Churchill's Secret War (35 page)

In truth, Indian famines of the Victorian era cannot be fitted into Malthus’s framework, because he did not envision a worldwide grain trade that would enable the people of certain nations to consume far more or far less food than they could produce. Throughout the nineteenth century Indians were harvesting enough grain to feed themselves, but the export cycle had drained grain surpluses and driven food prices
beyond the reach of the poor. Great Britain, in contrast, produced far less grain than necessary to sustain its people but was free of Malthusian constraints on its population because it relied on imported food. In short, to use the language that economist Amartya Sen would introduce—in the context of the 1943 Bengal famine—the vanishing purchasing power or “exchange entitlements” of some sectors of society, having been pitted directly against the far greater entitlements of others, resulted in starvation in India.
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In his memo to Churchill, Lord Cherwell suggested that the Bengal famine arose from crop failure and high birthrate. He omitted to mention that the calamity also derived from India’s role of supplier to the Allied war effort; that the colony was not being permitted to spend its sterling reserves or to employ its own ships in importing sufficient food; and that by his Malthusian logic Britain should have been the first to starve—but was being sustained by food imports that were six times larger than the one-and-a-half million tons that the Government of India had requested for the coming year. The memo did raise the prospect that harm would be inflicted on long-suffering Britons if help were extended to over-fecund Indians. At the War Cabinet meeting the day after the memo was promulgated, November 10, 1943, the prime minister gave his own Darwinian twist to Cherwell’s Malthusian considerations. Amery made his plea, following which “Winston, after a preliminary flourish on Indians breeding like rabbits and being paid a million a day by us for doing nothing about the war, asked Leathers for his view.”
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In his pronouncements over the years, Churchill had invented some wonderfully apt animal metaphors, with rabbits the least among them. A communist such as Stalin resembled a crocodile: “when it opens its mouth you cannot tell whether it is trying to smile, or preparing to eat you up.” After a coup had done away with a pro-Axis regime in Yugoslavia, he said Hitler was in a more vicious mood than a “boa constrictor, who had already covered his prey with his foul saliva and then had it suddenly wrested from his coils.” The prime minister declared that while facing Italian forces in the desert, Britannica was an “old lion
with her lion cubs at her side,” one of which may have been India—or at least its warlike aspect, the army. Gandhi had once been a tiger, but he had long since descended the food chain. More often than not the small, brown, fangless, and numberless Indians whom the frail old pacifist personified brought to Churchill’s mind a prey species. “The British lion, so fierce and valiant in bygone days, so dauntless and unconquerable through all the agony of Armageddon, can now be chased by rabbits from the fields and forests of his former glory,” he had warned during the 1930s campaign against native self-rule. During the Quit India uprising, the government had the rebels “on the run.” Winston Churchill, the quintessential lion, was an excellent shot when it came to rabbits, and earlier in the war was heard to repeatedly murmur the first two lines of the ditty:
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The prey’s role is to nourish the predator, and the predator’s role is to keep the prey from overbreeding. Lions do not feed rabbits.

