Churchill's Secret War (5 page)

“I
n my view England is now beginning a new period of struggle and fighting for its life,” Winston Churchill wrote in 1933, “and the crux of it will be not only the retention of India but a much stronger assertion of commercial rights.” As the world began to edge toward war, none of the globe’s other empires, such as the French or the Dutch, were about to relinquish their possessions; and Japan was already conquering new realms. According to Churchill, who was urging armament against a newly resurgent Germany, this crucial moment was no time to cede political powers to Indians, as the British government was planning to do. In the conflict to come, he believed the United Kingdom would need its huge and resource-rich possession as never before.
¹

Six years after Churchill’s avowal and two days after the Nazis began their blitzkrieg into Poland, on September 3, 1939, the United Kingdom declared war on Germany. So did the viceroy of India, on behalf of nearly 400 million subjects of the British Empire. The colony was vital to the defense of British interests around the world. It sat in the middle of the supply and communication route that stretched from the United Kingdom, through the Suez Canal or around the Cape of Good Hope, and across the Indian Ocean to Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand. Throughout World War II, ships would transport food, armaments, and troops from the colonies and dominions on the periphery of the Indian Ocean to the United Kingdom, as well as to war theaters around the Mediterranean Sea or in Southeast Asia.

The Indian population would play a significant role in the war. Of the colony’s prewar budget, a third went toward defense, and that
fraction had increased to two-fifths by 1939. The Indian Army’s primary domestic tasks were to guard the northwestern border against Soviet incursions southward across Afghanistan and to ensure internal security. Just as important, this army was ideally situated to defend British dependencies in the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia, and could be dispatched to diverse theaters under direct orders from London. At the start of the war, it comprised 43,500 British and 131,000 Indian troops, some of whom had already been sent to Egypt and Singapore. Churchill, then a member of the War Cabinet, recommended that a further 60,000 British troops “be sent to India to maintain internal security and complete their training,” while at least 40,000 trained troops be brought back. While being trained, the white soldiers would forestall any uprising among the increasingly restive population of Indians intent on independence.
²

“I was kept for this job,” Churchill confided to his doctor when he succeeded Neville Chamberlain as prime minister on May 10, 1940. Over his sixty-five years, Churchill had repeatedly placed himself in danger and had had several narrow escapes, which had bolstered his profound conviction that he was destined for a mighty task. It had taken him most of his life to discover what that something was: to lead The Island Race, as he would entitle his history of the British, in a great struggle. “I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial,” Churchill wrote of his accession to the most powerful position in the British Empire. Three days after his appointment he addressed the Parliament and the nation, promising nothing but “blood, toil, tears and sweat.” The aim of the war, he declared, was “victory, victory at all costs . . . for without victory, there is no survival. Let that be realised; no survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal.” The prime minister would not only defend the British Isles from invasion and subjugation by Hitler’s armies; he would safeguard its vast and sprawling empire. But India, like some of
the other colonies and dominions, would sacrifice at least as much as the United Kingdom did in the defense of an empire from which it had long been struggling to break free.
³

To make sure India obeyed him and did its part to support the war, Churchill needed a lieutenant with a record of firmness in dealing with colonies. The very day he gave his rousing “blood, toil, tears and sweat” peroration, the prime minister summoned the respected elder statesman Leopold S. Amery and asked him to serve as secretary of state for India.

Amery was bitterly disappointed by the request. He was sixty-six, a year older than Churchill, and up to that point his career had broadly paralleled that of the prime minister. Amery had covered the Boer War as a correspondent, had served in World War I, and had subsequently been appointed first Lord of the Admiralty and colonial secretary. At the very least, he had expected a significant role in the War Cabinet helping to direct the war effort. It was even said that if Amery had been “half a head taller and his speeches half an hour shorter” he might have become prime minister himself. Amery had also just played a central role in the Tory Party mutiny that had brought down Chamberlain and installed Churchill. A week earlier, he had denounced Chamberlain from the floor of Parliament: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing,” Amery had declaimed, invoking the words of Oliver Cromwell, the seventeenth-century British leader who had deposed and killed King Charles I: “Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”
⁴

Amery protested to Churchill that he was “side tracking me from the real conduct of the war.” Not so, the prime minister responded: it was important to ensure that India contribute as much as possible to the war, which might even move east. Amery was not persuaded, and believed that Chamberlain had urged against his appointment to the War Cabinet. Historian William Roger Louis holds, however, that by giving him a relatively subordinate role Churchill sought to contain a potential rival, one reputed to be “a man of integrity and judgment who had the courage to speak his convictions regardless of consequence.” Eventually the patriot
in Amery prevailed—even as he maintained a private hope that a cabinet reshuffle would bring him closer to power. He accepted the position.
⁵

The new secretary of state for India rapidly put mechanisms in place “to utilize Indian supplies to the utmost,” as he described in his diary, and moved to impart to the marquess of Linlithgow, the viceroy in New Delhi, emergency powers of arrest and detention, control of the press, prohibition of seditious groups, and so on. “My whole conception is that of India humming from end to end with activity in munitions and supply production and at the same time with the bustle of men training for active service of one sort or another, the first operation largely paying for the cost of the second,” Amery explained to Linlithgow.
⁶

