232 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
munities, Bose had toyed with the idea of taking a Hindu, a Muslim,
and a Sikh on his journey to Asia. Once the German naval authorities
told him that he could take only one aide, he picked Abid Hasan to be
his companion. N. G. Swami, and four others with advanced training
in wireless telegraphy, secret inks, and sophisticated radio transmitters,
were to follow on a blockade- runner in March.^75 Hasan was simply told
to pack his bags for a long journey, and had no inkling of his destina-
tion. He feared that he might be sent to Mecca as part of a scheme to
find anticolonial recruits during the haj. Only when he met Netaji at
the Lehrter train station did he realize that he would be accompanying
his leader. On the train from Berlin to Kiel, Bose asked Hasan: “Now do
you know where you’re going?” “Yes, sir,” Hasan replied, “I know where
we’re going.” “Where are we going?” Bose inquired. “We are both going
to perform Haj,” the aide commented wryly, eliciting peals of laughter
from his leader.^76
Bose and Hasan arrived at the north German port city of Kiel on
February 8, 1943. Before dawn on February 9, Werner Musenberg, cap-
tain of the German submarine U- 180, welcomed them aboard. As soon
as the two Indians had boarded the vessel, the submarine set off. “In
one respect,” historians Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper write of the
war situation in early 1943, “the British had much to fear. Subhas
Chandra Bose, their most resolute and resourceful Indian enemy, was
on the move.”^77 They were apprehensive despite the fact that Rommel
had been stopped in his tracks at El Alamein on November 4, 1942, and
the Soviets had defeated the Germans at Sta lingrad on February 2,
1943, barely a week before Bose’s departure. The historical sig nifi cance
of Bose’s submarine voyage is underscored by the British response to
another crucial development in India on February 9, 1943. This was
the commencement of Mahatma Gandhi’s fast, which was to keep In-
dians on tenterhooks for three weeks.
The British cabinet had decided that if Gandhi fasted, he would be
allowed to die. Flush with the victories at El Alamein and Sta lingrad,
Churchill was of the clear opinion that “this our hour of triumph ev-
erywhere in the world was not the time to crawl before a miserable
old man who had always been our enemy.”^78 In the event of Gandhi’s