In the War Cabinet meeting that November day, Leathers said that he could do nothing to assuage India’s hunger that December. He could, however, manage to send 50,000 tons for each of January and February, and that was agreed upon. As it happened, Canada had offered a free gift of 100,000 tons of wheat to India to relieve the famine, and Viceroy Wavell had accepted. Churchill had already rejected Canada’s proposal because, according to a document with the Ministry of War Transport, “it would be unjustifiable to impose any additional strain on our shipping resources (especially if that involved seeking further shipping assistance from the Americans) for the sake of the wholly uneconomic prospect of shipping wheat from Canada to India.” But a Canadian ship of 10,000 tons had become available at Vancouver, and Prime Minister
Mackenzie King wanted to fill it with wheat for India. To Amery’s consternation, Leathers and Churchill were “vehement against this” and resolved to stop the consignment. “I can only trust that they won’t have begun loading before Winston’s telegram arrives,” Amery recorded. “The trouble is that Winston so dislikes India and all to do with it that he can see nothing but the mere waste of shipping space involved in the longer journey.”
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At the time, a consignment of 9,000 tons of rice from Brazil was on its way to Ceylon, and shiploads of Australian wheat were circumnavigating India on their way to the Balkan stockpile. Other ships were traveling to Argentina to collect wheat for Britain—a trip twice as long as that to Canada or the United States. And as it happened, the United Kingdom already had more than enough wheat. “I hope that out of the present surplus of grain you will manage to do a little more for the domestic poultry keeper,” the prime minister directed the day after this meeting. If their hens could get more grain, Britons would get more eggs.
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EVEN AS THE War Cabinet debated the Bengal famine that November, representatives of forty-four nations were meeting in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to hammer out the details of what would become the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). India was represented by its agent-general in the United States, Sir Girija Bajpai, and by a gatecrasher named Jagjit J. Singh, a “6-foot, handsome Sikh from Kashmir,” according to
Time
magazine. Singh was an entrepreneur and head of an immigrant association, the India League of America; he had earlier sent a report on the Bengal famine to Eleanor Roosevelt, who had passed it on to her husband. “This is a matter which the new UNRRA can properly take up,” the president had responded.

But a key U.S. representative to the UNRRA, the diplomat Dean Acheson, stated that India was not eligible for aid. Singh protested that surely the starving in Bengal qualified, given that the organization’s charter promised “relief of victims of war in any area under the control
of any of the United Nations.” The British representative, Colonel John J. Llewellin, announced, however, that India was not a victim of war, and its case was not taken up for discussion.

