Churchill's Secret War (36 page)

The conference continued its work in Teheran, where the Soviets joined in. At a tête-à-tête with Stalin, Roosevelt cautioned that it was “unwise” to bring up India in the general discussions, and Stalin agreed that this was a “sore spot with the British.” Sometime in the future, the president continued, he would like to discuss India at length: it would, he said, probably require Soviet-style “reform from the bottom.” Stalin opined that the colony was complicated by culture and caste, but that reform from the bottom meant revolution. The Bengal famine was reaching its climax even as the world leaders met, but it appears not to have been mentioned—which is odd, given that the economics of India were discussed at some length.
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The U.S. military had conquered a number of Pacific islands and was determined to establish a chain of bases there. Because the islands
themselves would be under international control, the president saw no contradiction in establishing such bases under the aegis of the trusteeship scheme; Stalin agreed that footholds near the Axis powers would be useful. Suspecting that the two Allied leaders sought some of the empire’s possessions for these bases, Churchill angrily retorted that the British “intended to hold on to what they had” and “nothing would be taken away from England without a war.” This extraordinary threat must have been directed at the president, who was displaying the most inclination to do away with old-fashioned colonies.
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Sometime during the conference, Stalin baited Churchill, accusing him of cowardice because of his foot-dragging on the invasion of northern France. “What happened?” he teased. “Is it advancing age? How many divisions have you got in contact with the enemy? What is happening to all those two million men you have got in India?” At one vodka-soaked banquet, Churchill was needled by Stalin so mercilessly that he stomped out in a fury.
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ON DECEMBER 16, at a meeting of the War Cabinet that Churchill did not attend because of illness, Leathers mentioned that Canada was “pressing very hard to allow at any rate one shipload of Canadian wheat to go to India.” News of the offer had leaked in both the Indian and the Canadian media, and “the political now perhaps outweighed the shipping aspects,” said Leathers. To Amery’s relief, the War Cabinet acquiesced to a proposal to load a Canadian ship with wheat for India.
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In late July, the Government of India had requested a half-million tons of wheat to be delivered by the end of 1943. That amount was the minimum necessary for maintaining the army and the most essential war workers until the next harvest. Apart from the psychological impact of imports on hoarders (who would take substantial grain imports as a signal of falling prices and thus release grain to the market, thereby causing prices to fall in reality), the needs of rural India had not figured into this calculation. In response, the War Cabinet had authorized 130,000 tons of barley, which was of little help, and 80,000 tons of wheat, the first shipments of which reached India in November. The paucity of relief
meant that for the rest of that year the soldiers and war workers in India continued to consume grain that might otherwise have been used to relieve the suffering of the people. The famine came to an end in late December, when the survivors harvested their own rice crop. According to Chitto Samonto, some in Kalikakundu died of diarrhea because they ate the creamy rice seeds long before they had had a chance to ripen.
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WINSTON CHURCHILL’S TRUE love was war, and it took precedence over such dreary matters as colonial economics. The chief of the Imperial General Staff, Alan Brooke, had a full-time job restraining him from headlong pursuit of whatever glittering military prize had caught his eye. “It is a wonderful character—the most marvellous qualities and superhuman genius mixed with an astonishing lack of vision at times, and an impetuosity which if not guided must inevitably bring him into trouble again and again,” Brooke mused in his diary. “Perhaps the most remarkable failing of his is that he can never see a whole strategical problem at once. His gaze always settles on some definite part of the canvas and the rest of the picture is lost. . . . This failing is accentuated by the fact that often he does not want to see the whole picture, especially if this wider vision should in any way interfere with the operation he may have temporarily set his heart on.”
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Churchill overflowed with ideas for operations and hated the lull that preceded a major undertaking. In the autumn of 1943, soldiers and supplies were being gathered for Operation Overlord, and precious little was left over for supposedly quick and easy side ventures that could turn into quagmires. Yet one day the prime minister would be pushing for an attack on the Balkans, a few days later on Sumatra or Norway, and in another week he would be back at the Balkans again. “He is in a very dangerous condition, most unbalanced, and God knows how we shall finish this war if this goes on,” Brooke wrote in October.
