Churchill's Secret War (39 page)

Other colonies were also trying to figure out what the postwar order held for them—adding to the prime minister’s distress. When the necessity of granting self-government to Ceylon came up, “Winston muttered and growled and mumbled for a quarter of an hour or more in order to ventilate his emotions of disgust at anything that could extend self-government to brown people, but in the end subsided and gave way.” All such matters, Amery observed, raised in Churchill “a wholly uncontrollable complex.”
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In July 1944, “Winston sent me a peevish telegram to ask why Gandhi hadn’t died yet!” Wavell recorded in his diary. “He has never answered my telegram about food.” Gandhi also wrote to the viceroy, offering to suspend the Quit India movement and to collaborate with
the war effort in exchange for an immediate declaration of independence. Military operations could continue, he wrote, but “without involving any financial burden on India.” The viceroy drafted a polite reply turning Gandhi down, but offering an olive branch: if Hindus, Muslims, and the main Indian minorities agreed on a constitution, they could form a transitional government, under the tutelage of the existing one, until the war was over. In the proposed missive, Wavell also gave his blessings to private discussions scheduled between Gandhi and Jinnah.
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When Wavell’s draft came before the War Cabinet, “the real storm broke,” wrote Amery. The viceroy should not be interacting with “a traitor who ought to be put back in prison,” raged the prime minister. “As for Wavell he ought never to have been appointed.” The tirade lasted for a full hour: Churchill was prepared “to resign rather than betray our ancient trust, etc.” A committee had rewritten Wavell’s response so that it bristled with hostile legalese, but the War Cabinet sent it back for further revision.
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Amery’s diary entry for August 4, 1944, is worth quoting at length. At the War Cabinet meeting that day, Churchill inserted into the new draft a statement of British responsibilities toward Untouchables in a land ruled by Caste Hindus. Amery pointed out that this was irrelevant to the issues that Gandhi had raised. “However, this let loose Winston in a state of great exultation describing how after the war he was going to go back on all the shameful story of the last twenty years of surrender, how once we had won the war there was no obligation to honour promises made at a time of difficulty, and not taken up by the Indians, and carry out a great regeneration of India based on extinguishing landlords and oppressive industrialists and uplift the peasant and untouchable, probably by collectivisation on Russian lines. It might be necessary to get rid of wretched sentimentalists like Wavell and most of the present English officials in India, who were more Indian than the Indians, and send out new men. What was all my professed patriotism worth if I did not stand up for my own countrymen against Indian money-lenders? Naturally I lost patience and couldn’t help telling him that I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s which annoyed him
no little. I am by no means sure whether on this subject of India he is really quite sane.”

