Gandhi & Churchill (88 page)

KCIOs became the backbone of the Indian Army in World War II. They were the last soldiers of the Raj as well as “the advance guard of the new Indian nation.” For every disgruntled or discouraged subaltern who joined Japan’s puppet Indian National Army, a dozen KCIOs and VCOs served with distinction on every front in the British war effort, from Burma and Eritrea to North Africa and Italy.
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And the minister of war who created the KCIOs in 1920 had been Winston Churchill. Without realizing it, he had at the stroke of a pen secured India as part of the future Allied cause and created independent India’s military legacy. Churchill never grasped the full magnitude of what he had done, but Gandhi nearly did. Many times over the years he had spoken of brave Indian soldiers who would defend their country and then return home to carry the future burden of freedom. “There is a new ferment and a new awakening among all the ranks today,” Gandhi later would say about the Indian Army.
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And the KCIOs were the core of it.
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One of them was Ajit “Jick” Rudra, who came from a Bengali professional family. His father was the man who had sponsored Gandhi’s trip from England to India in 1915, and he and the Mahatma had remained friends ever since. Ajit entered the army, served with distinction in the First World War, and won a king’s commission. But he had then been appalled by the slaughter at Amritsar. He consulted with Gandhi. Should he stay in the army? Gandhi refused to give a direct answer but said that one day India would be free and would need an army of strong able men and officers like Rudra.
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Gandhi never guessed it was Churchill who gave those officers to India.

Churchill himself later acknowledged the debt that he and Britain owed to the Indian Army during the Second World War. Depending on his mood, he could be cynical about where its loyalties ultimately lay. But even he recognized that the army was indispensable to his strategic vision. When Indian regiments scored a major success in driving the Italians out of East Africa, he sent a personal telegram to Linlithgow. “The whole Empire has been stirred by the achievement,” he wrote. The Indians’ “ardor and perseverance recalled memories of the Northwest Frontier of long years ago.” As one “who has had the honor to serve in the field with Indian soldiers from all parts of Hindustan,” he felt it a privilege to pass on “the pride and admiration with which we have followed their heroic exploits.”
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After the war Churchill paid the Indians an even more elaborate tribute. “The loyalty of the Indian Army to the King-Emperor,” the “glorious heroism” of its soldiers on campaigns from Abyssinia and North Africa to Burma and Italy, and “the unsurpassed bravery of Indian soldiers and officers, Moslem and Hindu alike, shine forever in the annals of war.” He noted with pride that 2.5 million men had volunteered for the army, at a rate of fifty thousand a month—even while Gandhi maintained that “India should remain passive and neutral in the world conflict.”
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Certainly Churchill took a grim satisfaction at the news of Gandhi’s arrest and the defeat of the Quit India insurrection. The India issue had been a sore spot since the spring. Even after the failure of the Cripps mission, the Americans had leaned on Churchill to assure the world that Britain was serious about giving India its independence after the war. The pressure led to a full-scale row between Roosevelt and Churchill. Indeed, the vaunted “special relationship” threatened to run aground over the quesion of what to do next about India.

What nearly put it on the rocks was Roosevelt’s suggestion that Cripps should not be allowed to leave India until some sort of national government had been formed. This innocent but incendiary message came to Churchill at three o’clock one morning while he was meeting with Roosevelt’s special adviser Harry Hopkins. Churchill was trying to explain to Hopkins the importance of retaining India, even while America and Britain were focusing their forces on the main enemy, Hitler. “We could not possibly face the loss of an army of 600,000 men and the whole manpower of India,” he kept saying.
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Roosevelt’s intrusion, with what Anthony Eden called “a meandering amateurishness lit by discursive flashes,” into what Churchill considered internal imperial affairs was too much. First he had had to endure the impromptu lesson in American history in March. Now he was being told that Cripps must do the impossible.

Churchill immediately tried to reach FDR but failed, then sent a frank telegram. “You know the weight which I attach to everything you say to me,” it read, “but I did not feel I could take responsibility for the defense of India if everything had again to be thrown into the melting pot at this critical juncture.” He promised he would keep Roosevelt’s telegram private. “I do not propose to bring it before the Cabinet officially unless you tell me you wish this done. Anything like a serious difference between you and me would break my heart” and would damage the alliance “at the height of this terrible struggle.”
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Roosevelt quickly realized his mistake and, at Hopkins’s urging, backed down. But the outburst was indicative of how sensitive Churchill had become on the India issue and on challenges from outsiders who he felt knew nothing of the stakes involved. In fact, as historian Christopher Thorne has pointed out, Churchill’s original response to Roosevelt had been even more pointed and menacing.

“I cannot feel that the common cause would benefit,” Churchill had written, if it became known that “we were conforming to US public opinion in a matter that concerns the British Empire.” If Roosevelt insisted on consulting with the cabinet, Churchill warned, he himself would have to resign. “I should personally make no objection at all to retiring to private life,” he added, “and I have explained all this to Harry [Hopkins] just now.” Yet even if he quit, Churchill felt confident that the cabinet would still turn Roosevelt down.
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It was the one time during the war when Churchill actually threatened to quit as prime minister. Whether he was bluffing, no one can know. Certainly Hopkins got the message and passed it on to Roosevelt. No more would be said about India, at least for now. But the incident was proof that on the issue of India, Churchill was adamant. No one—not the Germans or the Japanese; not Leo Amery or Clement Attlee; not Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Hopkins—was going to make him surrender the Raj.

