Gandhi & Churchill (84 page)

Then on June 22 Hitler launched his fateful and fatal attack on the Soviet Union. With a sigh of relief, Churchill realized that Hitler would not invade England. The German army’s panzer divisions would be diverted into an unwinnable war in Russia. Churchill pledged his full support to Russia. “Any man or state who fights on against Nazism will have our aid,” he told a national radio audience that night. “We shall give whatever help we can to Russia and the Russian people.”

John Colville asked how Churchill felt, after a lifetime of anti-Bolshevism, siding with a man like Stalin. “If Hitler invaded Hell,” Churchill answered, “I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”
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The invasion represented a turning point in the war at home as well: the British Communist Party and trade unions sympathetic to the Soviet cause, not to mention the Communist Party in India, would now be fully on Britain’s side.

But Churchill’s biggest accomplishment that spring was to cement the close bond of trust and cooperation between himself and the American president, Franklin Roosevelt. It began with the Lend-Lease program, which Churchill in March 1941 described to the House of Commons as “a second Magna Carta” guaranteeing Britain’s freedom, and it grew with their meeting on board HMS
Prince of Wales
that same month when they signed the Atlantic Charter promising to extend that freedom to the peoples oppressed by the Axis powers. Ironically, just nine months later that same
Prince of Wales
would be lying on the bottom of the Gulf of Siam.

Like any alliance, the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States, and the bond between Roosevelt and Churchill, had its shaky moments. Almost all of them came over India. The clash began with the Atlantic Charter itself, which included a joint declaration calling for “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they live” and the restoration of self-government for those who had been deprived of it. Churchill assumed that this declaration applied to European nations conquered by Hitler and Stalin. But other officials, including Leo Amery, feared that the wording was a Pearl Harbor–style sneak attack on the foundations of the British Empire.
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They knew Americans considered European overseas empires to be iniquitous relics of a discredited colonial past (unlike their own holdings such as Puerto Rico and Guam). Churchill seemed to have been tricked into endorsing the breakup of the Empire on which the Sun Never Set. On August 16 the newspaper
Daily Herald
seemed to confirm that assumption when it ran the headline: “The Atlantic Charter: It Means Dark Races As Well.”

The Colonial Office became officially upset. Leo Amery said the declaration “let loose a lot of questions about its application to the Empire,” particularly to India, and he suggested that the India and Colonial Offices file a joint memorandum.
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For once Churchill agreed with Amery. He spoke to the matter in the House of Commons on September 9, reassuring members that the declaration had nothing to do with the British Empire or India. “We are pledged,” he announced, “to help India, to obtain free and equal partnership in the British Commonwealth with ourselves, subject of course,” he added, “to the fulfilment of obligations arising from our long connection with India and our responsibilities to its many creeds, races, and interests.”
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In short, nothing about the American alliance had changed Churchill’s mind about either India or self-government for “the darker races.”

In fact, his mood that autumn was distinctly upbeat. The war seemed to have turned a significant corner—although, as he presciently told John Colville, “we cannot afford military failures.”
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In October he visited his old school, Harrow, and gave one of his most celebrated and inspiring speeches.

He reminded his audience that they had sat together in the same seats a year earlier, during the darkest days of the Blitz. “Can anyone sitting here today,” he said, “this October day, not be thankful for the time that has past and the improved condition in which our country finds itself?” He told the assembled boys and masters and other onlookers, “Surely from this period of ten months this is the lesson: never give in, never give in,
never, never, never, never…
never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense…We have only to persevere to conquer.”
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Just six weeks later a great naval disaster would put that self-confidence and resolution to the test and give the issue of India a spectacular new urgency.

Gandhi too had thought Britain’s tribulations were fewer than met the eye. The conventional wisdom among India’s intellectual and political elite in 1940 was that Hitler would win and Britain was doomed.
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In 1941 that view had been quietly but steadily reversed. Churchill’s iron resolve had impressed, and dismayed, nationalists who had seen Britain’s defeat as their ticket to independence. When Hitler attacked Russia in June, India’s Communists and other radicals turned overnight from opponents to outspoken supporters of the war. Communist leaders even attempted to persuade Gandhi to change his mind and back what had become “the war against Fascism,” but Gandhi refused to budge.
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Meanwhile, the crackdown on the Congress and other dissidents continued. “India is being ground down under the British heel,” Gandhi complained to the press in late April, but to little avail. Nehru and other Congress leaders remained in prison until early December, while the Muslim League remained as intractably opposed as ever to any cooperation with its Hindu counterpart. Gandhi as always blamed this intransigence not on Jinnah but the British: “‘Divide and rule’ has been Great Britain’s proud and ill-conceived rule,” he told the press.
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Yet he could not deny that, as the year wore on, divide and rule seemed to be working. He and the Congress languished in irrelevancy.

The sinking of the
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
changed everything. In Madras the prices of grain and other essential commodities shot through the roof.
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In Calcutta Nirad Chaudhuri was sitting in his office at the
Monthly Review
when his personal assistant told him the ships were gone. “At first I could not believe it, but he said he had heard the names clearly on the radio.” Chaudhuri felt “dazed,” and “I felt again the pain in my chest which I had suffered after the French defeat of 1940”—a harbinger of disaster to come.
¹⁴

He was right. On December 8 the first Japanese bombs fell on Singapore. On the eleventh their planes attacked Penang, on Malaya’s northwest coast. No one in Malaya had seen a war in generations. Europeans, Malays, Chinese, and Indians turned out to watch, as if they were attending an air show display. Curiosity turned to horror as the Japanese began strafing the crowds and spectators died by the hundreds. An English doctor recorded in his diary that it was like H. G. Wells’s
War of the Worlds
come to life.
¹⁵

