Subhas Chandra Bose

Indian nationalist military leader whose defiant patriotism made him a hero in India, but whose attempt during World War II to rid India of British rule with the help of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan left a troubled legacy.

Educated at the universities of Calcutta and Cambridge, he left a career in the Indian civil service to fight for India's independence and was imprisoned a dozen times by the British. He shared leadership of India's youth and peasant societies with Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Ghandi in opposition to their principals of non-violence.

He was elected the President of India's Congress Party in 1938, but in 1940-1941, fled to Germany, then to Malaya where he set up a Provisional Government of Free India in 1943.

Bose suffered third-degree burns on 18 August 1945 after his overloaded Japanese plane crashed around 2:30 PM in Taihoku (now Taipei) in Japanese-ruled Formosa (now Taiwan). He was taken to hospital for treatment but died a few hours later, between 9 and 10 pm, at age 48.