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The previous year, Brooke had turned down the Middle East command so that he could stay in London and prevent the prime minister from precipitating another Gallipoli. Churchill may also have had that disaster in mind when he had appointed Brooke the chief of staff.
That is, he may have been aware that he needed containment while recognizing that, of all his generals, Brooke alone had the personality for that task. “When I thump the table and push my face towards him what does he do? Thumps the table harder and glares back at me,” Churchill had said admiringly. After tremendous and exhausting battles to which he brought the full force of his conviction, lungs, vocabulary, and lachrymal glands, Churchill would eventually back down and accept Brooke’s judgment—only to return to the fray the next day.
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When it came to civilian advisers, however, the prime minister had picked too many cronies, whose sycophantic counsel on the Indian famine he would rely on rather heavily. “All I want is compliance with my wishes after a reasonable amount of discussion,” the prime minister said of the War Cabinet, and he was only half joking. Lord Woolton, Lord Leathers, and Sir Percy James Grigg owed their positions to him and deferred to him. Lord Beaverbrook, who served on the War Cabinet in a variety of positions, was an old friend and ally. Brendan Bracken, the minister of information, once circulated rumors that Churchill was his father, so enamored was he of the older man. (Bracken would personally present to Churchill preview copies of ministers’ speeches due for broadcast by the BBC. One minister was shifted from his post because he intended to say that members of Parliament did much that was asked of them, but refused to shout “
Heil
Churchill!”) As for Cherwell and the S branch, their allegiance was unabashedly to Churchill alone.
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“Churchill on top of the wave has in him the stuff of which tyrants are made,” Beaverbrook had once warned. Lord Moran, Churchill’s doctor, similarly noted: “when the sun shines his arrogance, intolerance and cocksureness assume alarming proportions.” Ever the bumptious schoolboy, the prime minister may also have relished thumbing his nose at Leopold Amery, his lifelong rival and critic. Churchill “is instinctively inclined to disagree with anything I say,” the secretary of state for India had observed two years earlier. Despite never having been to India as an adult, Amery was a far more knowledgeable and legitimate adviser on the colony than was Cherwell. Yet Amery was also long-winded and incapable of expressing himself dramatically; he had little hope of seducing
the prime minister with the kind of catchy epithet Churchill relished and respected. The Prof, in contrast, knew exactly which buttons to push.
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The problem was that whereas Brooke served as a restraint, Cherwell acted as a goad. Lord Moran commented that the Prof ’s placid appearance deceived many who met him casually. Once they got into conversation with him, “men learnt with a start of surprise that the most violent views were hidden and disguised by the level tones of the Prof.’s voice.” In a 1960 lecture at Harvard on Cherwell’s wartime influence, physicist and writer C. P. Snow would say of Churchill’s chief adviser: “He was formidable, he was savage.” Snow complained that Cherwell’s advocacy of area bombing of German civilian houses had prevailed over the objections of other physicists. The Prof’s close relationship with Churchill had given him “more direct power than any scientist in history,” Snow argued, and power so unchecked was harmful.
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Churchill did question Cherwell’s judgment on one occasion (when the scientist dismissed evidence that the Germans were developing a rocket capable of damaging London). Yet the Prof never wavered in his personal devotion to the prime minister. The only other individuals of whom Cherwell was heard to speak admiringly were Albert Einstein and Lord Birkenhead, his biographer’s father. Cherwell believed that a small circle of the intelligent and the aristocratic should run the world. “Those who succeed in getting what everyone wants must be the ablest,” he asserted. The Prof regarded the masses as “very stupid,” considered Australians to be inferior to Britons, advocated “harshness” toward homosexuals, and thought criminals should be treated cruelly because “the amount of pleasure derived by other people from the knowledge that a malefactor is being punished far exceeds in sum total the amount of pain inflicted on a malefactor by his punishment.”
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Inferior as the British working class was in Cherwell’s view, he nonetheless ranked it far above the black and brown subjects in the colonies. A measure of his racism can be found in his assertion that “20 percent of white people and 80 percent of coloured were immune” to mustard gas. The figures are clearly incorrect, because biology admits
of no such chasm between the races, but they are in keeping with early-twentieth-century notions of eugenics.
