The President was incredulous, given the deteriorating military situation—of which Churchill was either oblivious or willfully blind. On April 1, the Prime Minister had sent him a cable, claiming he was not in the least disturbed by the Japanese Army’s rout of British forces in Burma, since he thought the Japanese would “press on through Burma northwards into China and try to make a job of that. They may disturb India, but I doubt its serious invasion,” Churchill had added, complacently. “We are sending forty to fifty thousand men each month to the East. As they round the Cape we can divert them to Suez, Basra, Bombay, Ceylon or Australia.”11
In view of the fact that similar British troops had failed to fight for Singapore, and were now failing to fight in Burma, Churchill’s assurance seemed to the President to be optimistic at best. “In his military thinking,” the Prime Minister’s own military aide noted, “Churchill was a curious blend of old and new. He tended to think of ‘sabres and bayonets,’ the terms used by historians to measure the strength of the two forces engaged in battle in years gone by. Thus, when he considered Singapore,” Colonel Jacob observed, “his mind seemed to picture an old fortification manned by many thousands of men who, because they possessed a rifle each, or could be issued with one, were capable of selling their lives dearly, if necessary in hand-to-hand fighting.”12
Had Churchill interviewed a single veteran of fighting against the Japanese, he might have recognized how disastrously he was underestimating the enemy, and the sheer unwillingness of British troops to “sell their lives dearly” for a form of colonialism that was doomed. As a result, no one was more shocked than Churchill when the situation in Burma and in the Indian Ocean now spiraled out of control.
Ominously, U.S. and British intelligence had already reported on March 31, the night before Churchill’s cable to the President, that the largest carrier fleet ever sent into combat by the Japanese—indeed the same force that had attacked Pearl Harbor—seemed to be heading through the Malay Barrier into the Indian Ocean.
In Churchill’s underground headquarters in London, the Map Room became a scene of high alarm. Was the Japanese fleet moving to support the Japanese conquest of Burma? Or was it out to destroy British maritime shipping in the Indian Ocean, and annihilate remaining Royal Navy warships there? Did the Japanese intend to invade Ceylon as the steppingstone to an amphibious assault on southern India?
In the Map Room on the ground floor of the White House, there was equal concern. In the circumstances, it seemed incomprehensible to the President that the British government would seriously allow the Cripps mission to fail.
As the six Japanese aircraft carriers, five battleships, and seven cruisers were identified steaming into the Indian Ocean, shock turned to dismay. Virtually unmolested, Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa proceeded in the ensuing days to decimate Churchill’s naval forces, sinking twenty-three British ships in the Bay of Bengal, while Japanese submarines sunk five more off the Indian coast, and Admiral Chuichi Nagumo attacked the British naval base at Colombo, Ceylon.
Then on April 5, 1942, Nagumo’s forces not only found two British cruisers, HMS Dorsetshire and HMS Cornwall, and sent them to the bottom of the Indian Ocean, but went on to attack and sink the British aircraft carrier HMS Hermes.
It was a devastating blow.
“Poor American boys!” Radio Tokyo had recently broadcast a sneering challenge to U.S. troops and sailors in the Java area. “Why die to defend foreign soil which never belonged to the Dutch or British in the first place?”13
The President, proud of the way the U.S.-Filipino Army had held out against the Japanese in the Bataan Peninsula for so long, despite virtually no supplies or reinforcement, was deeply disappointed by Churchill’s sabotage of self-government for Indians. It seemed to Roosevelt impossible that the British would cling to their colonial “rights of conquest” in India, rather than welcoming Indian participation in the war on the British side, when Gandhi himself had withdrawn from the Indian Congress Working Party to enable his “legal heir,” Jawaharlal Nehru, to negotiate a deal with Sir Stafford Cripps and the British government. Nehru had promised in writing that Indians, if given self-government, would defend India to the last hamlet; and Mohammed Jinnah, the Muslim League leader (and future founding governor-general of Pakistan), had also told Cripps he would go along with an Indian cabinet—yet still the viceroy and Churchill resisted.
