STATISTICS: Sikh soldier in World War One by Suman Kaur; and (below left) Indian War Memorial CWGC at Neuve Chapelle

by Amit Roy TATE HINTS AT HISTORY OF INDIAN SOLDIERS IN FIRST WORLD WAR FIELD-MARSHAL Sir Claude Auchinleck, Commander–in–Chief of the Indian Army from 1942, once asserted that the British “couldn’t have come through both wars (First and Second World Wars) if they hadn’t had the Indian Army”. The statistics are that in the First World War, 1.5 million Indian troops fought for Britain between 1914-18 on the Western Front, in Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Italy. When it ended, 113,743 Indi­ans were reported dead, wounded or missing. In the Second World War, 2.5 mil­lion Indian soldiers enlisted for Britain from…