 Soon Bose's aim became to raise an army, which he imagined would march into India with German forces and trigger the downfall of the Raj.The first troops of the Indian Legion were recruited from Indian POWs captured at El Mekili, Libya during the battles for Tobruk.The German forces in the Western Desert selected a core group of 27 POWs as potential officers and they were flown to Berlin in May 1941, to be followed, after the "Centro I" experiment, by POWs being transferred from the Italian forces to Germany.