Churchill's Secret War (10 page)

The führer would repair German fortunes by creating sources of cheap food and raw materials, as well as expansive export markets; this would necessitate acquiring fresh territories. The Ukraine would supply the ruling race with bread, the Black Sea with an inexhaustible supply of fish, the Crimea with oranges, cotton, and rubber; and the crowning glory, Russia, would be an insatiable captive market for German “cotton goods, household utensils, all the articles of current consumption.” (The Slavic areas would also provide fields for Germans rendered “superfluous” by industrialization—an aspect of Hitler’s dream that was inspired not by India but by the colonization of North America by white farmers.) Such expropriations of the colonies’ resources and products would result in the deaths of tens of millions of Slavs by famine and disease, estimated a Nazi policy paper formulated in 1941.
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Because Germans would deploy divide and rule to retain control, only a few selected officers would be needed to administer the vast new territory. “The Russian space is our India,” Hitler elaborated. “Like the English, we shall rule this empire with a handful of men.” His favorite movie, the 1935 Hollywood production
Lives of a Bengal Lancer
, depicted the adventures of a few such valiants: English cavalry officers at India’s northwest frontier. The movie illustrated the feats that the warriors of an inspired race could perform in service of their homeland, and Hitler made it compulsory viewing for SS guardsmen. A great deal about Hitler remains mysterious, but his daydreams of world conquest were transparently inspired by what might be called Empire Envy.
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“ENVY IS ONE of the less pleasing features of the German character, and there is a peculiar German word [Brotneid], envy of another for earning the bread that might be yours, which conveys tersely what Germans felt about our wealth and the vast resources of our Empire,” wrote Leopold S. Amery in his autobiography. “Looking back on the costly struggles and sacrifices of their own history they felt that our Empire had been far too cheaply won; largely won, indeed, by utilizing Germany as a pawn in our long struggle with France. Not only cheaply won, but cheaply held; not by the kind of sacrifice which conscription imposed upon Germany’s manhood to maintain her frontiers, but by a Navy.”
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In 1934 Amery had read
Mein Kampf
and found it “very interesting and stimulating,” as he wrote in his diary. Hitler’s “intense sincerity and clear thinking on some points, as well as really careful study of propaganda methods, attracted me very much.” On the other hand, the author was clearly “quite insane about Jews and Socialists,” Amery observed. The next year, when he was holidaying in the Bavarian Alps, Hitler had invited him for a meeting. The führer looked unprepossessing, rather like a salesman in a gent’s clothing store. Amery did not find “the hypnotic charm I had heard of, and no attempt to exercise it, but liked his directness and eagerness to let his hearer know his mind.” Amery judged that Hitler had a “grip on economic essentials and on many political ones, too, even if it is crude at times and coloured by deep personal prejudice.”
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Like Hitler, Amery believed that less developed parts of the world, such as India, should provide raw materials and markets for the highly industrialized centers of imperial power. Amery did not regard Indians themselves as greatly inferior, however: his confidence in their abilities underlay his later attempts, as secretary of state for India, to secure the assistance of native politicians and manufacturers in provisioning the war effort. In part because of personal experience, he was aware that political disadvantage did not necessarily indicate feebleness in character or intellect. Historian William D. Rubinstein has discovered that Amery’s mother came from a distinguished Jewish family, many of whose members had converted to Christianity. Amery himself had a deep-seated
empathy for Jews and was one of the architects of modern Israel. But he kept his origins a close secret throughout his life and dropped not a hint of his Jewish ancestry in three portly volumes of autobiography (which he could not complete).
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Given this background, Amery’s rather positive appraisal of Hitler is astonishing. Like many others, he may have assumed that Hitler could not possibly carry out the exterminations that he had hinted at in
Mein Kampf
. Nor could Amery have foreseen a bizarre personal tragedy: his troubled elder son, John, would turn into an anti-Semite and, finding himself in Europe in 1942, would travel to Berlin to assist Hitler with his war effort.
