Lieutenant Tatsuo Hayashida, carried Bose's ashes to Tokyo, and the following morning they were handed to the president of the Tokyo Indian Independence League, Rama Murti. On 14 September a memorial service was held for Bose in Tokyo and a few days later the ashes were turned over to the priest of the Renkōji Temple of Nichiren Buddhism in Tokyo. There they have remained ever since. Among the INA personnel, there was widespread disbelief, shock, and trauma. Most affected were the young Tamil Indians from Malaya and Singapore, men and women, who comprised the bulk of the civilians who had enlisted in the INA. The professional soldiers in the INA, most of whom were Punjabis, faced an uncertain future, with many fatalistically expecting reprisals from the British. In India the Indian National Congress's official line was succinctly expressed in a letter Mahatma Gandhi wrote to Rajkumari Amrit Kaur. Said Gandhi, "Subhas Bose has died well. He was undoubtedly a patriot, though misguided." Many congressmen had not forgiven Bose for quarreling with Gandhi and for collaborating with what they considered was Japanese fascism. The Indian soldiers in the British Indian army, some two and a half million of whom had fought during the Second World War, were conflicted about the INA. Some saw the INA as traitors and wanted them punished; others felt more sympathetic. The British Raj, though never seriously threatened by the INA, was to try 300 INA officers for treason in the INA trials, but was to eventually backtrack in the face of its own end.

Subhas Chandra Bose's exploits had become legendary long before his physical death in August 1945. From the time he had escaped house arrest in Calcutta in 1940, rumours had been rife in India about whether or not he was alive, and if the latter, where he was and what he was doing. His appearance in faraway Germany in 1941 created a sense of mystery about his activities. With Congress leaders in jail in the wake of the Quit India Resolution in August 1942 and the Indian public starved for political news, Bose's radio broadcasts from Berlin charting radical plans for India's liberation during a time when the star of Germany was still rising and that of Britain was at its lowest, made him an object of adulation among many in India and southeast Asia. During his two years in Germany, according to historian Romain Hayes, "If Bose gradually obtained respect in Berlin, in Tokyo he earned fervent admiration and was seen very much as an 'Indian samurai'." Thus it was that when Bose appeared in Southeast Asia in July 1943, brought mysteriously on German and Japanese submarines, he was already a figure of mythical size and reach. After Bose's death, Bose's other lieutenants, who were to have accompanied him to Manchuria, but were left behind in Saigon, never saw a body. There were no photographs taken of the injured or deceased Bose, neither was a death certificate issued. According to historian Leonard A. Gordon,

For these two reasons, when news of Bose's death was reported, many in the INA refused to believe it and were able to transmit their disbelief to a wider public. The source of the widespread skepticism in the INA might have been Bose's senior officer J. R. Bhonsle. When a Japanese delegation, which included General Isoda, visited Bhonsle on 19 August 1945 to break the news and offer condolences, he responded by telling Isoda that Bose had not died, rather his disappearance has been covered up. Even Mahatma Gandhi swiftly said that he was skeptical about the air crash, but changed his mind after meeting the Indian survivor Habibur Rahman. As in 1940, before long, in 1945, rumours were rife about what had happened to Bose, whether he was in Soviet held Manchuria, a prisoner of the Soviet army, or whether he had gone into hiding with the cooperation of the Soviet army. Lakshmi Swaminathan, of the all female Rani of Jhansi regiment of the INA, later Lakshmi Sahgal, said in spring 1946 that she thought Bose was in China. Many rumours spoke of Bose preparing for his final march on Delhi. This was the time when Bose began to be sighted by people, one sighter claiming "he had met Bose in a third class compartment of the Bombay express on a Thursday."