In American eyes, Churchill’s refusal to allow Cripps to make concessions amounted to fiddling while Rome burned. In a cable on April 4, Colonel Johnson begged Roosevelt to intervene personally, since unless the President “can intercede with Churchill, it would seem that Cripps’ efforts are doomed to failure.”14 This prompted Welles to respond that he had “personally discussed with the President your telegram no. 145, April 4, 8p.m.,” but that he did not “consider it desirable or expedient for him, at least at this juncture, to undertake any further personal participation in the discussion. You know how earnestly the President has already tried to be of help. . . . In view of the already increasingly critical military situation do you not believe that there is increasing likelihood of the responsible leaders adopting a more constructive attitude?”15
For his part, Colonel Johnson, in Delhi, did not blame the Indians. Like Cripps, the colonel thought it was the British who, in such a critical military situation, should have been more reasonable, if they wanted Indians to fight for their own territory.
Instead of offering the post of minister of defense to an Indian with genuine military responsibilities under a British war minister, however, Churchill and Amery would only agree to offer, on April 7, the possibility of appointing an Indian member on the viceroy’s Executive Council with responsibility for “storage of petroleum products; welfare of troops; canteen organizations; stationery and printed forms for the Army . . .”16
How the British could be so stupid, at such a menacing time, seemed downright incomprehensible to the President. “I suppose this Empire has never been in such a precarious position in its history!” even Churchill’s own army chief of staff, General Alan Brooke, acknowledged in his diary on April 7, 1942.17
As was inevitable, Churchill cabled the President in growing desperation that evening to ask if the United States Pacific Fleet in Hawaii could be ordered into action in order to “compel” the Japanese to “return to the Pacific.”
The American fleet must save India and the British Empire—forcing the Japanese to retreat, “thus relinquishing or leaving unsupported any invasion enterprise which they have in mind or to which they are committed. I cannot too urgently impress the importance of this.”18
Churchill’s cri de coeur, when it arrived, caused consternation. Instead of negotiating with Nehru, Churchill bombarded the President with disingenuous claims about the exclusive fighting skills of Muslim rather than Hindu soldiers—despite the fact that neither Muslim nor Hindu nor Sikh soldiers were fighting the Japanese with anything but halfheartedness, as long as their home country was denied self-government.19
Despite Welles’s formal response to his cable begging the President to intervene personally, Colonel Johnson was, therefore, quietly encouraged to act on the President’s behalf. In a series of accelerando meetings on April 8 and 9, the colonel—who ran a top legal practice in America—knocked heads together and, after a meeting with General Wavell, got a “Cripps-Johnson Plan” unofficially accepted by the Indian Congress Party. “CRIPPS SAID TO HAVE ACCORD ON NATIONAL REGIME IN INDIA,” the New York Times reported triumphantly on April 9, 1942.
Cripps was delighted—as was Colonel Johnson, who reported proudly to the President that “the magic name here is Roosevelt,” and that “the land, the people would follow and love, [is] America.”20
Colonel Johnson was speaking too soon. Churchill was still determined to counter the success of the Cripps mission, however dire the situation.21
Secretary Hull was still away from Washington, recuperating, but when he heard what had been done at this critical juncture,
he too was disgusted—indeed, he deliberately titled the chapter of his memoirs covering the episode “Independence for India”—furious that Churchill had, after the signing of the original Atlantic Charter, “excluded India and Burma” from the principles and, as he put it, had already declared, in an address to Parliament in September 1941, that “Article 3 applied only to European nations under Nazi occupation and had no effect on British policy.”22
For Roosevelt, Churchill’s panic-stricken plea for the United States to rescue the Royal Navy marked the end of their military honeymoon. The President had authorized the surrender of all Filipino and American troops remaining on the Bataan Peninsula, after doggedly fighting the Japanese since December 10, 1941. Though Corregidor might hold out a further month, failure of the British to fight the Japanese, and their assumption that their colonial empire would merely be rescued by Americans who did fight, was unacceptable.
