Churchill's Secret War (14 page)

The evacuation of Burma was chaotic. White administrators and civilians commandeered all available transport and piled in, leaving everyone else to seek his or her own way. Some 600,000 Indians who worked in Burma, and who also feared the Japanese, took to the sea on horribly overcrowded ships or trudged over rain-sodden Himalayan passes in an attempt to reach their homeland. Around 80,000 would die on the way. Women and children sank into ferocious mud; feces and bodies mingled in campsites with living, starving people; and cholera became endemic.

Congress leaders imprisoned in the fall of 1940, during Gandhi’s satyagraha movement against the war effort, had been released just before Pearl Harbor, after a prolonged argument that Amery had won in the War Cabinet. (“A most unnecessary waste of time and generation of heat owing to Winston’s refusal to accept things as they are and not as they were in 1895,” he commented in his diary.) Nehru toured transit camps in the northeast and found that white evacuees had food but the brown ones had none—yet the native peoples were being prevented from leaving the camps lest they carried their germs further. The catastrophic exodus devastated the myth of the brave Briton standing firm in defense of his charges.
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WITH THE BURMA Road to China closed, American forces began pouring into Calcutta and traveling northeast into the Indian province
of Assam. They constructed runways and flew thousands of tons of war supplies, brought by rail from the western ports of India, over the Hump: the perilous eastern Himalayas. As long as China kept resisting them, the Japanese could field fewer forces in the Pacific. India became a beneficiary of Lend Lease, with the United States providing tanks, jeeps, aircraft, and other war equipment in exchange for clothing, services, and food. India was also set to provide shelter and supplies to troops from China, the United Kingdom, Africa, and Australia—around a half-million foreign soldiers in total.
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If Calcutta fell, the supply route to China would be cut off. An anxious Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Chinese nationalists, visited India in early 1942 to ask for the support of Congress leaders and was shocked to find them indifferent to the Japanese threat. At his urging, President Roosevelt instructed a representative in London, Averell Harriman, to suggest to the prime minister the desirability of reaching a settlement with Indians that would rouse them to fight for the Allies. Churchill responded that he could not alienate the Muslims, who, he stated, constituted three-quarters of the Indian Army. (In reality, the fraction was one-third.) He also sent the president a letter that the government had received from Mohammad Ali Jinnah, reiterating the demand for Pakistan as the price for Muslim cooperation.
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The stunning reversals of Allied fortunes in Southeast Asia had made Churchill politically vulnerable, and critics in the Labour Party were also insisting that the Indian National Congress be won over to the war effort. As a result, that February the prime minister came up with an astonishingly liberal scheme for India: an enlarged viceroy’s council consisting mainly of elected members to assist in the war effort and, subsequently, to formulate a constitution. This time, it was Viceroy Linlithgow who protested, declaring that Muslims would “refuse to serve on any body in which they would be an ineffective minority.” An army general further warned that “any concessions to Congress” could anger Muslim soldiers and result in “the ruin of the Indian Army as at present constituted.” Such concerns convinced Amery, who ended up
telling Churchill, “we must reassure the Moslems that they are not to be outvoted over a constitution.”
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A year earlier, Amery had expressed concern about the deepening division between Hindus and Muslims, to which Churchill had replied, “Oh, but that is all to the good.” Amery had since become sensitized to Muslim sentiment, possibly because he had helped dispatch Indian troops to take control of oilfields in the Middle East. During World War I, some Muslim soldiers from India had mutinied upon being ordered to battle the Turks, and once again the British Empire was asking Muslims to fight Muslims. The last thing Amery needed was for Jinnah to inflame any incipient Muslim anger. Amery even wondered whether, with the Japanese at India’s door, “it would not be better, for the moment at any rate to go back more to the spirit of Mutiny days and revive British Rule in its most direct and, if necessary, ruthless form.”