The leftist commentator I. F. Stone approved Singh’s effort to give the issue of famine an airing. “I have found general agreement among officials dealing with shipping that it is nonsense to talk of a shipping shortage in connection with food for India,” Stone wrote. “With some 50,000,000 tons available, much of it inadequately utilized, a few hundred thousand tons of shipping could easily be allocated to ease the famine.” The problem, Stone felt, was politics: “Shipments made under pressure from public opinion would imply embarrassing admissions in British domestic policies, revive hopes of American interference in India.”
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It was an issue on which Americans of both political parties could come together. Karl Mundt, a Republican congressman from South Dakota, met Singh and became infused with passion for his cause. Speaking in December before the House of Representatives, Mundt accused the UNRRA of harboring a “malevolent bias” against a patient ally. How did it make sense to feed former enemies and starve a friend? he asked. His appeal fell on deaf ears, so the congressman coached Singh on the tactics of lobbying on Capitol Hill. After a vigorous battle, in February 1944 the two managed to win over enough Democrats to insert an amendment to the UNRRA bill extending benefits to “any area important to the military operations of the United Nations which is stricken by famine or disease.”
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All that effort was in vain. The War Cabinet did not permit the Government of India to apply for aid—a necessary formality before it could be sent. British authorities did, however, donate $30 million of the colony’s wartime earnings to the UNRRA, making India the sixth-largest contributor to the fund.
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AN UNRRA ALLOTMENT of grain to India would have brought to the fore a discomfiting question: who would ferry it to Bengal? As Amery noted, the UNRRA itself was “not in a position to provide any shipping.”
Had any grain been sanctioned, the ships would have had to come either from the United States or from the British Empire.
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The War Cabinet did not intend to request further shipping from the Americans. Nor would it slow the buildup of its stockpiles by releasing ships or grain. Throughout that autumn, the United Kingdom’s civilian stocks of food and raw materials continued to swell, so that by the end of 1943 they would stand at 18.5 million tons, the highest total ever. The United Kingdom imported that year 4 million tons of wheat grain and flour, 1.4 million tons of sugar, 1.6 million tons of meat, 409,000 heads of live cattle, 325,000 tons of fish, 131,000 tons of rice, 206,000 tons of tea, 172,000 tons of cocoa, and 1.1 million gallons of wine for its 47.7 million people—a population 14 million fewer than that of Bengal. Sugar and oilseeds overflowed warehouses and had to be stored outdoors in England under tarpaulins. American and Canadian grain traders complained that excessive British demand was distorting the market and worried that, after the war, the United Kingdom would use its vast stocks to manipulate world prices.
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Why was such a stockpile necessary? The U-boat threat had fallen away, the tide of war had turned, and a plethora of ships were available. Hitler still could, and would, launch air strikes on the United Kingdom, but the Blitz had shown that almost three-quarters of the supplies directly affected by bombing could be recovered. Air attacks threatened lives, not food supply. That fall, ships were being diverted to bring equipment for Operation Overlord, the invasion of northern France that would be launched from British soil—so it made sense to keep some extra stores at hand. But the quantities being held were far too large to be explained by the prospect of that attack alone. The War Cabinet’s preoccupation with domestic stocks was in fact motivated by the economic shocks that would follow the fall of Germany. In October 1943, Churchill had informed the public that the government was preparing for the end of the war. The first of the “urgent needs” of the postwar period was to plan for smooth demobilization, and the second was the “provision of food for our island on a scale better than the war-time rations.”
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Historian R. J. Hammond has noted that the Ministry of Food’s estimates of minimum required stocks increased in tandem with actual stocks. For instance, whereas it had stated 850,000 tons of wheat as the minimum working stock in 1943, the ministry set the figure at a million tons in 1945 and represented this as a reduction from a supposed wartime minimum of 1.2 million tons. The stated minimum for oilseeds similarly swelled. “What purported to be an insurance against a breakdown of distribution was in reality something that could hardly be avowed within the Ministry of Food, and certainly not at the Combined Food Board,” where Americans were all too eager to dissect British stock levels—“namely an attempt to protect the future level of United Kingdom consumption,” Hammond wrote.
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In November 1943, Viceroy Wavell circulated a memorandum that explained to the provinces’ governors why no aid could be expected for Bengal. “The Ministry of Food expect a world shortage of cereals, and although the shipping position has improved very greatly the Ministry of War Transport has to consider not merely the tonnage available but its operation as part of the general strategic plan. Thus, though foodgrains may be immediately available in Australia or North America the Ministry of Food may be reluctant to release them, and the Ministry of War Transport may be unable to deliver them to India except by diverting ships and changing loading programmes on a scale sufficient to be most embarrassing.”
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In other words, the harvests of Australia and Canada were being regarded as part of the United Kingdom’s strategic stockpile and were being conserved for postwar use—as had been recommended during the War Cabinet meeting of January 5, 1943. “Shipping [difficulty] cuts both ways,” the minister of production had declared at the time. “It means [that] we are piling up stocks overseas.” An undated S branch memo noted that Colonel Llewellin, who succeeded Lord Woolton as the minister of food near the end of 1943, was demanding a minimum stock of 12 million tons of wheat (presumably in the British Empire as a whole). That amount would be easy to achieve, given that “at the end of 1943/44 harvest year, stocks will amount to about 29,000,000 tons,
assuming no relief shipments” to liberated areas. Still, the memo continued, it was somewhat excessive to regard “100% of the volume of trade to the ‘Free World’” as a necessary minimum stock, given that 7 million tons would be ample.
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The extraordinary quantity of wheat stocks that the Ministry of Food regarded as essential militated against even a few hundred thousand tons being expended on famine relief in Bengal. Another reason for the paucity of aid, as Wavell had explained it, was the risk of loss of face. The diversion of a large amount of tonnage to India would possibly have been “most embarrassing” because it would have proved to Americans what they had suspected all along: the British had extracted a lot more shipping than they really needed.

 

WHEN THE U.S. president and the prime minister met that November in Cairo, much of the talk was about the demands of the postwar world. The Americans wanted to treat colonies, such as those of France, as “trustees” of what would be a newly organized United Nations. For the time being the colonies would remain under imperial control, but would be coached toward independence; and inspectors would visit from time to time to gauge their living conditions and political progress. Churchill refused outright to subject the British Empire to such an order.