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Eugenic ideas also feature in a lecture that Lord Cherwell (then known as Professor Lindemann) had delivered more than once, probably in the early 1930s. He had detailed a science-based solution to a challenge that occupied many an intellect of the time: preserving for eternity the hegemony of the superior classes. Any attempt “to force upon Nature an equality she has never admitted” was bound to lead to bloody strife, the scientist asserted in a draft of this talk. Instead of subscribing to what he called “the fetish of equality,” he recommended that human differences be accepted and indeed enhanced by means of science. It was no longer necessary, he wrote, to wait for “the haphazard process of natural selection to ensure that the slow and heavy mind gravitates to the lowest form of activity.” New technologies such as surgery, mind control, and drug and hormone manipulations would one day allow humans to be fine-tuned for specific tasks. Society could create “gladiators or philosophers, athletes or artists, satyrs or monks” at will—indeed, it could manufacture “men with a passion and perhaps even aptitude for any desired vocation.” At the lower end of the race and class spectrum, one could remove from “helots” (the Greek word for slaves) the ability to suffer or to feel ambition.
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“Somebody must perform dull, dreary tasks, tend machines, count units in repetition work; is it not incumbent on us, if we have the means, to produce individuals without a distaste for such work, types that are as happy in their monotonous occupation as a cow chewing the cud?” Lindemann asked. Science could yield a race of humans blessed with “the mental make-up of the worker bee.” This subclass would do all the unpleasant work and not once think of revolution or of voting rights: “Placid content rules in the bee-hive or ant-heap.” The outcome would be a perfectly peaceable and stable society, “led by supermen and served by helots.”

Because many people would evince an “illogical disgust” of such alterations to the nature of the human species, one might have to make do with great apes for such tasks instead of humans, the Prof conceded.
It would of course be “somewhat more difficult to make an efficient bricklayer out of a gorilla than out of a bushman,” but at least no one would demand votes on behalf of an ape. As for the “unlimited number of half-witted children born of mentally defective parents,” sterilization could and should ensure that society be freed of that burden. “Philosophers have failed to agree on any definition of what is good and what should be our aim is a matter of individual opinion,” the professor summarized. “But unless we desire to see our civilisation perish, to see it disappear as the great eastern cultures of the Nile and Mesopotamia did, unless we wish to prepare [for] new dark ages such as followed the crumbling of the Roman empire, the fundamental cause of present day unrest will have to be removed.” To consolidate the rule of supermen—to perpetuate the British Empire—one need only remove the ability of slaves to see themselves as slaves.
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Lindemann’s utopia bears an uncanny resemblance to the science-determined dystopia that a contemporary writer, Aldous Huxley, brought to life in his novel
Brave New World
. And his talk of helots suggests inspiration from Sparta, a racially segregated city-state about which he would have learned in school. The Prof may also have derived from ancient Greece the insight that hierarchical regimes are most endangered by those who chafe under their bonds. The Spartans once offered freedom to 2,000 helots who had performed bravely in war and then killed all those who stepped forward to claim their liberty, on the assumption that, as recorded by the classical historian Thucydides, they “would be the most high-spirited and the most apt to rebel.”
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In Lindemann’s utopia, racial superiority alone would not win a high social ranking: he demanded intellectual superiority or aristocratic lineage as well. He envisioned a clique of exalted beings perched on top of a pyramid, with the rest of society ordered in caste-like layers beneath. The hierarchy resembles the terrifying society that George Orwell would sketch in his novel
1984
, in which a class of elites uses mind control to rule over a society of commoners and, below them, so inferior and distant as to be almost invisible, slaves in the colonies. The objective of the three empires chronicled in
1984
“was to arrest progress and freeze
history at a chosen moment,” wrote Orwell, so that “this time, by conscious strategy, the High would be able to maintain their position permanently.” This was the selfsame outcome that the Prof hoped to deliver. Cherwell’s utopia also recalls the predator-prey pyramid envisaged by Darwin, in which the King of the Jungle forever reigns over forests and fields of scurrying rabbits.
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