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IF THE JAPANESE invaded, they would probably land on the coast of Bengal, which adjoined Burma. Because of the inadequate defensive installations, they would be impossible to resist; worse, they might even be welcomed by the locals. On January 21, 1942, Linlithgow had warned Amery: “Recent reports from military authorities in eastern India [are] to the effect that there is a large and dangerous potential fifth column in Bengal, Assam, Bihar and Orissa, and that, indeed, potentiality of pro-enemy sympathy and activity in eastern India is enormous.” Many Bengalis, including Sushil Dhara of Midnapore, were elated by news of Japanese successes—and the events to follow would only increase their disaffection with the British.
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On November 14, 1941, the prime minister had urged a “scorched earth” policy involving “ruthless destruction in any territory we have to surrender.” The following January the War Office ordered such measures in colonies on the periphery of the Indian Ocean, which were at risk of seaborne Japanese attack. Amery relayed the instructions to India. The army was to destroy industrial, military, and transport facilities, while the civil administration should deprive the enemy of sustenance.
“Water supplies and minimum stocks of essential foodstuffs should be left for local inhabitants but latter should as far as possible be distributed to population before withdrawal takes place to avoid bulk supplies falling into enemy hands,” the order elaborated. If some resource could not be burned or blown up, “dumping in sea or rivers may suffice.”
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In Bengal the winter crop had just been harvested, so scorched earth would not mean literally burning the fields. Instead, the rice would have to be removed from traders’ storehouses and landowners’
gola
s, or miniature silos. In the confusion and panic, the vital caveat of leaving enough food for the people would be disregarded.

Wavell hoped to retake such regions as the Japanese might occupy, and he protested the demolition of industrial facilities. Amery cabled back on March 27: “it is essential that destruction should be ruthless and should achieve without fail total denial of such resources as would assist enemy operations.” Removal of river craft, which the Japanese might use to advance along Bengal’s waterways, “should commence now repeat now,” he urged. The viceroy sided with the commander-in-chief, however. Demolition along a coastline as long as India’s would “give handle for agitation,” the viceroy wrote; and with “enormous population in threatened areas any scorched earth policy will mean that we will have millions on our hands who it will be quite impossible to feed.”
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Thus scorched earth was reduced in scope and limited to coastal Bengal, where it went by the less incendiary name of Denial Policy. The province was selected because it adjoined Burma, and perhaps also because its populace was deemed treasonous: one War Office memo warned that in Bengal saboteurs and provocateurs could “gravely impair the efficiency of Indian defence.” Military planners drew on the map a line that ran east to west some twenty miles south of Calcutta. South of that line, the Japanese would be denied transport and food. Civil servant Olaf M. Martin, who was posted in eastern Bengal, recalled that army chiefs were demoralized and “temporarily obsessed with the supposed necessity of ‘denying transport’ to any invading force.” Vital records and white women were swiftly moved out of the demarcated
region. The government advised “wise men” to keep two months of rice in stock—amounting to a confession that the public would be left to its own devices. The viceroy sent his private secretary, Leonard George Pinnell, to Bengal to implement the Denial Policy.
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Hardly any defense existed in eastern and southern Bengal, Pinnell would subsequently state to a Famine Inquiry Commission that was set up in 1944. Nobody knew “whether, by the next cold weather, Calcutta would [be in] the possession of the Japanese.” To prevent anyone from potentially hearing Axis broadcasts, the authorities confiscated all the radios they could find. Allied forces established observation posts, linked by wireless sets to the old fort in Calcutta, every ten miles along the seacoast and on the banks of major rivers. Military authorities had already requisitioned all serviceable trucks and cars, as well as most buses; now the officials confiscated from southern and eastern Bengal virtually all other forms of conveyance. Bicycles, steamers, boats carrying more than ten passengers, bullock carts, and even a few elephants were commandeered, destroyed, or forced to move north of the denial line. From Midnapore alone, the police removed close to ten thousand bicycles.
