Churchill's Secret War

by Madhusree Mukerjee

  One morning a boy named Gora was resting by Gupta’s house. His two sisters had fallen far behind on the road, and Gora insisted on going back to find them. The parents never turned up. Given their first food, the three children ate so frenziedly that they were in danger of getting diarrhea, but they slowed down when they were told that they would get more meals. “We found that siblings were tremendously attached,” Gupta said. “As they grew older we separated girls and boys into different schools, but they always stayed in touch.” She had also restored many lost children to their families. “They’d say things like, ‘My village is behind the big banyan tree near the grocery store.’ We would try to figure it out. One said, ‘If you take me to Triveni train station, I can find my house.’ She was at most five, but we did manage to get her home.”

  One boy, Nitai Sawrkar, believed his original home to be near Dacca in the east of Bengal. “My mother died perhaps two years before the famine, when I was two or so,” Sawrkar said in 2003. “My father came to Bankura for work, and brought me with him.” Unable to feed the boy during the famine, Nitai’s father had left him at Gupta’s orphanage. The home held only ten children then; by the end of the famine it would have fifty. “I missed my father,” Sawrkar said, “but when I was with the other kids we’d forget our troubles.” After about a year, a friend of his father had visited him. A supervisor subsequently informed the boy that his father had died: that was what the friend had come to tell Nitai, but had been unable to do.

  “We rented a large house for the children, with wide verandahs,” Gupta remembered, “and got a retired school headmistress to run it.” The curriculum, inspired by Gandhi, emphasized basic education, hand-work such as spinning—and democracy. The children elected a “Prime Minister” who appointed a council of “Ministers” to execute all the jobs at hand: budgeting, planning menus, serving food (cooked by an adult), cleaning, tending to vegetable gardens, taking care of visitors, and so on. Once a month, at an open meeting, everyone would voice his or her complaints. As the children got older they trained for future jobs, and Nitai had learned to be a tailor. “If they hadn’t saved me, I would have been washed away,” Sawrkar concluded. “That I have become a man, stand on my own feet, is her blessing.”

  Nitai Sawrkar was one of the exceedingly lucky few. One observer witnessed, in Munshiganj town in eastern Bengal, lost or abandoned children “of all ages—a child of seven carrying another child of three. They were to be found in every corner, standing, sitting and sleeping. It was almost impossible to ascertain where they had come from and what had become of their parents.”7

  Near the bridge that connected Howrah with Calcutta, a journalist saw a boy eating out of a dustbin. The child said that he had walked from his village in Midnapore along with his mother, in the hope of finding food in the city, but she had died of a fever. Another observer described the crazed cries of a wild-haired, half-naked woman who, while wandering the city in search of food with her four children, had lost a daughter. “She was rushing madly making her way out of the crowd crying, ‘Purana! Purana! Where have you gone Purana!’ She entered lane after lane, hunting desperately, and finally hit her head against something and fell down unconscious.”8

  One of Gita Mukhopadhyay’s aunts started a relief kitchen, and Gita would help line up the destitutes who gathered there. “One woman with a baby kept saying, ‘Please give me milk now, right now,’” Mukhopadhyay recalled. “But we couldn’t put her ahead of the others, who were also desperate. When she finally reached the head of the line, she said, ‘I don’t need milk any more.’ Her baby had died.”

  IAN STEPHENS, CHIEF editor of The Statesman, could not be sure just when it dawned on him that a disaster of major dimensions was at hand. In April or May 1943, he had watched Pinnell and Braund of the Department of Civil Supplies at a press conference, striving to assure the public that the food situation was under control. Stephens had been a public relations officer for the Government of India and felt sure that he was seeing “two unhappy but not dishonest men working to a brief they didn’t believe in.” Over the next months the mortality on Calcutta’s streets became disconcerting enough that cocktail conversations had turned to the need for a “corpse disposal squad.” Yet officials continued to dither over what was becoming indistinguishable from an old-fashioned famine.9

