1944: The Homfreyganj massacre of the Andaman Islands
January 30th, 2017 Headsman
On this date in 1944, the Japanese shot 44 civilians on the Andaman Islands as possible spies.
This breathtaking Indian Ocean archipelago has been seen in Executed Today previously, as the site where Sher Ali Afridi both assassinated the visiting British Viceroy in 1872, and paid for that act with his neck a month later.
Come World War II, the Andaman chain remained in principle a property of the British Raj — pending India’s postwar independence — but they had come under Japanese control in 1942.
Though its sparse population and remote locale insure that it will never be described in the first rank of World War II cruelties, the Andamans suffered a number of atrocities during the war — including hundreds of executions, whose documentation was intentionally hindered by the Japanese army’s systematic destruction of records when evacuating the islands.
Among the most notable was the incident marked today, known as the Homfreyganj massacre. To guess by nothing but the timing, the slaughter of suspected spies might have conducted in anticipation of the 1944 Japanese offensive against British India, Operation U-Go. U-Go was a notable bust, but that didn’t mean the denizens of the Andamans had seen the last of their occupiers’ fury.
“The worst atrocities were saved for the very last,” writes Bryan Perrett, who muses that there was “no discernible reason” for the “particularly savage” conduct of the occupation.
On 13 August 1945 300 Indians were loaded aboard three boats and taken to an uninhabited island. When several hundred yards off the beach they were forced to jump into the sea, one-third drowned and the remainder who reached the shore were simply left to starve — just eleven were alive when British rescuers arrived six weeks later. In a different event, on 14 August 800 civilians were taken to another uninhabited island where they were dumped on the beach. Shortly afterwards nineteen Japanese troops came ashore and shot or bayoneted every last one of the unarmed civilians.
On this day..
- 1953: Mat Indera, for the Bukit Kepong incident - 2020
- 1945: Andrew Brown, Leading Aircraftsman - 2019
- 1937: Georgy Pyatakov, Anti-Soviet Parallel Trotskyist - 2018
- 1744: Skinnar Per Andersson, legislator - 2016
- 1801: Four entrapped Jacobins - 2015
- 1857: Jean-Louis Verger, doctrinaire - 2014
- 1913: John Williams, the Case of the Hooded Man - 2013
- 2011: Ahmed Ali Hussein, enemy cleric - 2012
- 1474: Not the Archer of Meudon - 2011
- 1996: William Flamer, Alito'd - 2010
- 1661: Oliver Cromwell, posthumously - 2009
- 1649: Charles I - 2008
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Espionage,Execution,History,India,Japan,Mass Executions,Shot,Summary Executions,Wartime Executions
Tags: 1940s, 1944, homfreyganj massacre, january 30, world war ii
It is interesting to read about the little known stories of World War 2 such as this one.