A UK-based website set up to chart the last days of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose has released documents relating to the day before his plane crashed in August, 1945.
The latest documents on www.bosefiles.info, launched by UK-based independent journalist and Boses grandnephew Ashis Ray, trace his movements on the day before his plane crashed in Taiwan on August 18, 1945.
The website citing documents said that on August 17, 1945, Bose departed Bangkok and arrived in Saigon before midday. Several Indian and Japanese witnesses testified this to the 1956 Netaji Inquiry Committee headed by Major General Shah Nawaz Khan, among them SA Ayer and Debnath Das of the Provisional Government of Free India (PGFI) and Colonel Habib-ur-Rahman of the Indian National Army (INA) both headed by Bose.
Maj Gen Bhonsle, INA’s chief of staff, who was later interrogated by British military intelligence, concurred that Bose left Bangkok for Saigon on the morning of August 17, 1945.
In Saigon, though, in the immediate aftermath of Japan’s surrender in World War II a couple of days earlier when this country’s military headquarters were in a state of confusion - no plane was straightaway available to carry Bose to North-East Asia, as was the plan.
Ultimately, General Isoda of Hikari Kikan, the liaison body between Japanese authorities and the PGFI and INA, conveyed to Bose that only two seats would be available on a plane heading for Tokyo.
This meant a majority of his advisers and officers would not be able to accompany him.
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