Roosevelt would not have been Roosevelt had he allowed his personal feelings of disappointment to affect his judgment, however. Coalition war, the President knew, meant allying oneself with partners who did not necessarily share the same political or moral principles, or vision—as, for example, America’s military partnership with Stalin’s Soviet Union. Collaborationist, imperialist Vichy France was another possible ally, or at least non-hostile government—a government whose military compliance might be of profound significance in launching a Second Front against the Nazis, either in North Africa or mainland France. Leading a coalition of United Nations, in other words, was bound to involve associations that were at best necessary, and at worst cynical.
Deliberately trivialized by Churchill in his memoirs,23 and ignored by most historians in the decades following the war, the saga of the Cripps mission—and the President’s role in it—marked in truth the end of Britain’s colonial empire, as Churchill willfully surrendered Britain’s moral leadership of the democracies in World War II.
Sir Ian Jacob, reflecting on the Anglo-American alliance, would later date the change that came over U.S.-British relations as taking place in 1943: the “change which came about when the Americans felt that they had developed enough power to conduct their own line of policy.”24 In reality, however, the change had taken place much, much earlier—as the White House records and diaries of those visiting with the President would show.
The President had absolutely no intention of risking the gathering strength of the U.S. fleet in the Pacific in an unprepared battle with the Japanese Navy. Instead, ignoring what he’d told Welles to say officially to Colonel Johnson, he wired Prime Minister Churchill on April 11, asking him please not to recall Cripps, but to make one last effort at accommodating Indian aspirations for a national government.
Why Churchill closed off this possibility will be debated by historians and biographers to the end of time—“one of the most disputed episodes in Britain’s imperial ending in India,” as Oxford historian Judith Brown would later call it.25
Did Churchill fear Sir Stafford Cripps returning to Britain in triumph—given broad British public support for a settlement—and supplanting him as prime minister? Or could Churchill simply not accept the idea of Indian leaders running their own country of four hundred million people, after all the years Churchill had fought to deny India self-government, let alone independence?
In any event, deliberately rejecting the President’s advice as well as widespread British and American hopes for an act of statesmanship, Churchill now did the opposite—withdrawing all previous assurances he’d given Cripps, which had been the basis of the tentative agreement with Nehru. “I feel absolutely satisfied we have done our utmost,” Churchill cabled the President with finality on April 11—and instructed Cripps to return to London without any agreement.26
The President was dumbfounded. In a cable early that same day, Colonel Johnson had, by contrast, assured the President that, in regard to the impasse with Churchill, Sir Stafford Cripps and Nehru “could solve it in 5 minutes if Cripps had any authority” from Churchill. Johnson was at a loss to understand why the Prime Minister had become so intransigent. The Indian Ocean, after all, “is controlled by the enemy,” the Japanese, he pointed out to the President. “British shipping from India has been suspended; according to plan determined many days ago, British are retiring from Burma going north while fighting Chinese go south; Wavell is worn out and defeated.” In Colonel Johnson’s view, the British were finished not only as an imperial, colonial power, but as a first-rate nation. “The hour has come when we should consider a replotting of our policy in this section of the world,” he recommended. “Association with the British here is bound to adversely affect the morale of our own officers. . . . Nehru has been magnificent in his cooperation with me. The President would like him and on most things they agree. . . . I shall have his complete help; he is our best hope here. I trust him.”27 India, in other words, could become a great democratic partner to the United States.
