Death of Subhas Chandra Bose

[8] 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.

[9] 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).

[11] Bose spent the next two months between June and July 1945 in Singapore,[11] 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.

[12] 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.

[14] On 3 August 1945, Bose received a cable from General Isoda advising him to urgently evacuate to Saigon in Japanese-controlled French Indochina (now Vietnam).

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.

[14] 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,[17] and, consequently, a possible base of his future operations against the British Raj.

[18][19] 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.

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.

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.

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).

[20] 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.

[23] 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.

[17] In India the Indian National Congress's official line was succinctly expressed in a letter Mahatma Gandhi wrote to Rajkumari Amrit Kaur.

[31] 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'.

"[32] 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.

The best-known and most intricate of the renunciant tales of Subhas Bose, and one which, according to historian Leonard A. Gordon, may "properly be called a myth," was told in the early 1960s.

[38] Bose was still in the Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China; attended the Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru's cremation in 1964, but, this time, neglecting to disallow a Janata-published newspaper to photograph him; and gave notice to the Janata of his return to Calcutta, for which several much publicized rallies were organized.

[42] Earlier, in 1977, summing up the extant Bose legends, historian Joyce Chapman Lebra had written, Stories persist that Netaji has become a sannyasi (holy man) and has been seen in the Naga hill country of Assam; that he was a member of a Mongolian trade delegation in Peking; that he lives in Russia; that he is in the Chinese Army.

It sustained the morale of many across India and Southeast Asia who deplored the return of British power or felt alienated from the political settlement finally achieved by Gandhi and Nehru.

Hot-headed young Bengali radicals broke into the convention hall where Fujiwara, the founder of the INA, was to address the assemblage and shouted abuse at him.

[33] Figgess's report, submitted on 25 July 1946, however, was confidential, being work done in Indian Political Intelligence (IPI), a partially secret branch of the Government of India.

All the persons named below were interrogated at different times but the several accounts of the event agree both in substance and detail at all points where the knowledge of the subjects could have been deemed to be based on common experience.

The possibility of a pre-arranged fabrication must be excluded since most of the individuals concerned had no opportunity of contact with one another prior to interrogation.The remaining four pages of the Figgess report contain interviews with two survivors of the plane crash, Lt. Cols.

"[45] The Figgess report and Leonard Gordon's investigations confirm four facts: 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.

[34][28] 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.

[34] 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.

[34] 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.

[47] 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[48] but asked for a DNA test.

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.

A memorial to Subhas Chandra Bose in the compound of the Renkōji Temple , Tokyo . Bose's ashes are stored in the temple in a golden pagoda. Bose died on 18 August 1945. His ashes arrived in Japan in early September 1945; after a memorial service, they were accepted by the temple on 18 September 1945.
Map of Central Burma showing the route taken by Subhas Chandra Bose and his Indian National Army (INA) group of 500 from Rangoon to Moulmein . The group traveled in a Japanese military convoy until they reached the river Sittang . After crossing the river, they walked the remaining 80 miles. At Moulmein, Bose, his party, and another INA group of 500, boarded Japanese trains on the Death Railway (which had been constructed earlier by British, Australian, and Dutch prisoners of war) to arrive in Bangkok in the first week of May 1945.
The last airplane journeys of Subhas Chandra Bose. Paths of completed flights are shown in blue. On 16 August 1945, he left Singapore for Bangkok , Siam (now Thailand). On either the 16th itself or on the 17th morning, he flew from Bangkok to Saigon , now Ho Chi Minh City. On the 17 August afternoon, he flew from Saigon to Tourane , French Indo-China , now Da Nang, Vietnam. Early next morning at 5 AM, he left Tourane for Taihoku , Formosa , now Taipei, Taiwan. At 2:30 PM on 18 August, he left for Dairen , Manchukuo , now Dalian, China, but his plane crashed shortly after takeoff, and Bose died within a few hours in a Japanese military hospital. Had the crash not occurred the plane would have dropped off Bose at Dairen and proceeded to Tokyo along a flight path shown in red.
The Mitsubishi Ki-21 twin-engine heavy bomber ( Allies code name Sally ) that Subhas Chandra Bose and Habibur Rahman boarded at Saigon airport around 2 PM on 17 August 1945.
Clipping from Japanese newspaper, published on 23 August 1945, reporting the death of Bose and General Tsunamasa Shidei of the Japanese Kwantung Army in Japanese-occupied Manchuria.