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Boats were the primary form of transport in riverine Bengal. Most villagers were so poor that they either walked or boarded a ferry. Boats took traders to the market, fishers to the sea, potters to their clay pits, and farmers to their plots, which were often marooned between vast swathes of river. Demolishing boats meant destroying livelihoods: as Pinnell confessed, “for anyone who knows the Bengal cultivator it was a completely heart-breaking job.” Of 66,500 registered boats, more than two-thirds were rendered inoperable in coastal Bengal. Pinnell said that in fact nine-tenths of the larger boats that could be found were taken out, and he could not be sure how many still plied within the denial area. Of the surviving vessels, many would be used for transporting jute (needed for sandbags, a necessity of war), of which Bengal was the world’s only significant source. As a result, the rice crop harvested at the end of 1942 could be moved from regions of surplus to those of scarcity only with great difficulty. When a member of the famine commission
asked if “boat denial” had ended up “killing” the economy of certain locales, Pinnell replied: “I do not think a consideration of that sort would have been of any weight at all.”
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Boat denial “completely broke the economy of the fishing class,”
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he further testified. In December 1943 a journalist visited Faridpur in eastern Bengal and was told by an elderly survivor that in his fishing village of 200 households, 50 had perished in entirety. The 35,000 families that lost their homes and fields to military barracks and aerodromes would also feature prominently among the victims of famine.
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ANOTHER ASPECT OF the scorched earth policy, called “rice denial,” would impact the economy of Bengal just as fiercely. Just when the authorities began to remove rice stocks from the coastal and eastern parts of the province is unclear. When civil servant Asok Mitra arrived in Munshiganj in eastern Bengal in early February 1942, he found less than 10 tons of rice in riverside storehouses that should have held thousands of tons. The police, he was told, had gone around destroying or seizing the stocks. Journalist Sukharanjan Sengupta alleges that thousands of tons of rice stored at three river ports of eastern Bengal were thrown into the water, while a villager told radio correspondent Nazes Afroz that he saw soldiers setting fire to stacks of rice.
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Bengal’s elected chief minister, Abul Kasem Fazlul Huq, further charged that in April the governor of Bengal, Sir John Herbert, ordered a British official to remove “excess rice from three districts within 24 hours.” Since the Bengal administration did not have the staff to enforce such a drastic order—its only village-level employees were chowkidars, or night watchmen—the official had advanced 2 million rupees to a merchant to buy up rice. The businessman was Mirza Ahmad Ispahani, a key financier of the Muslim League. Herbert described his political adversaries in the province as “Caste Hindus” and regarded members of the Muslim League as “enemies of our enemies” and thus as natural allies in his task of committing the productive capacity of Bengal to the war effort. The Ispahani Company would become the government’s principal buying agent, with the power to commandeer rice if the owners refused to sell.
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“At the moment we are facing a rice famine in Bengal” because of the governor’s policies, Huq protested in August 1942. Just as worrisome, brokers from Ceylon and other Indian provinces were also buying rice in Bengal. After the fall of Burma, the Government of India had undertaken to do without the usual rice imports from the east—and moreover to supply rice to those parts of the British Empire that could no longer obtain it from Southeast Asia. As a result, whereas Bengal had imported 296,000 tons of rice in 1941, it would export 185,000 tons in 1942. The price of rice soared.
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EVEN AS INDIA waded into an economic morass, the president of the United States had been trying to throw a bridge across the ideological chasm between the Indian National Congress and His Majesty’s Government. The prevailing political stalemate was embittering nationalists and endangering the prosecution of the war against Japan. On March 11, 1942, Roosevelt had written to the prime minister, likening the Indian predicament to that of the thirteen American colonies facing the War of Independence. The colonies had joined to form a stopgap government in order to fight the British, he pointed out. During the war, confusion had prevailed among the “separate sovereignties”—but then “the experiment was still in the making and any effort to arrive at a final framework would have come to naught.” Roosevelt asked Churchill to similarly allow a temporary government, headed by representatives of the various political groups, to be set up in India.
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