Sir Stafford Cripps had complained that a patronizing speech by Lord Halifax in New York on April 7, broadcast on CBS, had “done the greatest harm at a most critical moment,”28 and Johnson was of like mind, telling the President that the address had “added the finishing touches to the sabotaging of Cripps. It is believed here it was so intended and timed and I am told pleased Wavell and the Viceroy greatly”—with Churchill breaking into a victory dance in the Cabinet Room below Whitehall “on news the talks had failed,” jubilantly declaring: “No tea with treason, no truck with American or British Labour sentimentality, but back to the solemn—and exciting—business of war.”29
Johnson was certainly right about the viceroy, the Marquess of Linlithgow, who was if anything more intransigent—and racist—than the Prime Minister. Linlithgow had earlier described the Japanese, before Pearl Harbor, as “Yellow Bellies” who would probably enter the war on Germany’s side: “I don’t see how they can help it, the silly little things!” he’d mocked them in a letter to Lord Halifax. Burma might be threatened, but the British would prevail, he’d been sure. American weaponry nevertheless remained important. In fact, in terms of the Indian Army, Linlithgow was “greatly dependent upon your constituents in North America,” he’d admitted to Halifax, “for heavy gear. So don’t tell them what I think of them,” he warned.
What he thought was, in truth, mean, despicable, and almost unbelievably snooty. “What a country,” he derided America, “and what savages who inhabit it! My wonder is that anyone with the money to pay for the fare to somewhere else condescends to stay in the country, even for a moment! What a nuisance they will be over this Lease-Lend sham before they have finished with it. I shan’t be a bit surprised if we have to return some of their shells at them, through their own guns! I love some clever person’s quip about Americans being the only people in recorded times who have passed from savagery to decadence without experiencing the intervening state of civilization!” Halifax, he was quite sure, shared his views, but would just have to be stoic and go on with his work in Washington to obtain more free military assistance, while “toadying to your pack of pole-squatting parvenus!”30
Why Churchill tolerated such an anti-American, bigoted buffoon as viceroy of India was hard both for Colonel Johnson and President Roosevelt to understand—especially since Linlithgow had begged Churchill for months to be allowed to retire, after almost six years in the post. Churchill had, however, insisted that, despite his unpopularity, Linlithgow should stay—with orders to abort Cripps’s mission.
This the Scottish aristocrat did with enthusiasm. Colonel Johnson he described as “Franklin D.’s boy friend,” whom Cripps had brought into “close sensual touch with Nehru, for whom J. has fallen.” It was too bad—though Linlithgow hoped others could correct “in the President’s mind, the distorted notion which I feel sure Johnson is now busy injecting into that very important organ.”31
Distorted or not, the news from India mystified the President, who became more and more concerned lest the British use their crucial, American-
provided weaponry not to combat the Japanese, but to put down the inhabitants of India, who might well revolt if denied at least a semblance of self-government.
In the circumstances the President decided he must try one more time to pressure Churchill into seeing sense. Harry Hopkins had recently set off for London with General Marshall to discuss prospects for a Second Front in Europe, and was staying with the Prime Minister at Chequers, his country residence. To Hopkins the President now sent an urgent cable, asking him to “give immediately the following message to the former naval person.” As he added, “We must make every effort to prevent a breakdown.”32
The President’s signal—which Churchill later derided, after the President’s death, as “an act of madness”33—was a simple request: namely for the Prime Minister to “postpone Cripps’ departure from India until one more final effort has been made to prevent a breakdown in the negotiations.”34
Roosevelt was, as he explained, “sorry to say that I cannot agree with the point of view set forth in your message to me that public opinion in the United States believes that the negotiations have failed on broad general issues. The general impression here is quite the contrary,” the President corrected the Prime Minister. “The feeling is almost universally held that the deadlock has been caused by the unwillingness of the British to concede to the Indians the right of self-government, notwithstanding the willingness of the Indians to entrust technical, military and naval defense control to the competent British authorities”—as he had heard from Colonel Johnson himself. “American public opinion cannot understand why, if the British Government is willing to permit the component parts of India to secede from the British Empire after the war,” as per the original Cripps mission’s declaration, set out by the British government, “it is not willing to permit them to enjoy what is tantamount to self-government during the war.”35
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