A Churchillian explosion followed Amery’s outburst, after which a report on the sterling debt came up for discussion. The report advised that revising the financial agreement with India would be difficult, in part because of the “deprivation and starvation” that the colony had undergone—and it set the prime minister off again. “A long tirade on the worthlessness of the Indian Army was too much for me and I went for him hammer and tongs pointing out what India had done ever since it had saved the Middle East,” wrote Amery. Then Churchill segued into “a long description of how he was going to present his counterclaim to India for all we have done for her defence. . . . To try and put any of the economic side of the case into his head was hopeless, but I do think I finally got him to realise the futility of raising the issue with India now when we must have what India can supply.”
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THE CONTRETEMPS OCCURRED a year to the day since the War Cabinet had made its first, and most crucial, decision to deny meaningful relief to Bengal. It was also a year to the day since the committee on Indian inflation had been set up—the same body whose report was on the table. Perhaps the anniversary was on Amery’s mind, particularly if he was apprehending another famine. Amery made the Hitler remark in the heat of argument, but clearly he stood by it. For he left much out of his diaries—notably, any hint of his Jewish heritage—and the retention of this explosive comment can be no accident. Given that Chaim Weizmann, the future premier of Israel, had recently told Amery about “the monstrous German blackmailing offer to release a million Jews in return for ten thousand lorries and other equipment, failing which bargain they proposed to exterminate them,” he understood as well as anyone could in those times the implications of his remark.
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Amery may also have been irked by the reference to moneylenders—a hint that Churchill saw upper-class Indians, in particular Bengali babus, through the same lens as anti-Semites might perceive Jews. Others had made an explicit comparison. “All those arts which are the natural
defence of the weak are more familiar to this subtle race than to . . . the Jew of the dark ages,” Macaulay had written of the Bengali, who compressed into his diminutive form every loathsome aspect of the Hindu. “[A]s usurers, as money-changers, as sharp legal practitioners, no class of human beings can bear a comparison with them.” The Bengali babu, another writer had joked in 1911, was “something of an Irishman, something of an Italian, something of a Jew: if one can conceive of an Irishman who would run away from a fight instead of into it, an Italian without a sense of beauty and a Jew who would not risk five pounds on the chance of making five hundred.”
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The frustration that Amery felt that August can perhaps best be gauged by means of an extraordinary three-page typewritten draft that is to be found among his files. Entitled “The Regeneration of India: Memorandum by the Prime Minister” and appended with the initials
W.S.C.
, the manuscript appears at first glance to have indeed been written by Churchill. But a finely penciled notation reveals the paper’s true author: “A skit by LSA after a harangue by WSC in Cabinet—only slightly exaggerated.” The last two words are underlined.

“We have had enough . . . of shameful pledges about Indian self-government, and of sickening surrenders to babu agitation,” the document asserted. “If we went even further two years ago in an open invitation to Indians to unite and kick us out of India that was only because we were in a hole.” After the war was over, continued the paper, the prime minister would announce a new policy on the colony: “No more nonsense about self-government; down with all (brown) landlords and profit making industrialists, collectivise agriculture on Russian lines and touch up the untouchables.” The scheme would require removing all those Englishmen, beginning with the viceroy, who “would not only appear to have taken our pledges seriously, but to be imbued with a miserable sneaking sympathy for what are called Indian aspirations, not to speak of an inveterate and scandalous propensity to defend Indian interests as against those of their own country, and a readiness to see British workers sweat and toil for generations in order to swell yet further the distended paunches of Hindu moneylenders.”

The numerous babus “who infest the government offices” would also have to be disposed of, and replaced by a new force of English re-educators who would uphold “our historic right to govern India in accordance with our own ideas and interests.” Every five villages would require “[o]ne English instructor in the new way of life and one English head policeman with five Indian subordinates drawn from the loyal martial races.” In total, the colony would require 160,000 instructors in “regeneration,” 160,000 English police officers, and 800,000 Indian policemen. Any criticism in the British Parliament of this “new Dawn over India” would be banned. “It will also be necessary, following an excellent Russian precedent, to forbid any but trusted officials to leave India or to allow any visitors from outside except under the closest supervision by an official Intourist Agency.”
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Another penciled notation confirms that this paper was written in August 1944. Amery must have caricatured the prime minister’s ramblings in order to vent his anger, and perhaps also to explain to shocked colleagues why he had compared the beloved statesman to the man who would become the most reviled figure of the twentieth century. “I have stood much during these four years which I should not have stood but for the common danger and for Winston’s indispensable gifts as a war leader,” Amery confided to his diary. “Now the danger is over . . . while the dangers arising from his lack of judgement and knowledge in many respects and his sheer lack of sanity over India make him increasingly dangerous.”
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Amery’s papers, which were opened to the public in 1997, decades after his death, may be seen as a plea for understanding. Amery had been an elder statesman, a gifted and respected Tory leader with more vision and liberality than most. Saddled with a thankless job for the duration of the war, he had done his best for Britain. But to the extent that posterity would remember him, it would be as the imperialist who had presided over the Bengal famine. It should not be surprising that Amery wanted to tell his side of the story, at a time when it could no longer harm anyone.

