The Indian Army and the End of the Raj

Daniel Marston is Professor of Military Studies in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University, Canberra. He is also the Principal of the Military and Defence Studies Program at the Australian Command and Staff College in Canberra, Australia. He has also been a Visiting Fellow with the Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War. His first book Phoenix from the Ashes, an in-depth assessment of how the British/Indian Army turned defeat into victory in the Burma campaign of the Second World War, won the Field Marshal Templer Medal Book Prize in 2003. He completed his doctorate in the history of war at Balliol College, Oxford, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

• Introduction; 1. The bedrock of the Raj: the Indian Army before 1939; 2. The performance of the Indian army in the Second World War; 3. Question of loyalty? The Indian National Army and the Royal Indian Navy mutiny; 4. The Indian Army in French Indo-China and the Netherlands East Indies 1945–6; 5. 1946, the year of difficulty: internal security and the rise of communal violence; 6. Demobilisation, nationalisation and division of the army in the midst of chaos; 7. 1947: the year of reckoning and the end of the Raj; Conclusion: the end of the British Indian Army; Bibliography; Index.

'The 'Transfer of Power' in India has often been written about in terms of politics and personalities, but lingering largely unnoticed in the background has been a crucial, unasked question: why did the Indian Army, under stresses as powerful as any army in modern history has experienced, not simply disintegrate, throwing the subcontinent into total chaos? Mixing massive archival research, interviews with surviving participants, British, Indian and Pakistani, and a profound empathy for the subject, Marston answers that question in a book that will certainly readjust perspectives on the end of the Raj, and be essential reading for any serious student of that epochal event.' Raymond Callahan, FRHS, Professor Emeritus, University of Delaware