280 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
Short of food and medicines, the regiments of the INA’s first division
were in desperate straits by early July. Naga Sundaram, a Tamil civilian
in Burma who had joined a field pro pa ganda unit of the INA and
fought in Imphal, described how, with supply lines cut, the soldiers of
the INA had to subsist on jungle grass and small fish caught in little
streams with their mosquito nets.^83 The Gandhi Brigade, which had
fought fiercely against the Scottish soldiers of the Seaforth Highland-
ers, suf fered a tragic blow. Unable to bear the hardships any longer,
Major B. J. S. Garewal, the second in command of the regiment, de-
serted to the British side, taking with him details of the positions where
the INA soldiers were entrenched. The brigade was in danger of being
encircled and decimated. Abid Hasan, Bose’s submarine voyage com-
panion, became Inayat Kiani’s deputy after Garewal’s desertion. Hasan
rallied his forces and was able to counterattack and extricate the Gan-
dhi Brigade from a critical situation. Hasan remembered that his Sikh
comrades were crestfallen that Garewal, a Sikh of fi cer, had let them
down so badly. Soon after war’s end, Garewal was assassinated on a
street in Lahore.^84
The military debacle in Imphal was followed by a harrowing retreat
back into Burma. On July 18, M. Z. Kiani ordered all the regiments
of the first division to withdraw. Japan’s decision to suspend the Im-
phal campaign was made public on July 26, the day Tojo resigned
as prime minister for unrelated reasons. The terrain along the Indo-
Burmese border has been described by the British commander Wil-
liam Slim as “some of the world’s worst country, breeding the world’s
worst diseases, and having for half the year the world’s worst climate.”^85
The Japanese armed forces and the INA had dared to cross this two-
hundred- mile belt of hills and jungles in their attempt to take Kohima
and Imphal. Starvation and disease took an extraordinarily heavy toll
as they trudged back, deeply despondent that their march to Delhi had
suf fered such a tragic fate. August was the cruelest month of all. Their
predicament would have been worse, had it not been for the stellar
work done by the motor transport company led by Colonel Raja Mo-
hammad Arshad and a civilian, Zora Singh, in ferrying the sick and
wounded soldiers from Kalewa to Yeu. By September 1944, the divi-
sional headquarters had been established in Mandalay. The remnants