The Indian Army was slated to play a crucial role in the war, and in June 1940 the prime minister directed Amery to ensure that additional divisions were shipped westward. “The fact that we are somewhat reducing the quality of our British garrisons [in India], makes it all the more desirable that a larger number of Indian troops should also be employed outside India,” Churchill explained. That is, because recent recruits from the United Kingdom, who were in need of training, were replacing more experienced white troops in India (the latter were either returning home to defend Britain or moving to the war theaters), any mutiny by the native soldiers would be all the more difficult to quell. So India’s internal security required that as many of the sepoys as possible should also be abroad. Moreover, Churchill continued, it appeared that the war would “spread to the Middle East, and the climate of Iraq, Palestine and Egypt are well suited to Indian troops.” The prime minister’s greater apprehension of a mutiny than of an external attack would mean that when Japanese forces suddenly and ominously arrived at India’s eastern border in March 1942, the colony’s most highly trained and best-equipped divisions would be on another continent.
⁷

Apart from supplying soldiers for some of the toughest combat in countries around the Mediterranean Sea, India was designated to provide the bulk of supplies for those theaters. Starting in May, Amery oversaw the effort to ship from India around 40,000 tons of grain per month,
a tenth of its railway engines and carriages, and even railway tracks uprooted from less important train lines. The colony’s entire commercial production of timber, woolen textiles, and leather goods, and three-quarters of its steel and cement production, would be required for the war. Factories near Calcutta were soon turning out ammunition, grenades, bombs, guns, and other weaponry; Bombay’s mills were producing uniforms and parachutes, while plants all over the country were contributing boots, jeep bodies and chassis, machine parts, and hundreds of ancillary items such as binoculars for which the need had suddenly swelled. Apart from the United Kingdom itself, India would become the largest contributor to the empire’s war—providing goods and services worth more than £2 billion.
⁸

Leopold Amery had not visited India since he had left it as a small child. He sought to travel there, to gauge first-hand the manifold problems with the war effort, but discovered that the viceroy was too protective of his turf to acquiesce. Lord Linlithgow was an acknowledged expert on India and had been viceroy since 1936; Amery, being far less familiar with the colony’s affairs, needed his cooperation. Yet over a lifetime of service to the needs of the empire, Amery had acquired a special skill: devising constitutions that ceded power to colonies in small and careful doses. Resolving to maximize India’s contribution to the war, he decided to apply this expertise toward breaking the prevailing impasse with the country’s nationalists.
⁹

 

AMONG INDIANS, THE advent of war had brought anxiety mingled with hope. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, now seventy, had retired from active politics because he was unhappy with the socialism pro-pounded by younger leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose. The attractive and erudite Nehru, who turned fifty in 1939, had long played a prominent role in the Indian National Congress. Early in his career Nehru had been emotionally and ideologically close to Gandhi, but they had since diverged on a number of issues. Bose, who was eight years younger than Nehru, was a passionate radical who
had spent most of his adult life in prison or in exile because of his extreme antipathy to colonialism—which included, on more than one occasion, expressing a sympathetic interest in armed rebellion.

Both Nehru and Bose asserted that India needed to be industrialized along socialist lines, under the paternal guidance of a powerful state. Gandhi, in contrast, held that industrialization begat violence: it drew power away from individuals and toward large centralized entities, and it demanded the massive use of natural resources as well as expanding markets that could be acquired only by force. In the late 1930s, Gandhi had occupied himself with rejuvenating villages, believing that India’s salvation lay in reviving cottage industries such as spinning, which would employ and thereby restore power to individuals in their homes. But World War II thrust upon him a moral challenge that would bring him back to the fore.
¹⁰

In 1935, after a prolonged civil disobedience movement in India, a coalition government in London had granted limited powers of self-rule to the colony. Many members of the Labour Party were sympathetic to Indian aspirations, and even some Tory politicians held that Britain could not forever oppose some measure of self-government in the colony. But an earlier viceroy of India, Lord Irwin, had explained to Amery that Indians could probably be appeased, by “some façade which will leave the essential mechanism of power still in our hands.” Accordingly, by 1935 London’s socialists and conservatives had hammered out a compromise: a franchise of around 30 million voters would elect Indian ministers to run the provinces and send a few representatives to the viceroy’s executive council in New Delhi. The viceroy, along with governors in the provinces, would retain ultimate control over defense, finance, foreign affairs, and internal security. As a colleague explained at the time to Churchill, this constitution would allow Indians to rule the provinces “as long as they do it properly, and leave the Governors absolutely free to take over the whole or any part of the administration themselves should the machine not function properly.”
¹¹

The Indian National Congress contested the elections mandated by the 1935 act and won handsomely. Eight provinces (out of eleven)
gained Congress ministries. But three years later the fiery Bose became president of the Congress and reiterated the call for independence. “Ours is a struggle not only against British Imperialism but against world Imperialism as well, of which the former is the keystone,” he declared. “We are, therefore, fighting not for the cause of India alone but for humanity as well.”
¹²