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LEOPOLD S. AMERY was born in northern India in 1873, to an English forester and a woman of east European extraction. When Leo was three, he went to England with his mother and younger brother, and in their absence his father abandoned the family and moved to Canada. Leo’s mother was forced to live in boardinghouses while she spent all her money educating her sons. “Nobody could ever give herself over so helplessly to laughter, and laughter was a large ingredient in our childhood’s atmosphere,” Amery remembered. Leo was precocious and spoke Hindi fluently when he left India. From his father’s side he inherited a diminutive frame (he was five feet four) and from his mother’s a gift for languages, of which he would learn fifteen. He read parts of the
Mahabharata
in Sanskrit and once astonished a London audience by reciting the first book of the Koran in classical Arabic.
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At Harrow the brilliant youngster garnered most of the prizes—and encountered a bumptious redhead by the name of Winston Churchill. During Winston’s first summer at Harrow, he spent hours by the swimming pond, eating buns and sneaking up behind unsuspecting boys to push them in. One day he saw a student standing right on the edge of the pond and gave him a shove. “I was startled to see a furious face emerge from the foam, and a being evidently of enormous strength making its way by fierce strokes to the shore,” Churchill recounted. He ran, but his pursuer easily caught him and flung him into the pond. It
was Leopold Amery of the Sixth Form: “He is Head of his House; he is champion at Gym; he has got his football colours.” Mortified, Winston approached the “potentate” the next day and explained: “I mistook you for a Fourth Form boy. You are so small.” Since Leopold did not seem at all calmed, Winston brilliantly improvised: “My father, who is a great man, is also small.” Leo laughed and indicated the end of the episode. Neither ever forgot this introduction, however.
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Amery went on to Oxford University and eventually became a fellow of All Soul’s College—in whose lounges not only scholars but also “cabinet ministers, bishops, Members of Parliament, civil servants, lawyers, journalists and businessmen” conversed on equal terms. It was the intellectual soul of the empire, and Amery, one of its brightest lights. He served on several fronts of World War I as an intelligence officer, went on to hold important positions in the British government, and drafted the Balfour Declaration of 1917 that promised Jews a home in Palestine. By 1938, Amery understood the ferocity of Hitler’s ambitions and joined Churchill in attacking the British government’s policy of appeasement. Listening to a broadcast of one of the führer’s speeches, he found it terrifying: “It was the most horrible thing I have ever heard, more like the snarling of a wild animal than the utterance of a human being.”
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IN APRIL 1941, a week after his arrival in Berlin, Subhas Chandra Bose submitted to the German foreign ministry a couple of detailed memoranda on how the goals of Indians could mesh with those of the Axis. In
Mein Kampf
, Hitler had described India’s nationalists as “a coalition of cripples” and asserted that he could not link “the destiny of my people” with that of such an inferior race. His contempt for the Indian independence movement indicated a reversal of German policy, which during World War I had been strongly supportive of Indian insurgents. In 1915 German agents, acting in concert with Sikh émigrés in Canada and the United States, had sent a shipload of arms to Bengal’s revolutionaries. (The plot was foiled by the British.) Aware of Hitler’s attitude, Bose anticipated resistance from the German government; he nevertheless hoped that rational self-interest would prompt the Nazis to take him seriously.
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“It is one of the cardinal principles of British diplomacy to adopt a sanctimonious role when she is fighting in reality for her own selfish interests,” Bose wrote in his proposal. His Majesty’s Government had, for instance, allowed several European nations to set up governments-in-exile and thereby acquired credentials as a champion of freedom. “Why should not the Axis Powers adopt the same policy and pay England back in her own coin?” Germany should shelter a free Indian government and—through broadcasting incendiary messages, sending weapons and other supplies to revolutionaries, and other means—incite the subcontinent to rebellion. Moreover, he asserted, if the Axis powers publicly committed to liberating British colonies, they would prompt defections among Indian soldiers fighting in the Middle East and Africa. And once the loyalty of the Indian Army was shaken, the arrival of “a small force of 50,000 men with modern equipment” on the colony’s border would be enough to topple the British Raj.
