Churchill's Secret War (22 page)

The viceroy nevertheless proposed to release Gandhi from prison for the duration of his fast, an offer he declined. So the ordeal began, and as each excruciating day crawled by, Indians came to besiege the new American envoy with pleas for help. William Phillips once arrived at his office to find twenty-five agitated schoolgirls camped in the hall outside. He asked the viceroy for permission to visit Gandhi and was
turned down. But when Indians realized “that I could not intervene without instructions and that the President would not intervene with Churchill, American stock in India fell rapidly,” Phillips recounted in a memoir. On February 19 he was finally able to hand Linlithgow a telegram from Cordell Hull, the American secretary of state, expressing the president’s alarm at the prospect of Gandhi’s death.
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Linlithgow explained to Phillips that if Gandhi should die, the worst would be “six months unpleasantness steadily declining in volume; little or nothing at the end of it.” After it was all over, India would be “far more reliable as a base for operations.” The prime minister instructed Lord Halifax, the ambassador in Washington, to leave no doubt that any interference from the United States would “cause great embarrassment between the two Governments.”
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Gandhi’s moral stature nevertheless posed a serious problem to the British. Since he was holding out longer than expected, the prime minister asked the viceroy to check if he was sneaking some glucose with his water: “Would be most valuable [if any] fraud could be exposed.” Gandhi had refused glucose, Linlithgow responded. On February 21 the old man’s condition suddenly worsened, but the crisis passed. A British doctor attested that one of the Indian doctors might have panicked when Gandhi appeared to be on the verge of death and secretly given him a dose of glucose, but the old man could not have known and so could not be exposed as a cheat. No matter: Churchill would write in
The Hinge of Fate
that it “was certain however at an early stage that he was being fed with glucose whenever he drank water.”
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The viceroy thanked the prime minister for standing firm against “a wicked system of blackmail and terror” practiced by “the world’s most successful humbug.” Churchill had meanwhile come down with pneumonia and was on his own irksome diet. “I do not think Gandhi has the slightest intention of dying,” he complained in a letter to Prime Minister Jan Smuts of South Africa (who, three decades earlier, had had his own share of troubles with the Indian). “I imagine he has been eating better meals than I have for the last week.”
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AS LUCK WOULD have it, while the prime minister was down with pneumonia and irascible over Gandhi’s fast he received a complaint from Cherwell about the transportation of grain to India. Upon returning from Casablanca, the Prof had vehemently protested the shipping committee’s promise to send the colony at least 40,000 tons of wheat. The consignment would cost the United Kingdom dearly in terms of shipping, Cherwell argued, and India’s annual output of cereals was so enormous (a little above 50 million tons) that even the 600,000 tons that the viceroy wanted could make no conceivable difference to its food supply. He trusted that “no further gestures of this sort will be encouraged.”

Churchill concurred. “I am much concerned about these heavy inroads into your shipping due to the improvidence of the various Governments in the East concerned, and the failure of their crops,” he wrote to Leathers, the minister of war transport. “I hope you will be as stiff as you can. There is no reason why all parts of the British Empire should not feel the pinch in the same way as the Mother Country has done.”
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In his January memo to Leathers, Amery had noted that the food stringency in India was a result of high prices, arising from the cessation of Burmese imports, crop failure, and the demands of the army and of Ceylon, all of it compounded by hoarding. With prices on the rise, cultivators were refusing to sell while traders and householders were buying grain and storing it for future use, forcing prices even higher. Imports would render the army and part of the urban population less dependent on open-market purchases of grain until the summer wheat was harvested, reducing prices and greatly alleviating the problem.
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Compared to Amery’s incisive analysis, Cherwell’s drop-in-the-bucket argument was shallow. Indeed, India’s harvest was large. The problem lay in distributing it so that everyone got enough—which was more likely to happen if everyone was confident of getting enough. For instance, the people of the United Kingdom knew that their government would take care of them and felt no need to stockpile essentials. The residents of Bengal, in contrast, knew that famine was impending and were equally sure that the government would
not
take care of them.
