A long-time admirer of fascist Italy and then of Nazi Germany, a leader of the Indian National Congress who broke with its other leaders Gandhi and Nehru to form the Forward Bloc as a separate faction within the Congress, Subhas Chandra Bose moved via the Soviet Union to Germany. He spent the years 1941 to 1943 there, met the secretary who became his mistress and then his wife, and in 1943 traveled on a German submarine to meet a Japanese submarine in the Indian Ocean so that he could direct his version of an Indian nationalist movement from Southeast Asia. This book reviews the time Bose spent in Nazi Germany on the basis of a careful survey of the relevant literature (which is discussed in a bibliographical essay) as well as access to some British, Indian, and French archives. The book also includes a number of important documents in appendices.

The author shows how Bose first hoped that the German armed forces would reach India and tried to assist them in a project that never came off. An admirer of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, Bose could benefit from the Duce's support only by recruiting Indian prisoners of war captured in Libya for the Indian Legion he was organizing to fight alongside the Axis. Japan's going to war with Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States appeared to offer even better prospects for Bose's ambitions, though the author never comments on what Bose knew or thought about Japan's record in Korea and elsewhere as a colonial power.

Hayes stresses the intensity with which Bose pressured the Germans to issue a proclamation endorsing the independence of India, though Hayes still believes the old myths about Hitler wanting an agreement with England. He fails to recognize that Hitler similarly refused to make such a proclamation for Arab independence as requested by Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The Middle East was to be turned over to Italy, and Hitler agreed that most of India was to be under Japan. In both cases, the German leader was happy to receive whatever help local nationalist leaders might be willing to provide, but in both cases that help was to lead to a new colonial fate for the area in question, ironically more repressive than the one those leaders were fighting.

The book shows how Bose increasingly hoped for an Axis victory in the war and saw several ways of going to Japan fall through. With neither a Japanese submarine nor an Italian airplane project working out, it would be a German submarine taking him to meet a Japanese one that took him to his destination, where he set up a “Provisional Government of Free India” in October 1943. After taking that step, which the Germans had not authorized while he was still there, he could now rejoice in having this “Government” recognized by the puppet state of Manchukuo alongside other Axis powers as it declared war on Britain and the United States.

While still in Europe, Bose had to deal not only with the German and Italian authorities but also with what might best be called rivals for leadership among the relatively small number of Indians with some status for control of the exile community. The author covers these struggles as well as the surviving record allows. He also makes it clear that Bose always favored a one-party state for the India he wanted to lead to and in independence. There is, however, an aspect of Bose's role in the development of an Indian Legion that might have deserved further exploration. On the dust jacket of the book as well as in the section of pictures in it, the Legion is prominently displayed. Its assigned role was to assist the German military in defending the “independence” of France from an invasion by British and American forces in 1944. If the war had developed more along the lines Bose preferred, perhaps a unit of French military collaborators could have fought alongside Japanese and German forces to ward off British and American troops landing on the coast of Japanese-occupied India.