76 years of Japanese bombing in Kolkata: How World War II almost destroyed the city

76 years ago, on the midnight of December 20, 1942, the then city of Calcutta (now Kolkata) jolted up by the sound of bomb blasts across the city as the World War II reached its peak. The Imperial Japanese Army Air Force (IJAAF) started bombing the city of joy for the first time that night. India was a de-facto ally of the British Empire back then.

As the doom of the World War engulfed the globe, Calcutta also got hit by the global war as the bombing from Japanese aircraft damaged the city’s infrastructure and livelihood.

Back then, India was a major aerial and land supply route to China, for the Allied powers. They used to cross the Himalayas, in order to send supplies to China, in the war against Japan, as Burma, now Myanmar was then occupied by the Japanese.

As the Japanese invasion was expanding through Southeast Asia by defeating both Chinese and British troops, they decided to take over the city of Calcutta as it is located in the eastern region of the country. To fight back, the city was put under curfew – the streets, houses, shops everything used to be ‘blacked out’ after sundown to make it harder for the Japanese troops to hit their target.

The City of Joy was bombed for a number of days, starting from December 20, 1942. The air strikes were mostly conducted at night by the Japanese fighter aircraft, as the city boasted of a strong air defence system. The night sky of that city turned into a battleground over the next few days, as the skilled pilots of the British Air Force and the allied countries started attacking and destroying several Japanese fighter aircraft, to tone down the aggression.

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The Kidderpore Dock in Kolkata got worst-hit by the bombings in 1943, more so because the Japanese wanted to cut off the supply lines to China. Back then, most of the shipments to China landed in this dock and then get transported to China through the railway tracks up to the Assam border. Hundreds of people lost their lives in the dock attack along with massive destruction of ships and property in the warehouses.

Several of the bombs blasted in the vast openness of Maidan, lessening the number of casualties. After this attack, the much famed Red Road of Kolkata got transformed into a landing strip for the allied forces, and Maidan became the parking zone for oil tankers, warehouses also came up.

The sporadic attacks by the Japanese on Calcutta continued along with several other cities across the world, till 1944, when World War II came to an end.

West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee remembered this sombre past on its 76th Anniversary on Thursday. She tweeted, “On this day in 1942, during World War II, the Japanese Air Force bombed #Kolkata. Let the great suffering during the two World Wars be a lesson for the generations to come. Peace leads to prosperity.” She urged for global peace and told to look at World Wars I and II as a lesson for the coming generations.