Eighty years ago this week Britain fights multiple colonial rearguards

 

Three officers - a major general and two colonels - who had  defected from the British led Indian army to the Japanese controlled Indian National Army were put on trial by court martial at the Red Fort in Calcutta on charges equivalent to treason. All came from the Punjab but one was Muslim, one Sikh and the third Hindu. They all chose to be defended by the Indian National Congress. The trial provoked extensive protests in which hundreds were injured.

 Two police manned coast guard stations in Palestine were blown up  in protest at British measures to halt illegal Jewish immigation causing some injuries. The British responded with an attack on kibbutzim suspected of harbouring the attackers. Some 10,000 soldiers of the 6th Airborne Division conducted the operation in which eight settlers were killed and dozens injured. The settlements were searched and some forty Jews were taken away for interrogation.

British led forces including Gurkhas were heavily engaged against Indonesian nationalists on Java. Since the middle of October they had suffered almost 800 casualties. RAF aircraft attacked nationalist locations including a radio transmitter. Dutch civilians, supposedly the beneficiaries of British action, appealed to be evacuated from the island.

At the opening of the Nuremberg trials the court ruled that the defendants should make a simple one word plea. The first defendant to be called to plead was Goering and he appeared clutching a sheet of paper from which he evidently intended to deliver a speech. He was silenced by the judge's gavel and had to content himself with, "I declared myself in the sense of the indictment not guilty." all the other nineteen defendants pled not guility, some using Goering's formulation.