Across the British Empire in Asia, white and nonwhite alike were swept up in an incomprehensible wave of destruction, as the Japanese tsunami smashed into their world. The whites of Penang evacuated in a panic (on ships manned by sailors rescued from the
Prince of Wales
), leaving their servants, employees, and tenants to their fate. “The white man’s burden” was forgotten. It was left to the Tamil editor of the
Straits Echo,
Penang’s English-language newspaper, to lower the last Union Jack. After a century and a half British rule in Malaya had come to an end.
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Indians living in other Asian outposts realized that the empire that they may have hated but that they also relied on for a living and for protection was dissolving before their eyes. On December 16 Japanese bombers hit Rangoon, capital of Burma. Meanwhile Japanese soldiers equipped with six thousand bicycles swarmed down both sides of the Malay peninsula, converging on Singapore. On Christmas Day Hong Kong fell. In Bangkok the head of the Indian Independence League called on all overseas Indians to join the Japanese in driving “the Anglo-Saxon from the whole of Asia.” On New Year’s Eve a Japanese intelligence official began recruiting collaborators from Indian POWs, thus forming the core of what would become the Indian National Army.
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Meanwhile other Indian soldiers were fighting and dying in the hopeless effort to keep the Japanese out of Singapore. Like the rest of the British forces in Malaya, they were poorly prepared and poorly led. In the end they and their British and Australian comrades had to abandon the mainland to the enemy and withdraw for a final stand on Singapore Island—ironically, the site of the last Indian Army mutiny twenty-seven years earlier.
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On January 27, 1942, engineers blew up the causeway connecting the island to the mainland. The English principal at Raffles College asked some passing boys what the noise was. One of them promptly answered, “That is the end of the British Empire.”
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Churchill was still determined to save it. On December 26 he was visiting Roosevelt in Washington, D.C. That afternoon he had addressed a joint session of Congress, dissolving his audience into helpless laughter when he observed, “I cannot help reflecting that if my father had been an American, and my mother British, instead of the other way around, I might have gotten here on my own.”

That night in his White House bedroom Winston got up to open a window. As he threw up the sash, he felt a dull pain over his heart that passed down to his left arm. He had his doctor, Sir Charles Wilson (later Lord Moran), summoned. Wilson whipped out his stethoscope and confirmed Churchill’s suspicion. It had been a heart attack: fruit of the worst two weeks of his premiership, from the sinking of the
Repulse
and
Prince of Wales
to the abandonment of Malaya. The prime minister, however, swore his doctor to secrecy. Even Roosevelt must not know what happened. (In fact, no one knew about the heart attack until after Churchill’s death, when Lord Moran’s wartime journal was released.) “No one else can do this job,” he told his doubtful doctor. “I must.” Churchill was terrified that he might be replaced even as his empire was teetering on collapse.
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It was not the Japanese alone who were causing the pain. Before Churchill left for Washington, he had received a telegram from Linlithgow. Given the magnitude of the crisis, the viceroy wanted to reopen negotiations with Gandhi and the Congress. Churchill angrily refused, using the Muslim League’s opposition as his excuse. “Personally, I would rather accord India independence than that we should have to keep an army there to hold down the fighting races [i.e., Muslims] for the benefit of the Hindu priesthood and caucus,” he sputtered. In January he was still fuming and reiterated that there would be no constitutional change for India “at a moment when the enemy is upon the frontier.”
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But defiant words could not stop the rising Japanese tide. By February 9 their troops had landed on Singapore Island itself and were widening their bridgehead. Churchill frantically demanded a last-ditch stand. “There must be no thought of saving troops or sparing the population,” he told Archibald Wavell, the commander in chief. With the Americans and Russians watching, “the whole reputation of our country and our race is involved.” He assured FDR, whose troops were similarly engaged in the Philippines, “The battle must be fought to the bitter end.”
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But British resistance was already crumbling. General Arthur Percival, with 85,000 men and strong defensive positions, faced an army that had been reduced to nearly a third the size of his and that was running low on ammunition. But during the pell-mell retreat Percival had lost heart as well as honor, as one of his own officers angrily pointed out. In his misguided but civilized way, Percival had no wish to prolong the bloodshed, especially among civilians. It never occurred to him that after the surrender the Japanese would murder thousands, especially Singapore’s overseas Chinese. Percival’s soldiers, shaken and demoralized, summed up the situation in a quatrain that mocked Churchill’s own words:

Never before have so many

been buggered about by so few

And neither the few nor the many

Have bugger all idea what to do.
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Just four days after Churchill’s last frantic order, Singapore surrendered. In a radio broadcast, the prime minister put the best face on it. “This,” he said, “is one of the moments when the British race and nation can show their quality and their genius…So far we have not failed. We shall not fail now. Let us move forward steadfastly together into the storm.”
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But in private he was more candid, pronouncing it the worst disaster in the history of British arms.

It was also the worst disaster in the history of the Indian Army. For literally thousands of Indian POWs, their world had collapsed. One British officer simply told his men, “Now you belong to the Japanese army”—words that would later haunt Churchill and the Raj.
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Interestingly, Japanese soldiers had been told to sort out their Indian prisoners by asking them a single question: “Gandhi?” Those who gave a nod of recognition were shunted aside. Some were recruited to join the puppet Indian National Army. Others, including their officers, were shot.

One Indian captain told his captors that his father was a friend of Gandhi; he was spared. He watched as his British second in command was beheaded with a samurai sword. But Captain Prem Sehgal felt no regret. “The fall of Singapore finally convinced me of the degeneration of the British people,” he wrote later, “and I thought the last days of the British Empire had come.”
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