ONCE AGAIN THE prime minister crossed the Atlantic on the
Queen Mary
, consuming meals such as this one described by his personal secretary: “Oysters, consommé, turbot, roast turkey, ice with canteloupe melon, Stilton cheese and a great variety of fruit, petit fours, etc.; the whole washed down by champagne (Mumm 1929) and a very remarkable Liebfraumilch [sweet German white wine], followed by some 1870 brandy.” During dinner in Quebec on September 13, 1944, the prime minister argued with President Roosevelt for an hour over India. “Churchill talked rather angrily at length about the difficulties the British were confronted with administering India and on the lack of understanding in the United States about the Indian problem,” recorded an American observer. The prime minister offered his critics half of India to manage, to see if they could do any better.
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Churchill was determined to recapture Singapore, which he described as “the only prize that will restore British prestige in this region.” India’s economy was still so fragile, however, that the viceroy was reluctant to use the colony as the base for a final, massed attack against Japanese forces, scheduled for 1945. That would require the colony to serve as home base for 27 divisions and more than 200 squadrons. The Chiefs of Staff debated whether Australia or the Middle East might make for a more stable headquarters—but the S branch held otherwise.
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The supplies needed by the additional troops “would impose very little extra burden on the Indian economy,” an S branch paper argued. “Between 1939 and 1943 total expenditure on stores, hospitals, general measures, roads, etc. has amounted to only about £50 million as compared with an annual budget deficit of £250 million. A small increase of another few millions here would make little difference.” India’s primary burden, to the tune of £190 million a year, was that of supplying overseas war theaters. A “very drastic cut in our expenditure will be necessary to do much good,” Wilson elaborated in another memo, and that was not about to happen. Instead of forcing the Indians to deal with their problems, Wilson commented, Amery “prefers to shift the responsibility to us by telling us that we must not ask so much from India.”
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Rather than decrease the financial load on India, the War Cabinet drastically increased it by giving all British soldiers in the east a pay raise. The viceroy was furious at not even having been consulted. General Auchinlek demanded a commensurate increase for native soldiers, who were already resentful of getting a third of what their white counterparts earned. Overall, the enhancement added £50 million to India’s crippling inflationary burden. “I have found H.M.G.’s attitude to India negligent, hostile and contemptuous to a degree I had not anticipated,” a weary Wavell wrote in his diary.
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The viceroy did, however, receive 660,450 tons of wheat in 1944—despite the fact that in the fall the Americans suddenly withdrew part of the shipping assigned for British civilian imports. Fending off a second Indian famine took the combined efforts of the secretary of state for India, the viceroy of India, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, the supreme commander in Southeast Asia, and the commander-in-chief in India. It would be beyond anyone’s power, however, to win the prime minister’s consent to loosening political control over the colony.
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O
n August 8, 1944, Gandhi instructed all the insurgents who had gone underground to reveal their whereabouts to the authorities. In effect, he dissolved the renegade governments that had sprung up around the country. Gandhi believed that resistance should be open, courageous, and nonviolent: he disliked secrecy. He may also have hoped that the surrender of these rebels would persuade the Government of India to release the tens of thousands of Congress members who were entering their third year in prison.
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“All my dreams were dashed,” Sushil Dhara wrote. Gandhi’s order had come on top of profound disappointment over the Indian National Army’s fortunes. Throughout the previous year Dhara had listened on a makeshift radio to Axis broadcasts and dreamed of the footfall of Subhas Chandra Bose on the muktanchal, or free zone, that he and other rebels had carved out on the shores of western Bengal. In Dhara’s fantasy, Netaji, or Respected Leader—as his followers called Bose—would arrive in the vicinity of Midnapore by submarine, along with his forces. Dhara would approach, flying a white flag, and with fervent humility and devotion invite the hero onto the soil of his homeland. The INA would rest and regroup in Tamluk for a week. Dhara’s Lightning Brigade would meld with it, and the women’s brigade would merge with the Rani of Jhansi regiment. The people of Midnapore would rise as one to welcome their savior, so that India’s army of freedom would swell by more than 100,000 exalted souls.