The Indian National Army was formed from Indian prisoners of war taken by the Japanese in Malaya and Singapore in 1942. Punjabis, who made up a very large share of the Indian Army, made up a very large share of the INA.
Mohan Singh, a captain of the 1/14th Punjab Regiment from Ugoke in Sialkot district, raised the first INA in 1942. Subhas Chandra Bose took over the reorganised force in 1943.
The Rani of Jhansi Regiment, its women's unit, was raised in Singapore and included Punjabi women from the Malayan Indian community.
The Red Fort trials of November 1945 tried three officers together, Prem Sahgal, Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon and Shah Nawaz Khan, a Hindu, a Sikh and a Muslim, chosen deliberately by the prosecution and turned by the defence into the point. Bhulabhai Desai and Jawaharlal Nehru appeared for them. The convictions were remitted after public protest.
The trials, and the naval mutiny that followed in 1946, are considered by many historians to have weighed more heavily on the British decision to leave than anything else in that period.
INA veterans in Punjab villages were denied pensions and recognition for decades.
Something over forty thousand of the Indian prisoners joined and a larger number refused, and the men who refused spent the rest of the war in camps. Punjab villages sent men into both groups, in some cases out of the same platoon.
They fought at Imphal and Kohima against the army they had been in, and the survivors were tried at the Red Fort in 1945 in a case that made the Congress its defence counsel.
The trials made the men heroes and made the loyalty of the Indian Army an open question, which is one of the reasons the British left when they did.
Red Fort trial records, 1945.