Book Review

Sree Krishan Kumar

IN THE WAKE: THE BIRTH OF THE INDIAN AND PAKISTANI NAVIES

By Commander E C Streatfeild-James, OBE, RIN

Commander Eric Cardew Streatfeild-James was born in Angrezi Bazaar in 1904. He came from a family that even then had associations with India going back nearly two hundred years – one of his grandfathers was General H H James, who has some claims to being the officer who raised the Maratha Light Infantry. He himself was to serve in India till the very eve of Independence in 1947. He spent his childhood in Calcutta (now Kolkata), Lucknow and Naini Tal, and when about ten, like most colonial-era children of English parents, was sent to boarding school in England. He then went to the Royal Naval Colleges at Osborne and Dartmouth (of which another distinguished alumnus, Air Marshal Sir Thomas Elmhirst, was the first CAS of the post-Independence Indian Air Force). He joined the Royal Indian Marine as a Midshipman in 1921. The RIM may not have been entirely his first choice; he clearly had hopes of joining the Royal Navy, but had the misfortune to complete training at Dartmouth at a time when the RN was undergoing one of its periodic contractions. At this time the RIM was not a combatant service, and Cdr Streatfeild-James describes it as "a mixture of Trinity House and Government Shipping Company", also quoting his father as saying that "it consisted chiefly of hard-headed old 'shell-backs' who held appointments as Port Officers around the coast of India".

However, there were certainly periods in history during which service in the Indian arms of colonial services were more lucrative than in the direct service of the British monarch. One fascinating snippet in this book is that in the mid-18th century, the emoluments of the officer holding the position of Admiral to the Moghul Emperor (generally the East India Company's senior naval officer) amounted to more than ten times the emoluments of the Governor of Bombay. It is interesting, if idle, to speculate what Admiral Madhavendra Singh and Mr P C Alexander would think of this arrangement today. Of course there was no such imbalance between RN and RIM scales by the time the young Midshipman Streatfeild-James joined the RIM. Following the Indian Mutiny of 1857 all the various private and colonial armed services in India had been brought under the purview of the British Crown, and it is unlikely, to say the very least, that the British Treasury would have missed such imbalances. Be that as it may, Midshipman Streatfeild-James, then still a teenager, did join the RIM in 1921. He went on to serve in numerous peacetime locations in India, the Middle East and Burma; and with dedication during the Second World War in India, briefly at sea but mostly in training-related roles. This book chronicles his service in the RIM and its successor, the Royal Indian Navy, from 1921 to 1947, with several short but interesting asides about the history of the RIM, the RIN and their predecessor services.

The author's early career included ten years' service in Survey roles, which were invaluable in laying the foundations that have been built upon post-Independence by the Survey of India. He was serving aboard RIMS Investigator (a name which has been held in an unbroken sequence across at least two centuries by Indian survey ships, including the Sandhayak Class example currently in service) in 1925, the year in which the Royal Indian Marine was once again designated a combatant Service. The RIM was formally re-designated the Royal Indian Navy in 1934. The following year Lieutenant Streatfeild-James assumed his first command, the sloop HMIS Pathan, used at the time primarily as a boys' training ship. On the outbreak of the Second World War, the then Lieutenant-Commander Streatfeild-James formed and commanded the Cochin Local Defence Flotilla, consisting of five ships. These were three former merchant ships taken up from Indian coastal trade, HMIS Ratnagiri, Prabhavati, and Hiravati, converted for anti-submarine duties, and the minesweepers HMIS Oostcapelle (whose name suggests she must have
originated in Durban or Cape Town) and Irawadi. The ships of the flotilla carried the grand total of four depth charges each. Yet, before the end of 1939, this lightly armed flotilla had carried out an attack on an unidentified submerged contact, which later records suggest may well have been an Italian submarine from a base in Eritrea that failed to return from patrol around the same time.

The book includes a blurred action photograph taken during the capture of the Italian submarine Galileo Galilei off Aden by the Royal Navy in 1940. For Indian Navy historians, another connection to this incident is that the Navigation Officer of one of the ships that contributed to this capture was Lieutenant B S Soman, later Vice-Admiral and CNS of the post-Independence Indian Navy. One of the Galileo's sister submarines was to sink HMIS Pathan, the author's first command, in the Indian Ocean just four days later. In 1941 the author, and the RIN, played a role in the secret transportation of the Shah of Iran from Persia to the Seychelles, including a covert trans-shipment of the entire Royal party from one ship to another within Bombay Harbour. Later during the war, Commander Streatfeild-James served on the staff of the C-in-C India as an Assistant Adjutant-General (Recruiting), a position that carried the acting rank of Colonel; and as Deputy Chief of Staff (Admin) at Naval Headquarters, in which role he was responsible for construction of all shore training establishments in India. He also served as Drafting Commander RIN, in which position he oversaw the over 20-fold expansion of the RIN, from its pre-war strength of just over 1,300 officers and men, to its peak wartime strength of nearly 30,000. He offers interesting thoughts on the Navy's higher requirements of scientific and technical training (or trainability) in its manpower, when compared to the Army; and of the different degrees to which these requirements were met by recruits from different parts of the country. Some of his generalisations, about which Indian communities could be particularly relied on to provide 'Brain' and which 'Brawn' (to use his own labels), might not be regarded as politically-correct today – but are still recognisably the same stereotypes prevailing in Independent India, to this day.