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Whereas Bose was exaggerating the chances of success of such a rebellion, historian Milan Hauner has argued that the Nazis could have significantly disrupted the British war effort by providing prompt and substantial assistance to anti-colonials in India, Iraq, and elsewhere. It was not to be. The German government granted Bose a beautiful house in Berlin and permitted him to violate the Reich’s race laws by living with, and later marrying, an Austrian woman with whom he had fallen passionately in love while exiled from India in the mid-1930s. (Reuniting with her was no doubt a motive for his desperate escape.) The Nazis also permitted Bose to recruit thousands of Indian soldiers captured in northern Africa for a liberation army that he dreamed would march into its homeland via the Afghan border. But although the Italians and the Japanese urged a joint declaration in favor of Indian independence, Hitler refused to go along. He feared that any open threat to the Raj would strengthen the British resolve to fight on against the Germans.
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Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Hitler still fancied he could reach an accommodation with the United Kingdom. The previous summer, in July 1940, the führer had announced to horrified generals his determination to eventually attack the Soviet Union. He nursed
a fond hope that when Russia had been crushed and Britain stood alone, it would accept the position of Germany’s junior partner in world domination. “During the whole of my political activity I have always expounded the idea of a close friendship and collaboration between Germany and England,” Hitler had declared in April 1939. Surely, he said, the British could understand that just as the Raj gave meaning to their lives, the vision of a thousand-year Reich gave purpose to Germans. Hitler had made several peace offers to Britain, at one point putting forth “an assurance to the British Empire of German assistance regardless of where such assistance should be necessary.”
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But the United Kingdom had rejected Hitler’s overtures. Instead it had sent troops to defend France and, in the summer of 1940, had dispatched bombers over Germany, some of which had dropped their pay-loads on residential areas. On September 4, 1940, Hitler announced that his patience had run out: he would force the United Kingdom into submission. Starting three days later, some 200 bombers at a time, escorted by hundreds of fighters, attacked London and other towns almost every night for two months straight.
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CHURCHILL VISITED A shelter at Bristol in April 1941, where an old lady who had lost everything to the bombs saw him and cheered, waving the handkerchief with which she had been wiping her eyes. The prime minister choked up and remained sunk in thought on the train home. When he broke his reverie, it was to announce that he would ensure that Britons got all the nutrition necessary “to protect them from the strain and stresses that they may be subjected to in this period of great emergency.” Although a “Grow More Food” program had boosted domestic production of wheat, potatoes, and other staples, vast quantities of provisions would nevertheless have to be acquired abroad and transported to the British Isles.
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If the United Kingdom had an Achilles’ heel, it was the stomach. Two-thirds of the island nation’s food was imported, which made its very sustenance vulnerable to disruptions in shipping. During World War I, German U-boats in the Atlantic had threatened the delivery of
imported wheat and provoked panic hoarding, causing temporary shortages. After that war, civil servants had formalized plans for feeding Britain in wartime. In a crisis, the government immediately would have to demonstrate that it was on top of the situation—or else people would build personal stockpiles, depriving others. The cost of living, in particular the prices of bread and potatoes, should be tightly regulated so that no one went short of calories; and the more nutritious foods should be rationed to ensure adequate proteins and minerals. In 1936, a government committee had recommended that the United Kingdom build a stockpile of at least three months’ usage of food and animal feed in order to guard against wartime disruptions of supply. By the time World War II broke out, the entire machinery for feeding the country was in place.
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To watch over the care and feeding of Britons, Winston Churchill recruited a trusted old friend, the physicist Frederick Alexander Lindemann. Known as the Prof to admirers (because of his academic credentials and his brilliance) and as Baron Berlin to detractors (thanks to his German accent and aristocratic tastes), Lindemann was responsible for the government’s scientific decisions. He also headed a Statistics Division, or S branch, with whose help he scrutinized the performance of the regular ministries and prioritized the logistical machinery of warfare. Lindemann attended meetings of the War Cabinet, accompanied the prime minister on conferences abroad, and sent him an average of one missive a day. He saw Churchill almost daily for the duration of the war and wielded more influence than any other civilian adviser.
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