In 1944, when Geraldine Book, a resident of Washington DC, graduated from her nursing school all she wanted to do was travel the world. Consequently, she joined the US Army in its war effort. The Second World War was raging in full swing at that time and Book along with another classmate of hers volunteered for overseas duty. After six long weeks at sea, she landed in Calcutta where she was expected to tend to the wounded and ill in the China-Burma-India theatre. "You could smell Calcutta a hundred miles away. It was a huge city. People were dying in the streets and on the doorways," she says in a 2004 interview archived by the Veterans History Project of the Library of Congress. "Everything smells like it's decaying," she says about her first experience of Calcutta, as she narrates how she saw British trucks loading up bodies to dispose off in the burning ghats, and the occasional sight of arms and legs floating in the river that left her shocked. India was in a strange position during the War. As historian Yasmin Khan puts it aptly in a 2012 article : India was "not quite a home front, nor quite… Read full this story
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Coca-Cola, canned food and Jazz nights: What American GIs brought to the streets of Calcutta during WWII have 291 words, post on indianexpress.com at July 10, 2021. This is cached page on Vietnam Dance. If you want remove this page, please contact us.