The Forgotten Front
In the vast annals of India’s military history, there are names that thunder across battlefields, Rezang La, Longewala, Kargil. Yet there are others, whispered in the silence of jungles and the faded corners of war diaries, whose courage never made it to parade grounds or public squares. One such name is Major Chint Singh, the man who should have died, but didn’t.
His was not the heroism of a gallant charge or a victory won in daylight. His was the slow, excruciating endurance of captivity, hunger, disease, and despair. He was the sole survivor among 2,400 Indian soldiers who were captured by the Japanese during the Second World War and sent to the fetid jungles of New Guinea, a theatre that remains largely erased from our collective memory.
A Soldier from the Hills
Chint Singh was born in Himachal Pradesh, in a quiet village nestled amidst pine-scented slopes. The world was between wars when he joined the British Indian Army in 1935, enlisting in the 12th Frontier Force Regiment, an elite unit renowned for its fierce frontier spirit.
When the Second World War erupted, the Indian Army, the largest volunteer force in history, was thrust into global campaigns from North Africa to Burma. Chint Singh’s battalion was sent to Malaya, tasked with defending the British Empire’s last bastion in Southeast Asia: Singapore.
The Fall of Singapore and the March to Hell
The year was 1942. Singapore fell like a domino, the largest British surrender in history. Among the 80,000 prisoners taken by the Japanese were over 60,000 Indians, many of whom went to join the newly created Indian National Army (INA) under Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.
Chint Singh, however, remained loyal to the Crown’s uniform. That decision would cost him dearly.
In April 1943, around 2,400 Indian POWs, mostly from the 12th Frontier Force, were crammed into transport ships and sent to New Britain, an island in New Guinea. The Japanese were building airfields and roads, and they needed slave labour. The journey itself was a horror story: disease-ridden holds, no food, no air, and the constant threat of submarine attack.
By the time the ships reached Rabaul, dozens had already perished. The survivors were taken deep into the jungles to work under brutal tropical conditions – rain, leeches, malaria, dysentery, starvation, and the ever-present lash of their captors.
Life (and Death) in the Jungle
New Guinea was not merely a camp, it was a slow death sentence. The prisoners hacked through mangrove swamps and dense rainforests, carrying heavy loads of ammunition, digging trenches, and building airstrips for the Imperial Japanese Army.
Food was scarce, a handful of rice, sometimes mixed with sawdust or infested with worms. Water was taken from puddles. The air buzzed with insects and fever. Disease swept through the camp like wildfire. Those who stumbled were beaten to death.
Major Chint Singh later wrote in his war diary: “We were skeletons in rags, shadows of men who once wore the King’s uniform. The jungle swallowed our names. But we refused to die unnamed.”
Of the 2,400 men who began that nightmare, only 11 were alive when the war ended in August 1945.
The Last Eleven
When the Japanese finally surrendered, few in the world even knew that Indian POWs had been kept in such remote corners of the Pacific. It was the Australian Army, moving along the Sepik River in northern New Guinea, that stumbled upon a group of emaciated men near Angoram.
They could barely stand. Their uniforms were tattered, their bodies reduced to bone and sinew. Among them was Chint Singh – gaunt, feverish, and barely conscious. The Australians noted in their report: “These men had lived in conditions beyond imagination. One officer, Major Chint Singh, was the only one coherent enough to identify the unit.”
Tragedy, however, had not exhausted its appetite. Within weeks of rescue, the 10 other survivors boarded an aircraft to return to India. The plane crashed in Indonesia. Only Chint Singh remained alive, the lone survivor of 2,400.
Bearing Witness
For the British, his survival was providential. Major Chint Singh became a crucial witness in the war-crime trials of Japanese officers held in Rabaul. His detailed testimony, diaries, and recollections helped establish evidence of systematic brutality, starvation, and executions of Indian POWs in the Pacific theatre.
He described, without embellishment, how officers were made to kneel in the sun for hours, how men were executed for drinking water, and how the Japanese guards took photographs of dying prisoners as “records of duty.”
His evidence led to convictions, but his heart remained burdened. As he once told his son decades later, “Justice was done, perhaps. But the dead could not see it.”
Homecoming and Silence
When he finally returned to India, the war was over, the world had changed, and the nation was moving towards Independence. The British medals meant little in a country now finding its own identity.
Chint Singh continued to serve, transferring to the 2nd DOGRA Regiment after 1947. He rose to the rank of Major, a title that carried both honour and heartbreak. To his fellow officers, he was quiet, disciplined, and introspective, a man who had seen too much and spoke too little.
He retired in 1974, settled in Una district of Himachal Pradesh, and spent his final years in relative obscurity. In February 1983, he succumbed to cancer. A soldier whose life had been borrowed from death four decades earlier.
The Son Who Revived the Father’s Story
For years, Major Chint Singh’s story lay buried in military archives. It was only his son, Narinder Singh Parmar, who began piecing together the fragments, the diary, letters, and official correspondence with the Australian authorities who had rescued his father.
Narinder’s mission was not merely personal. He wanted the world to remember the 2,400 Indian POWs who never came home, and the one man who carried their memory. In 2023, he collaborated with Australian researchers and Indian veterans to push for a memorial in New Britain, honouring Indian soldiers who died in Japanese captivity.
The campaign struck a chord across continents. Australian war historians described Chint Singh as “a symbol of the shared military heritage between India and Australia”, and his resilience became a subject of academic study and commemoration ceremonies.
The Symbolism of Survival
In strategic terms, the Second World War is often narrated through Europe, North Africa, and Burma. Yet Chint Singh’s story widens that lens. It reminds us that Indian soldiers fought, and suffered, across the entire Indo-Pacific arc, from the deserts of Tobruk to the swamps of New Guinea.
He stands as a reminder that war is not always about victory. Sometimes, it is about endurance, the will to survive when survival itself is defiance. His story challenges the conventional narrative of heroism: that courage is not only the charge of bayonets, but also the quiet refusal to give up breath by breath.
In a sense, he personifies the very ethos of the Indian soldier. Resilient, loyal, and quietly stoic, attributes that later defined India’s military identity through countless post-Independence conflicts.
Recognition Long Overdue
It is tragic that Major Chint Singh’s name is not etched on any war memorial in India. There are no school chapters about him, no Defence Day tributes, no medals in his memory.
And yet, in the hills of Himachal, where he rests, his legacy endures through oral history, told by those who knew a quiet man who once walked with ghosts of 2,389 comrades.
Perhaps it is time that our War Memorials in Delhi and Kohima acknowledge such names, not merely as statistics, but as stories of human endurance.
Australia has begun that process; India must complete it.
In an age of loud victories and televised wars, that lesson is rare. Major Chint Singh’s life, devoid of glamour yet filled with grace, redefines what it means to serve, to fight battles unseen, and to emerge not as a victor, but as a witness.
The Man Who Should Have Died, But Didn’t
As historians revisit India’s military contribution to the Allied cause, Chint Singh’s name will perhaps find its rightful place. But even if it doesn’t, his story already belongs to eternity.
The Australian soldiers who found him in the jungle recorded that he whispered only one sentence as they lifted him from the mud: “I am Indian… I am still alive.”
That sentence, more than any decoration or dispatch, captures the essence of soldiering, the stubborn faith that even in the darkest jungle, even when abandoned by empire and memory, a soldier’s spirit endures.
Major Chint Singh, the man who refused to die, lives on, not in marble, but in memory.
P.S. Credits to my friend Mr Mritunjay Kumar, who brought out the name of this hero, who deserves his rightful place in history.
