28 Comments

  1. Great collating and research. Very interesting article. First time I’ve seen an article dedicated to the WWII bombing of Kolkata/Calcutta (as it was at the time). I remember my mum stating she and her family, and the rest of the residents, going to the basement of their building to shield themselves from the bombings. Quite a few regarded an Australian pilot (who must have been in the RAF) as leading the air defence and protecting the city from worse damage. Think his surname may have been Pring. Contemporaries recount that the Japanese subsequently ambushed him. Successfully unfortunately.

  2. Excellent. I think one of your best till date (as I have a soft corner for long, detailed, filled with boring trivia, meticulous articles !). In hindsight, I think you can also try to extoll the RAF part of this story. Not many know that during this phase, Calcutta had its own War hero. A young strapping lad who fought from the front and died in battle! Look up Sgt. Maurice Pring. Buried in the war graves.

  3. good account of the times and life during thewar ..To add to the problems was Chuchchills obsession with food shortage .So much so he stopped imports of rice from Burma and closed the granaries .. Thousands of villagers starved and came to Kolkata as my mum recalls begging for starch ..Maar OR maaD AS they call in Bengali …Dogs competed with humans for left overs and Allied forces threw cans of half eaten food from Grand Hotel to starved ones

  4. Subhadip, thank you so much for this wonderful blog. So difficult to get this information and I am really grateful to have found it all here. I am an English writer with a love of India and Kolkata in particular . I look forward to reading more of your work. Best wishes.

  5. This blog offered a complete experience. Every moment could actually be felt. You have done an incredible job with the narrative and the photographs. Inspired by your blog, I am visiting the Khidirpur dockyard with my friend. I am getting these photographs printed and carrying them with me. I hope that is not an issue. Thanks a lot, again 🙂

  6. Good One . My grand father also shared the same thing when he was in British Indian Army serving some where in jungles of Burma

  7. Thank you so much for doing this work and making it available. My father was in the British Army, posted in India from 1942 – 1947. He never talked about his time there (other than to say he bartered bottles of Whisky for bags of rice – he was a Quarter Master Sergeant) but Mum told me he was based in Calcutta and that they marched from Bombay to get there. I have found very little written about it.

    1. Its really nice to hear these small snippets of stories. I face a lot of challenges when writing this blog and had to eclusively depend of informations like these to give it a flavour. Thanks for sharing…

  8. A very good read, Mr. Mukherjee.

    I was in Kolkata from 1940-46 for my schooling and college and I still remeber the air raids sirens going off in Esplanade. Distance explosions were also heard on a few occasions.
    The British even moved an AA gun to the middle of Dharmatala.

  9. Subhadip, This is a wonderful article !! Very well written and the photographs are excellent. The effort you put in, to show how the exact same locations appear now makes the story so much more tangible and real. It’s fascinating to see how some things like window shutters, signboards, decorative touches to the walls, remain the same and you can walk by them today.

    Regarding the comment by Peter Fossey, he’s right that Flying Officer Maurice Pring (he was English, not Australian, BTW) was one of the pilots shot down in the raid on Dec 5th. One can learn more about his story at http://www.bharat-rakshak.com/IAF/History/WW2/1093-In-the-Skies-of-Calcutta.html. Incidentally, this December will be the 75th anniversary of that raid and Pring’s death.

    Thanks for giving your readers this treat.

  10. Subhadip. Commenting here. It’s a wonderfully detailed and well researched article. I have also keen interest in this period and events and have some ideas to share your efforts to more people in a larger scale. I have sent you a FR in FB.

  11. An amazing piece of journalism!

    My father, B.A. Clements (1922-1969), was a US Army Air Corps Air Traffic Control Tower Operator in WW2. His troop ship arrived the Kiddipore Docks just after the raid on Dec. 5, 1943. He and another operator were tasked with rolling full fuel barrels off of a burning ship at the port. Later they were ordered onto a burial detail for some of the air raid victims. It was my father’s first experience with the dangers and horrors of war. Soon enough he encountered worse situations in other places in India, Burma, Indochina, and China, including flying over the Hump. He avoided discussing his war experiences. He died in 1969 when I was 17. I never had a chance as an adult to later ask him about his experiences, nor to thank him for helping resist Japanese aggression. Thank you so much for helping me piece together his past.

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