That awareness had led landowners to store grain for survival, unscrupulous agents to hoard for speculation, and the government itself to stockpile for the war effort. Had the War Cabinet sent significant consignments of grain, it would have demonstrated a resolve to not let the colony starve and signaled that hoarding would be unprofitable. Those holding stocks in excess of their immediate needs would therefore have released them to the market, reducing prices and saving many lives.
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As it happened, the Government of India had already announced that wheat was coming, so Leathers felt obliged to send some. But after arranging for ships to carry 26,000 tons from Australia to India, he found that amount adequate to meet the United Kingdom’s immediate needs from the colony—and became reluctant to assign any more vessels. (During 1943, the United Kingdom continued to draw tea, oilseeds, and cotton from India.) Soon after, the Government of India reported that the lifting of price controls had enabled it to procure enough grain for the time being. In view of the simultaneous grain crisis in eastern Africa, the secretary of state for India asked the viceroy to forgo the shipments already promised.
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Linlithgow protested that India’s grain reserves were so low as to threaten disaster in the near future. “Rice crisis [inevitable] later in the year and additional shipments of wheat will be essential to help to meet this,” he wrote to Amery on February 21, 1943. “India’s own need is so acute that I must press for retention of all tonnage allocated to us already and repeat that further substantial allocations will be necessary later on.” But on March 2—after hearing a member of the viceroy’s council warn of famine—the shipping committee asserted that “no further diversions of ships from the United Kingdom import programme could be contemplated at present.”
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THE INDIAN OCEAN shipping cut saved the United Kingdom from impending calamity, at least as Donald MacDougall of the S branch told the story. The “imports—after falling to a terrifyingly low level for about four months—started arriving in increasing quantities just in time; our stocks—after plummeting in an equally alarming way—
levelled off just above the minimum safety level before starting to recover slowly,” he wrote in his memoir. MacDougall was referring to civilian stocks having reached their lowest point in March 1943—when they were still 3.1 million tons above the level (of 11.5 million tons) considered essential by the shipping committee, and 4.8 million tons above the level (of 9.8 million tons) considered essential by the Ministry of Production. And as it happens, even these so-called safety levels of stocks were inflated. “It is clear in retrospect that minimum food requirements were considerably, and raw materials requirements wildly, overstated,” historian W. K. Hancock and economist M. M. Gowing would comment in their official history of the British war economy. The shipping transferred from the Indian Ocean would add 2 million tons of supplies by the end of the summer. That is, the shipping cut that contributed to the outbreak of famine in Bengal merely added to the margin by which stocks were in excess in Britain.
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Stocks had originally been viewed by the Ministry of Food as a way to tide over the early difficulties of the war, until the dividends were apparent from the Grow More Food program, which expanded the area under cultivation in the British Isles. But as the war wore on, the purpose of the stocks, and the stipulated size, had altered. Cherwell, for instance, saw these food reserves, along with stocks of raw materials needed by factories, not so much as insurance against hard times but as savings that would enable full use to be made of strategic opportunities. “[W]e should strive to build up our stocks so as to be in a position to divert large masses of shipping for military purposes if the occasion arose,” he wrote in a memo. In his view—which prevailed—stocks should be maintained at levels well above those stipulated by the ministries, so that the War Cabinet could retain “flexibility for meeting emergency needs in a period of large scale military operations.”
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In June 1942, for instance, the shipping committee had formulated a plan to run down existing reserves. It “thought that, between January 1942 and June 1943, stocks could be reduced by six million tons before they reached the level estimated for indispensable working stocks,” wrote Hancock and Gowing. By the summer of 1943 the United States would
be producing an abundance of ships, supplies could be swiftly ferried across the Atlantic Ocean, and stocks should no longer be so necessary. But the War Cabinet worried that the Americans might not provide the necessary shipping. If so, food reserves might never be rebuilt to former levels, and “the Government would have no elbow room for strategic operations to take advantage of any sudden weakening of the enemy.” The prime minister inveighed against “tightening the belt,” while the Prof demanded at least 27 million tons of imports in 1943—more than ever before.
