India played a significant part in WWI. However, India’s contribution is easily overlooked. There are heroes who stood up and fought. The heroes of the European nations got the spotlight while some stay in the dark and contribute just as much as the others.
Indra Lal Roy is one such man who fought equally hard but never got any share of the limelight.
Why? Because he simply never cared.
1. Born in an affluent family in Calcutta in 1898, Indra Lal Roy was India’s first flying ace.
2. He always wanted to fly military aircraft and was sent off to a boarding school in London at an early age.
3. With WWI gathering impetus, the British were recruiting Indians in the Royal Flying Corps as front line combat pilots. Roy enlisted with the RFC and was commissioned as the 2nd Lieutenant.
4. In just 170 hours of flying time, he shot down 10 aircraft and destroyed 5 of them.
5. His last combat mission was on July 22, 1918. A brave Indra Lal downed 2 German fighters but was shot in the process and went down in flames in the German-held territory.
6. He was 19 years old at the time of his heroic death and that made German Air Combat Command Baron Manfred von Richtofen to drop a wreath on the place where Roy fell, as a tribute to his bravery.
7. Roy was awarded a posthumous Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC), Britain’s third highest gallantry award in September 1918.
8. On his 100th birth anniversary, the Indian government issued a commemorative stamp in his honour.
9. A unique inscription was made on his grave in French and Bengali.
10. The Bengali version read: Maha birer samadhi; sambhram karo, sparsha koro na.
Translation: A valiant warrior’s grave; respect it, do not touch it.
Although he was caught, killed and forgotten, he changed the world. 🙂