"The recent declassification of 100 files has done nothing to change opinions on whether Netaji died in a plane crash or not
This January 23rd marked another turn in a tale of enduring mystery plotted against a background of world war, the fall of empires, and the birth of nations. The story starts in tumultuous times, the likes of which the world has never seen. The Second World War, the most terrible war in human history, was coming to a blood-soaked end. Nazi Germany had surrendered three months earlier, in May 1945, with the fall of Berlin. Now, in August 1945, Japan was surrendering; the most terrible weapon ever invented, the atom bomb, had been used days earlier to terrorise two defenceless cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August 6 and August 9. Whole populations of civilians — men, women and children — had been wiped off the face of the earth in moments. The Japanese empire was finally forced to concede defeat. Emperor Hirohito announced surrender on August 15th.
Two days later, on August 17, an ally of the Japanese, Subhas Chandra Bose, the rebel ‘head of state' of an Indian government in exile named Azad Hind provisional government, boarded a Japanese military flight from Saigon in Vietnam to Manchuria in China. In those last days of the world war, a new battle had just broken out over there. On August 8, the Soviet Red Army had invaded Manchuria, which was then a Japanese territory nominally ruled by Pu Yi, the last emperor of China.
Along with Bose on that plane was Lt Gen T. Shidei of the Japanese imperial army. Shidei had served earlier in Manchuria as Chief of Staff of the ‘1 Area Army'; now, he was on his way back to take charge as Vice Chief of the Japanese Kwantung Army which was facing the Red Army in Manchuria…"
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