ABSTRACT
Analysis of the social, economic and political impact of World War II on India, as Indivar Kamtekar has rightly pointed out, has often been relegated to footnotes in the history of modern India. The spotlight of war was nowhere in India as bright as it was in Bengal. Since the onset of war, and even before, governmental priorities in the province were consistently established in direct relation to overarching concerns of 'defence'. After the fall of Burma in the spring of 1942, Bengal became the front in the Allied war against Japan, and Calcutta became the primary staging ground for the push east against a formidable enemy. It was under this dark cloud of famine, on 5 December 1943, with hunger-stricken bodies still accumulating on Calcutta's streets, that the city's dock complex at Kidderpore was bombed in broad daylight by two consecutive waves of Japanese aircraft. This chapter describes an extensive attack that caused considerable material and economic damage.
