Eighty years ago Subhas Chandra Bose gives up on Nazi Germany as an ally in favour of Imperial Japan

 

After two frustrating years in Nazi Germany, where he had been a privilieged but ineffectual resident, the Indian nationalist leader, Subhas Chandra Bose, set off by submarine on a long journey to Japan, which offered a more promising ally in his project to expel the British from India. Bose had to leave his Austrian partner and baby daughter behind. All he had achieved in Germany was to recruit a couple of thousand Indian prisoners of war for the "Free India Legion" trained by the German army. Japan, by contrast, was still fighting to invade India, although there is not the slightest indication that Indians would have been more than puppets in any area Japan succeeded in conquering.

Mussolini rejigged his government, sacking a number of ministers including his own son-in-law Count Ciano, who had been foreign minister. Mussolini took over most of the vacant portfolios himself, but his new deputy on foreign affairs had been a well-regarded ambasssador to London, which sparked some speculation that he might somehow seek a rapprochement. Similarly, Ciano's new job as ambassador to the Vatican might have been part of some dream of finding a diplomatic way out of Italy's predicament. In reality the sands of time had run out for Mussolini and no amount of desperate manoeuvres could save him.

The First Lord of the Admiralty found himself having to defend to the House of Commons the Fleet Air Arm's (FAA) dependence on obsolescent aircraft types, in particular the antique Fairey Swordfish biplane torpedo bomber. The best he could come up with was that more modern aircraft were being supplied by the Americans. Of the intended replacements for the Swordfish, the US Grumman Avenger was far superior to the British  Fairey Barracuda. Similarly the Grumman F4F Wildcat was better than the British carrier (in reality adaptations of land-based) fighters, whose merits the First Lord trumpeted: the Hurricane was already obsolete and the Seafire was too fragile for carrier operation. The FAA was still paying the penalty for its years under RAF control, when it had been treated as a strategic irrelevance with an equipment policy to match.

Not to be outdone by the General who had commanded the conquest, Churchill visited the newly liberated Libyan capital, Tripoli, where he conducted a mass review of troops. Admittedly he had appointed Montgomery, but was keen to bask in some of the credit for Britain's first significant victorious land campaign of the war.