Unsung Heroes: India’s Contribution to the British War Efforts in World War I

When the Great War is remembered, the imagery is almost always of European trenches and soldiers from Britain, France, and Germany. Yet one of the largest contingents fighting under the British flag came from a colony thousands of kilometres away. Over 1.3 million Indians served in the First World War, fighting and dying in France, Belgium, Mesopotamia, East Africa, Egypt, and Gallipoli. India also poured in money, animals, grain, and raw materials on a scale that few colonies could match. This is the story of a contribution that was indispensable to Britain’s war machine, yet has been pushed to the footnotes of history.

Why India mattered to Britain in 1914
The Western Front: holding the line in France and Belgium
Neuve Chapelle and the early battles
Courage recognised
Mesopotamia: a campaign fought largely by Indians
Gallipoli, East Africa, and Egypt
More than soldiers: India’s money and material
The financial burden
Raw materials, animals, and supplies
The princely states
The human cost
What India expected in return
Why the contribution was forgotten

Why India mattered to Britain in 1914

When Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, its regular army was small and quickly overstretched. The British Expeditionary Force suffered heavy losses in the opening weeks, and the empire needed trained manpower fast. India had that manpower. The pre-war Indian Army was a professional, battle-hardened force, and Britain turned to it almost immediately.

Just four days after the declaration of war, two infantry divisions and a cavalry brigade of the Indian Army were ordered to mobilise for overseas service. The first troops landed at Marseilles in late September 1914. By the end of that year, Indian forces made up roughly a third of all British troops on the Western Front, arriving, as one account puts it, just in the nick of time to help hold a collapsing line.

The numbers are staggering. Around 1.5 million men joined the Indian Army during the war, of whom slightly more than a million were deployed to battlefronts across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. India’s contribution in manpower exceeded that of all of Britain’s dominions, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa, combined. [Image: Map showing the global deployment of Indian Expeditionary Forces across the Western Front, Mesopotamia, East Africa, Egypt, and Gallipoli]

The Western Front: holding the line in France and Belgium

The first major commitment of Indian troops was in France and Belgium. The Indian Corps, made up of the 3rd (Lahore) and 7th (Meerut) Divisions, was in combat by October 1914 in the brutal fighting around Messines Ridge in Belgium.

Neuve Chapelle and the early battles

The defining moment for the Indian Corps came at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle in March 1915. Indian soldiers made up half of the attacking force and, despite very heavy casualties, captured important sections of the German line. Some units paid a terrible price. According to academic research on the Indian infantry, the 47th Sikhs lost around 80 percent of their force in the fighting.

Indian troops went on to fight at the Second Battle of Ypres, Aubers Ridge, Festubert, and Loos through 1915. They struggled with unfamiliar European weather, new weapons, and a high casualty rate among the British officers who led them. Even so, the Indian Expeditionary Force contributed in a crucial way to stemming the German advance, sustaining around 22,000 casualties before the infantry divisions were redeployed at the end of 1915.

Courage recognised

Indian bravery did not go entirely unnoticed at the time. Sepoy Khudadad Khan became the first Indian-born soldier to win the Victoria Cross, for his actions at Messines in October 1914. By the war’s end, Indian soldiers had earned more than 9,200 gallantry awards, including 11 Victoria Crosses, the British Empire’s highest award for bravery.

Mesopotamia: a campaign fought largely by Indians

While the Western Front gets the most attention, the campaign in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) was, from the very beginning, largely fought by Indian soldiers. The objective was to secure the oil fields of the region, which were vital to the British navy.

The campaign was a tale of two halves. Early success in securing the oilfields gave way to an over-ambitious advance on Baghdad, which ended in disaster. A British Indian garrison under Major General Charles Townshend was besieged at Kut-al-Amara. After holding out from December 1915, the garrison surrendered on 29 April 1916, with over 13,000 men captured. Many of the prisoners died on the brutal forced march into captivity. It was one of the most humiliating Allied defeats of the war, and the burden fell heavily on Indian troops.

Mesopotamia ultimately became the deadliest theatre for Indian soldiers. Of all the fronts, the maximum number of Indian deaths, around 14,742, occurred in Mesopotamia. A reorganised, largely freshly recruited Indian Army eventually captured Kut and Baghdad in 1917.

Gallipoli, East Africa, and Egypt

Indian troops served across a remarkably wide geography. At Gallipoli in 1915, Sikh and Gurkha regiments took part in the failed Allied attempt to force a sea route to Russia through the Ottoman-held peninsula. They endured not just enemy fire but unfamiliar terrain and a harsh climate.