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Another reason for maintaining large stocks, and the corresponding claim on shipping, was the prime minister’s distaste for austerity. In the summer of 1940, for instance, the Ministry of Food had estimated that it needed 15 million tons of imported food and animal feed each year, but at the urging of Churchill and Cherwell it had asked for almost 19 million tons. British rations would come to include red meats, butter and other fats, cheese, tea, sugar, jam, and other preserves. Prices were controlled for bread, milk, eggs, poultry, rabbits, frozen cod, canned salmon, herring, canned pork and beans, spreads made of fish and meat, preserved vegetables, potatoes, onions, rice, lentils, tapioca, sago, biscuits, macaroni and other noodles, canned soups, pickles, sauces, relishes, coffee, cocoa, honey, custard powder, jelly, dried fruit, nuts, oranges, and lemons. Rations and price controls required that stocks of at least the nonperishable commodities be maintained. Despite all this effort and expense, however, Americans had access to more meat, eggs, and fresh fruit than did Britons, a disparity that irked the prime minister.
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Sensitivity to the public’s tastes consumed additional tonnage on Allied vessels. Nutritionists argued, for instance, that the fraction of wheat grain used for bread flour, called the
extraction rate
, should be increased so as to enhance the intake of iron and vitamins. Raising the extraction rate would also cut wheat imports and thereby save shipping. But Britons preferred soft white bread, baked out of no more than 80 percent of the flour that whole wheat could yield, so it was not until the spring of 1942 that the extraction rate was increased to 85 percent. The Ministry of Food banned a further increase to 87 percent. That
economy would save shipping space and thereby “weaken our bargaining power in that we should immediately be called upon to surrender an equivalent amount of shipping,” one official argued. American officials at the Combined Food Board, an agency based in Washington, D.C., that coordinated the Allies’ distribution of food, had grown suspicious of British import requirements—which meant that every ton of shipping had to be fought for, sometimes for its own sake.
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The Ministry of Food also resisted the rationing of bread, which it regarded as “the last resort of a starving nation.” The prime minister himself had spoken for such rations in July 1942: he fretted that people might feed chickens with the cheap and plentiful bread. Rationing would reduce such wastage and save a large quantity of shipping. Lord Woolton, a businessman whom Churchill had appointed the minister of food, responded at a War Cabinet meeting that he could save 800,000 tons of shipping by other means if he chose to, and he would prefer that to rationing bread. (Bread rations were introduced only after the war.)
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Diluting the wheat flour used for baking bread with flour from home-grown barley and potatoes would also save shipping and improve nutrition. But barley was needed for beer, which was necessary for morale, and officials “unanimously recoiled” at the prospect of pubs closing for two days a week. Instead, brewers were persuaded to supplement their barley with oats. These deliberations and negotiations took time, so it was not until January 1943 that the order went out to replace 5 percent of the wheat flour used for bread-making with flour made out of potatoes, oats, barley, and rye. The 5 percent was subsequently increased to 10. It saved 284,000 tons of shipping over nine months—although most of the saving came after the summer, when ships became more available again. The sole sacrifice that ordinary Britons were asked to make in response to the shipping crisis of 1943 was to eat multigrain bread.
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Historian Kevin Smith maintains that the War Cabinet’s panic over food and other reserves was nevertheless understandable, in light of the heavy and ongoing losses of Allied merchant vessels to German U-boats. In January 1943, no one could have foreseen that three months later
the battle against the submarines would be won, and ships would thereafter ply in relative safety across the Atlantic. Be that as it may, the remarkable rate at which the United States was producing ships had been expected to render the shipping losses to U-boats irrelevant by the summer, and by that count alone stocks were ample—more than 4 million tons higher, at the end of 1942, than the quantity of food and raw materials the British economy would consume during the next half-year.
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