RIN officers and Petty Officers were virtually all British, with a very small leavening of Indians, at the start of the Second World War; but even then the ratings were almost all Indian – "almost entirely natives of the Ratnagiri district and the sea coast of the Konkan immediately south of Bombay". Wartime expansion of the RIN's strength required a corresponding expansion of recruitment sources. By the end of the war, RIN recruitment had expanded to cover most of the country, resulting in a service that in its diversity of regional and religious origin – demonstrated by statistics that the author includes – was much more like the Indian Navy of today. This was an achievement which the author can take much of the credit for. In the process of extending Naval recruitment to parts of India that were not traditionally seafaring, the author recounts in detail the story of HMIS Patiala, the full-size concrete replica of a 112-foot Fairmile class patrol vessel, built to give the subjects of Patiala State a better understanding of what a sea-going ship looked like and how men lived in one. The book includes some marvellous photographs showing the replica ship being visited by Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, then C-in-C India, and Vice-Admiral J H Godfrey, FOC RIN, accompanied by the imposing figure of the Maharaja of Patiala.

Cdr Streatfeild-James writes with affection and respect of one Indian officer in particular, Lieutenant-Commander JK ("Jimmie") Dubash, RINVR, who volunteered for war service while a student at Oxford. Cdr Streatfeild-James is knowledgeable enough about some of the difficulties facing Indians in the West, to sympathetically recount an anecdote about Lt-Cdr Dubash's recruitment. When the British Master-at-Arms asked the young Indian volunteer his religion, Dubash's response, "Parsee", was misheard and mistakenly recorded as "RC" – Roman Catholic – which in RIN records he remained, till his death in service in 1942. Immediately after the end of the war, preparations had to be made to divide the RIN into the post-Partition navies of India and Pakistan. Cdr Streatfeild-James writes, with discernible pain, of some of the considerations and constraints that went into planning the separation. Interestingly, he mentions that for a period thought was given to allocating a larger proportion of the Navy to India than of the Army and Air Force, because of the significantly higher proportion of seaboard that India was to retain after Partition. However, other considerations eventually prevailed. The author cannot hide his regret for the passing of British India, but it would be too much to expect one of his particular background not to feel that way. The author also writes, with a stoic adherence to dry facts that does not entirely conceal how personally wounded he felt by that whole episode, an hour-by-hour account of the RIN Mutiny of February 1946, as he saw it from Castle Barracks in Bombay. He is able to rise far enough above his immediate feelings to acknowledge Napoleon's dictum that there are no such things as bad soldiers, only poor officers; and writes that "to some extent at least we, the officers of the Service, must take our share of the blame."

Cdr Streatfeild-James clearly loved India, if sometimes in the way that Kipling loved India; and writes, in one of the few passages in which he departs from a stock British military-memoir style: "Oh Indians, we have loved you and served you. May your Pakistan and Hindustan bring to you what some have failed to accept when preferred by your foster parents. May the benefits of peace and security…be yours in the future." He expresses good wishes to "those whose lot it is to re-assemble and piece together the tattered remnants into two separate navies". (I cannot help wondering what his reaction would be, if he knew that the Indian Navy today is on the point of overtaking the Royal Navy in the number and tonnage of the ships with which it puts to sea.) And he closes his book with the famous passage from Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol, "All men kill the thing they love…" After India's Independence, Cdr Streatfeild-James retired from service and returned to the UK. He was ordained a priest in the Anglican church some years later. His three sons continued the family tradition for another generation, all three serving in the Royal Navy. Cdr Streatfeild-James's book does contain the odd passage that might annoy an Indian or Pakistani reader with a nationalist bent – he dismisses Admiral Kanhoji Angre as a pirate, for example; and suggests that some of the enthusiasm on the streets of Bombay at Independence was artificial and politically manufactured. There are also, as previously mentioned, some definite departures from views that would be considered politically correct today. However this reviewer strongly believes it is unfair to hold the book and its author to today's standards in those respects. The author seems to have treated the Indians he came into contact with well, and with a respect that appears to have been reciprocated, at a time when the very concept of multiculturalism was unknown. He spent years discharging demanding and unglamorous work, and doing it well; work that was indispensable in helping to build the institution that is now the Indian Navy. And like thousands of unsung servicemen, he did his duty without thought for his personal preferences and feelings. He has a strong claim to the respect and regard of the Indian Navy. And this book has a definite claim to the bookshelves of the IN's historians and admirers.