With the goal of quelling the rumours about what happened to Subhas Chandra Bose after mid August 1945, the Government of India in 1956 appointed a three man committee headed by Shah Nawaz Khan. Khan was at the time a Member of Parliament as well as a former Lieutenant Colonel in the Indian National Army and the best known defendant in the INA Trials of a decade before. The other members of the committee were S. N. Maitra, ICS, who was nominated by the Government of West Bengal, and Suresh Chandra Bose, an elder brother of Bose. The committee is referred to as the "Shah Nawaj Committee" or the "Netaji Inquiry Committee." From April to July 1956, the committee interviewed 67 witnesses in India, Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam. In particular, the committee interviewed all the survivors of the plane crash, some of whom had scars on their bodies from burns. The committee interviewed Dr. Yoshimi, the surgeon at the Taihoku Military Hospital who treated Bose in his last hours. It also interviewed Bose's Indian companion on the flight, Habib ur Rahman, who, after the partition, had moved to Pakistan and had burn scars from the plane crash. Although there were minor discrepancies here and there in the evidence, the first two members of the committee, Khan and Maitra, concluded that Bose had died in the plane crash in Taihoku on 18 August 1945. Bose's brother, Suresh Chandra Bose, however, after having signed off on the initial conclusions, declined to sign the final report. He, moreover, wrote a dissenting note in which he claimed that the other members and staff of the Shah Nawaz Committee had deliberately withheld some crucial evidence from him, that the committee had been directed by Jawaharlal Nehru to infer death by plane crash, and that the other committee members, along with Bengal's chief minister B. C. Roy, had pressured him bluntly to sign the conclusions of their final report. According to historian Leonard A. Gordon,

In 1977, two decades after the Shah Nawaz committee had reported its findings, historian Joyce Chapman Lebra wrote about Suresh Chandra Bose's dissenting note: "Whatever Mr Bose's motives in issuing his minority report, he has helped to perpetuate until the present the faith that Subhas Chandra Bose still lives." In fact, during the early 1960s, the rumours about Subhas Bose's extant forms only increased. In 1970, the Government of India appointed a new commission to enquire into the "disappearance" of Bose. With a view to heading off more minority reports, this time it was a "one man commission." The single investigator was G. D. Khosla, a retired chief justice of the Punjab High Court. As Justice Khosla had other duties, he submitted his report only in 1974. Justice Khosla, who brought his legal background to bear on the issue in a methodical fashion, not only concurred with the earlier reports of Figess and the Shah Nawaz Committee on the main facts of Bose's death, but also evaluated the alternative explanations of Bose's disappearance and the motives of those promoting stories of Netaji sightings. Historian Leonard A. Gordon writes:

In 1999, following a court order, the Indian government appointed retired Supreme Court judge Manoj Kumar Mukherjee to probe the death of Bose. The commission perused hundreds of files on Bose's death drawn from several countries and visited Japan, Russia and Taiwan. Although oral accounts were in favour of the plane crash, the commission concluded that those accounts could not be relied upon and that there was a secret plan to ensure Bose's safe passage to the USSR with the knowledge of Japanese authorities and Habibur Rahman. It though failed to make any progress about Bose's activities, after the staged crash. The commission also concluded that the ashes kept at the Renkoji temple (which supposedly contain skeletal remains) reported to be Bose's, were of Ichiro Okura, a Japanese soldier who died of cardiac arrest but asked for a DNA test. It also determined Gumnami Baba to be different from Subhas Bose in light of a DNA profiling test. The Mukherjee Commission submitted its report to on 8 November 2005 after 3 extensions and it was tabled in the Indian Parliament on 17 May 2006. The Indian Government rejected the findings of the commission. Key findings of the report (esp. about their rejection of the plane crash theory) have been criticized and the report contains other glaring inaccuracies. Sugata Bose notes that Mukherjee himself admitted to harbouring a preconceived notion about Bose being alive and living as an ascetic. He also blames the commission for entertaining the most preposterous and fanciful of all stories, thus adding to the confusion and for failing to distinguish between the highly probable and utterly impossible. Gordon notes that the report had failed to list all of the people who were interviewed by the committee (including him) and that it mis listed and mis titled many of the books, used as sources.

An investigative report by Japanese government titled "Investigation on the cause of death and other matters of the late Subhas Chandra Bose" was declassified on 1 September 2016. It concluded that Bose died in a plane crash in Taiwan on 18 August 1945. The report was completed in January 1956 and was handed over to the Indian embassy in Tokyo, but was not made public for more than 60 years as it was classified. According to the report, just after takeoff a propeller blade on the airplane in which Bose was traveling broke off and the engine fell off the plane, which then crashed and burst into flames. When Bose exited it his clothes caught fire and he was severely burned. He was admitted to hospital, and although he was conscious and able to carry on a conversation for some time he died several hours later.