274 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
ning Post of New York carried a lengthy diatribe on Bose by Alfred
Tyrnauer, under the title “India’s Would- Be Führer”:Subhas Chandra Bose, Head of the Japanese- sponsored “Free Indian”
government at Singapore, has emerged as the greatest and most sinister
Axis fig ure of the war in Asia. He has been an agent of Hitler and a tool
of the Japanese. Yet he is towering far above all other puppets set up
by the Axis; he is a Führer, a master intriguer and a war maker in his
own right. Shrewd, handsome, intelligent, British- educated, vain and
boundlessly ambitious, Bose began his amazing metamorphosis from a
revolutionary socialist into an advocate of fascism almost exactly ten
years ago.While condemning Bose as a fascist, Tyrnauer was not above describ-
ing his subject as an “Oriental acquisition” of the Nazis and a “brown
cavalier” of a “Nordic girl.”^70
John W. Gerber offered a more sober analysis of Bose’s strategy in
The Nation, on April 22, 1944. According to Gerber, Bose had pro-
claimed in November 1943 that he would march into Bengal and As-
sam; and when that happened, any hopes Chungking might entertain
of a new road from Assam would be dashed. Gerber observed that Bose
was “on the verge of achieving his goal,” and if he succeeded in doing
so, it would be “a major po lit i cal and military victory.” The United Na-
tions could no longer ignore Bose, Gerber argued, since he had “begun
to turn his words into action.”^71 On April 17, Time magazine noted the
danger that Bose posed to the Allied cause. “Thoughtful men thought
twice,” its article titled “Renegade’s Revenge” commented, “when they
learned that sardonic, myopic Bose, traitor, was with the Japs around
Imphal.” Yet despite the thick layers of British censorship, news was fil-
tering through about Bose’s army. Estimates of its strength, accord-
ing to Time, varied from three thousand to thirty thousand soldiers.
Far more sig nifi cant than the size of his army, the article perceptively
remarked, was “one explosive fact: an armed anti- British Indian stands
today on Indian soil and calls upon his fellows to rebel against
the Raj.”^72
Bose himself reported at this time that things were going “very well