Page:Fischer - A Week with Gandhi.pdf/82

 nothing about it. The people were most impressed by the sinking of the “Prince of Wales” and the “Repulse”; the British Navy had always been the real power behind British rule in India. All of Britain’s military reverses in the Far East had deeply impressed the people. Aryanaikam said Japanese suicide pilots flew their planes straight into the British battleships, but the British were incapable of such acts. I told him that the British had suicide pilots too. He replied he had never heard of them. I recalled the Swordfish airmen of the R. A. F. who struck at the “Gneisenau” and the “Scharnhorst,” the two German warships which had recently made a successful dash through the English Channel. Those pilots, I explained, did not hesitate to go on a death errand any more than the Japanese did. All the armed forces of the world had their heroes, I said, and there was no indication that the young fighting men of the democracies were decadent.

At the end of our conversation I summed up by suggesting that Indian anti-Fascists had to fight on two fronts, against the Axis powers and against British imperialism. My visitors, however, argued that they could not fight on one front, let alone two. “We have no arms,” Dev said, “so we cannot fight on the anti-Japanese front. The British deliberately keep us unarmed. Moreover it is difficult to fight on the side of the British who hold us down,