Command Areas of British India post-1942

The second world war is remembered with certain key words - Hitler, Nazism, Hiroshima-Nagasaki, etc. and with respect to India it's mostly associated with Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose's Azad Hind Fauj. This post doesn't talk about the involvement of Indians in the war (which is roughly 2.5 million) but discusses the political demarcations of the Indian theater of war. In terms of army language, it's called as 'command areas'. 

One of the oldest command areas of India is the Southern Command that was established on 1st April 1885, with headquarter at Poona (or Pune), which was earlier made the monsoon capital of Bombay Presidency (in 1835). Post-1895, the Presidency terminology was abolished and British India was divided into four broad command areas - Bengal, Bombay, Madras and Punjab. The divisions were changed further, first in 1908, then in 1922 and then in 1942. The last rearrangement before independence was in the year 1942 where British India was divided into the following command areas: 

1. North Western Army - consisting the Princely State of Jammu & Kashmir, whole of today's Pakistan excluding eastern part of Pakistani Punjab and Jaisalmer sector of Rajputana. 
2. Central Command - consisting the remaining Punjab province, United Provinces, Central India, Rajputana and Central Provinces. 
3. Eastern Command - consisting of the undivided Bihar and Bengal provinces, whole of northeast India, Orissa (or Odisha) and the Bastar region of today's Chhattisgarh. 
4. Southern Army - the remaining part of India, i.e. Bombay Province, the Hyderabad princely state, Mysore, Coorg and Madras province. 

At one point of time even Burma was a command area but was separated out in 1937 as a separate British Crown colony. Talking about military activities that took place in India during the second world war, there were a few of them as well. 

• A British freighter called Fort Stikine caught fire and exploded killing 800 people on 14th April 1944. The freighter was carrying 1,395 tonnes of explosives and £890,000 of gold in 31 crates. 
• At Cocanada (Kakinada), on 7th April 1943, a Japanese air-raid alert panicked the civilians and led to the evacuation of 50,000 people. The Japanese attacked 2 ships and killed one person and injured two. 
• On 9th March 1943, Calcutta Light Horse regiment attacked German submarines at Mormugao harbor, Goa. This event is even more interesting as Goa was part of Portugal, which was a neutral country during the war. 
• In 1944, during the Japanese occupation of the Andaman & Nicobar islands, 44 Indian civilians were killed as they were suspected of spying by the Japanese. The incident took place at Homfreysganj, Port Blair. 
• A series of Japanese aerial bombing took place at Chittagong, Patenga, Dohazhari, Cox's Bazar etc. of Bengal province. These towns are in today's Bangladesh. 
• On 20th December 1942, the Japanese bombers bombed Calcuta damaging the infrastructure for the next 4 days. They attacked again in 1943 and 1944, thus killing hundreds of civilians and destroying several ships. 
• The Imphal-Kohima battle that was fought between March to July 1944, the British forces aimed at driving away the Japanese with a total of 79,000 casualties. 
• In the Ramgarh cantonment of Hazaribagh district (in today's Jharkhand), a military training  center was installed in around 1942 where a number of American and later Chinese instructors were invited to train the soldiers who would help in the war. 

The main reason for why the Indian chapter in both the world wars have been avoided even by Indian educators as these men fought at alien fronts and had nothing to do with the independence movement nor had any link with 'India', except for their nationalities. Fighting in the deserts of Libya and Egypt against Italians and Germans would be of less concern to a regular Indian who just wanted the British to be out of his country. But that apathy did lead to a massive number of casualties. Even internationally the involvement of Indians in the wars is overshadowed, largely as these wars had Indians as a 'unit' and not a single battalion or a brigade of just Indians. Also, since India was a British colony that time, so the term 'British Army' encapsulated all the soldiers fighting under it - Indians, Africans, Chinese etc. Lastly, since being soldier to a colonial nation, ethnicity was largely ignored, and the entire worldly focus was to eliminate the Axis powers attached with Japan, Germany and Italy. 

The map here shows command areas of British India post-1942. The places marked are army garrisons, headquarters army formations - commands, brigade, battalion, company, platoon and section. 

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