In East Africa, Indian forces had a mixed experience. At the Battle of Tanga, entire battalions fled at the first German shots. But elsewhere, Indian troops were decisive. When Ottoman forces attacked the Suez Canal, Britain’s vital imperial transport artery, in early 1915, Indian units were the most numerous and best-trained forces available for the canal’s defence and played a leading role in repelling the assault.

Beyond the well-known fronts, Indian soldiers also served in smaller numbers in Salonica, Aden, and the Persian Gulf. The Royal Indian Marine was armed in 1914, with some ships serving the Royal Navy on escort duty and others operating as minesweepers and river gunboats in Mesopotamia.

More than soldiers: India’s money and material

India’s contribution went far beyond manpower. For a country under colonial rule and struggling to feed its own people, the financial commitment was extraordinary.

The financial burden

India sent a lump sum of 100 million pounds to the British war effort as a direct contribution. On top of this, India funded the entire cost of keeping over a million of its own troops overseas, including weapons, ammunition, and rations. According to British government records, the war expenditure of the Government of India up to 31 March 1919 came to about £127.8 million, the equivalent of roughly £2.7 billion in today’s money.

Raw materials, animals, and supplies

India was also a vast supply depot. According to the British government’s own commemorations, India contributed 3.7 million tonnes of supplies and 170,000 animals to the war effort. Iron, manganese, grain, cotton, jute for sandbags, horses, and mules flowed out of the country to sustain the fighting. The Indian merchant services played an essential role in transport and supply.

The princely states

The princely states, which made up roughly a third of British India, contributed heavily in both men and money. Many rulers placed their personal forces, the Imperial Service Troops, at the disposal of the British. The Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, for example, sent troops to East Africa, Egypt, and Mesopotamia and subscribed large amounts to war loans. These contributions were partly genuine loyalty and partly a calculated bid for British favour.

The human cost

The price India paid was severe. At the war’s end, India had suffered more than 120,000 total casualties, men killed, wounded, or missing. The British Council records that around 50,000 died, 65,000 were wounded, and 10,000 were reported missing, while 98 Indian army nurses were killed. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission puts the death toll at roughly 60,000.

Many of these men have no known grave. At cemeteries across Europe and the Middle East, Indian graves often bear only the anonymous inscription “A Soldier of the Indian Army,” a reflection of poor colonial record-keeping. The Neuve-Chapelle Indian Memorial in France, unveiled in 1927, commemorates over 4,700 Indian soldiers and labourers who fell on the Western Front and have no known resting place.

What India expected in return

This enormous sacrifice raised expectations. Many Indians believed that such loyal and costly service would be rewarded with greater political freedom after the war. The British, fearful of the growing Home Rule movement, adopted a carrot-and-stick approach.

The clearest political outcome was the Montagu Declaration of August 1917, in which Secretary of State Edwin Montagu announced that British policy would be the gradual development of self-governing institutions and the progressive realisation of responsible government in India. For the first time, the demand for self-government could no longer be treated as sedition.

Yet the declaration disappointed many nationalists. It set no timeline, and the British government alone would decide the pace of reform. The resulting Government of India Act of 1919 introduced a limited and unworkable system of “dyarchy.” Bal Gangadhar Tilak famously dismissed the reforms as “unworthy and disappointing, a sunless dawn,” while Annie Besant called the offer unworthy of England to make and of India to accept. Wartime sacrifice had been answered with repressive emergency laws and political half-measures, a contradiction that would feed the freedom struggle in the years ahead.

Why the contribution was forgotten

Given the scale of this involvement, the relative silence around it is striking. In Britain, national remembrance events often make only passing reference to Indian troops. In India itself, the memory is complicated. These men fought for an empire that ruled over them, and after independence, a war fought in service of colonial masters did not fit easily into the national story. As a result, the courage of soldiers who represented one-sixth of all those serving the British Empire in the First World War has been left largely out of mainstream histories on both sides.

What do you think? Should soldiers who fought for a colonial power that denied them freedom be remembered as national heroes, or does that complicate how we tell the story of the independence struggle? And how should the political “reward” India received after 1918 shape the way we judge the value of that sacrifice?

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Table of Contents

Why India mattered to Britain in 1914 🔗

The Western Front: holding the line in France and Belgium 🔗

Neuve Chapelle and the early battles 🔗

Courage recognised 🔗

Mesopotamia: a campaign fought largely by Indians 🔗

Gallipoli, East Africa, and Egypt 🔗

More than soldiers: India’s money and material 🔗

The financial burden 🔗

Raw materials, animals, and supplies 🔗

The princely states 🔗

The human cost 🔗

What India expected in return 🔗

Why the contribution was forgotten 🔗