And certainly not Gandhi. Churchill had learned of Gandhi’s Quit India resolution on June 14, 1942, even as news was coming in of the great sea battle between American and Japanese forces at Midway, and as the ferocious tank battles between Rommel and the British Eighth Army in the Libyan Desert were drawing to a climax. India’s Commander in Chief General Wavell still worried about Japanese attacks on the Indian coast. So Churchill told Amery, “If Gandhi tries to start a really hostile movement against us in this case, I am of the opinion he should be arrested, and that both British and US opinion would support such a step. If he likes to starve himself to death,” the prime minister added sardonically, “we cannot help that”—words that were uncannily prophetic.
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News of Gandhi’s arrest came as Churchill was leaving Moscow after his first meeting with Stalin to decide war strategy. “We have clapped Gandhi into jail,” Churchill gleefully told his doctor.
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In Cairo he got news about the growing riots in India. He told Linlithgow, “My own conclusion is that if this situation is handled with the poise and strength which the Government of India is showing under your guidance it will soon demonstrate the very slender hold which the Congress have both upon the Indian masses and upon the dominant forces in Indian society.” The next day his doctor could hear “the PM singing in his bath.”
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Back in London, Churchill reported to the House of Commons: “Mr. Gandhi and other principal leaders have been interned under conditions of the highest comfort and consideration, and will be kept out of harm’s way till the troubles subside.” Gandhi’s followers had abandoned their leader’s theories of nonviolence and revealed themselves to be “a revolutionary movement” designed to “promote disorder” and hamper the war effort by disrupting rail and communication links, looting shops, and attacking police—probably with the help of pro-Axis fifth columnists.

Fortunately, the Congress party and its followers did “not represent all India,” Churchill maintained. Above all, Congress had “no influence with the martial races” in the Indian Army, who remained firmly loyal. What emerged most clearly from the riots, Churchill averred, was how little influence Congress really had, “and their powerlessness to throw into confusion the normal peaceful life of India.”
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Churchill’s strong stand had been vindicated. All shades of opinion in Britain, and even in America, were appalled when they learned of Gandhi’s quixotic resolution and the bloodshed that followed. Political pressure on the British to make more concessions evaporated, even after stories circulated that British officials had had rioters flogged (shades of Amritsar) and that British soldiers had burned down Bihari villages that backed the insurrection.
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As October began, the crisis appeared to be over. With the Quit India movement crushed, Gandhi still incarcerated, and things returning to normal, Churchill could get on with the main task of winning the war.

And by November 1942 the Allies were winning it. Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps was decisively beaten at El Alamein; Anglo-American landings in North Africa with Operation Torch had guaranteed his defeat. German armies in the East were bogged down in front of Leningrad and Stalingrad. German U-boats were on the defensive in the North Atlantic, as Allied convoy losses fell.

Thanks to American naval victories at Coral Sea and Midway, the situation in the Pacific had also stabilized. British and Australian forces turned back a Japanese thrust at Port Moresby in New Guinea in mid-September and the monsoon had damped any chances of a Japanese incursion from Burma into India during the Quit India uprising. The Big Three had agreed to open a second front against Hitler. The Allies were on the verge of turning the war around.

Churchill could also weigh the successes of 1942 in imperial terms. Rommel’s defeat preserved British control over Suez. It kept the Germans from reaching the oil-rich empire that Churchill had built in Iran and Iraq in the 1920s—and thereby secured the western border of India. Stalin’s army, not just Hitler’s, was embroiled in battles east of the Dnieper, far from the heart of Europe. And with Japan on the defensive and Gandhi in jail, India was safe. For the first time Churchill could lay plans for recovering Britain’s lost territories farther east, including Burma.

East Asia was the “second front” that really mattered to Churchill. As early as May he had been contemplating this move, talking of a Burma offensive slated for the autumn or winter of 1942.
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When he arrived at Cairo, he spoke to Generals Bernard Montgomery and Harold Alexander about carrying off “a decisive strike” before the Americans arrived in North Africa. And so September 21, the very day railway lines were reopening in India, saw the opening moves in what would be the first Arakan offensive into Burma. British, Indian, and East African troops massed along the Assam border. As they began their attacks in December, Churchill’s mood was epitomized by his defiant words: “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.”

Any military operation in that rough terrain along a seven-hundred-mile front would be difficult, Churchill knew. “You might as well eat a porcupine one quill at a time,” he told CIGS Alan Brooke.
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Burma was a world of thick jungles, forbidding hills and mountains, and a tough and deadly adversary. The first Arakan offensive, from December 1942 to February 1943, would be a fiasco, but its failure would provide the British with powerful lessons on how to fight and win a modern land war in Asia. It would also usher in a new generation of British military leadership and a trio of men who would become national heroes: Generals William Slim and Orde Wingate, and Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Commander in Southeast Asia.

Still, even as weary British and Indian troops were trooping back across the Indian border, Gandhi made one more attempt to shift the world’s attention from war to nonviolence.

Chapter Twenty-seven

SHOWDOWN

1943

Never give in!

WINSTON CHURCHILL
, 1941

I
N PHYSICAL TERMS
, G
ANDHI’S CONFINEMENT AT
the palace of Aga Khan was hardly arduous. The rooms were spacious and well ventilated, with extensive grounds and gardens—even with the barbed wire. Gandhi had all the food and books he wanted (but no access to interviewers or visitors, which was frustrating). He received a massage twice a day and had around-the-clock medical attention. Even Kasturbai was there, joining her husband on her own volition.

But in mental and spiritual terms, Gandhi found his confinement a torment. For ninety-one hours after his arrest he refused to speak—a clear sign that the government’s action had been a shock and humiliation. Gandhi had been positively convinced that the viceroy would ask to speak to him before the Quit India movement started. Even if he could not get Linlithgow to somehow convince Churchill to begin a British evacuation of India, he could at least explain his position in greater detail. “The Government of India should have waited at least till the time I inaugurated mass action,” he complained in a letter to Linlithgow on the fourteenth.
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