  Where did his duty lie? Stephens had been appointed the newspaper’s editor precisely because he could appreciate the official point of view. His predecessor, an Irishman named Arthur Moore, had been forced out soon after the Quit India movement began and his editorials had gone from being “most mischievous” to “pestilent,” in Amery’s words. Stephens was conservative enough to have viewed Gandhi’s three-week fast as “a mean device by a politician” seeking the limelight—but famine was another matter. As an Englishman, he reasoned, he enjoyed a security and credibility not enjoyed by his Indian rivals, which gave him a particular responsibility to speak out.10

  Starting in the summer of 1943, The Statesman began to publish editorials excoriating the government for the spreading famine. Stephens pointed out the official confusion, indifference, subterfuge, and buck-passing, and every day his voice became more strident. The response was disheartening: “Write, write, write, but nothing came of it,” he wrote in a memoir. On Sunday, August 22, the newspaper came out with close-up photographs of children with protruding rib cages and panoramas of stick-like beings huddled in vast numbers. Despite a warning from censors, the next week The Statesman printed more photographs—and another editorial.11

  Until Stephens publicized it, the calamity in Bengal had been unknown to most of India and utterly unheard about in the rest of the world. In a bid to keep the news from leaking out, the Government of India had allegedly destroyed all but one of five thousand printed copies of Hungry Bengal, a collection of sketches and reportage on the Midnapore famine—but it could not suppress The Statesman. In New Delhi, storefronts displayed the pictures of famine victims, and in Washington the State Department circulated them among policymakers.12

  On August 14, 1943, the Indian Independence League, an association of expatriate nationalists, announced over Axis radio that it was accepting the help of Japan, Thailand, and Burma to send rice to India. “Though it is normally impossible to send rice to India from Japanese occupied territory the league is prepared to do so if the British Government approves the proposal and gives an undertaking that the food so sent will not be reserved for military consumption or exported from India” went the message, as translated from Tamil by British intelligence. Over the next months Subhas Chandra Bose repeated the offer, because he had instigated it, in speeches and broadcasts, such as this one from Singapore: “100,000 tons of rice are waiting to be sent to India to alleviate the famine. The rice is stored in a suitable port near India. As soon as the British Government shows its readiness to accept delivery, I will announce the name of the port and the competent authority from whom the rice is to be collected. I will then also ask the Japanese Government to guarantee a safe convoy for the transport. Further deliveries for the starving population of India can be made as soon as the offer has been accepted. I hope that the British Government will accept without hesitation, as it is a humane offer, the acceptance of which will save hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in India.”13

  Ripples of hope stirred in his prostrate homeland. According to one intelligence report, the “latest Bose rumour is to the effect that he has written to the Viceroy asking him to send two ships to enable Bose to send rice to the starving people of Bengal.”14

  FOR TWO YEARS, Subhas Bose had resided in Berlin. He had married the woman he loved, fathered a daughter—and utterly failed to arouse German enthusiasm for the cause of Indian independence. The Nazis were mired in the Soviet Union, so the army that Bose had raised from the ranks of captured Indian soldiers had no hope of reaching their homeland via Afghanistan. And although the Japanese and the Italians urged a joint Axis declaration promising freedom to Indi
ans and Arabs, Hitler continued to refuse. According to historian Milan Hauner, he was still concerned that if the United Kingdom perceived its empire to be threatened by Germany, its will to resist would be increased. He did, however, agree that Bose should travel to Asia, where he would be of more use.15

  On May 27, 1942, Bose had an audience with the führer. In response to his request for more substantive support, Hitler launched into an interminable lecture, the essence of which was that he could do nothing. Bose then asked him to repudiate passages in Mein Kampf that were contemptuous of Indians. That prompted another monologue—ending with the assertion that Indian natives would take one or two centuries merely to achieve unity among different factions. By the time the interview was over, any illusions that Bose had entertained about the führer’s rationality were gone. He told colleagues that Hitler reminded him of the Fakir of Ipi, a Pakhtun warlord he had met on his trek to Kabul, “with whom it was practically impossible to have a discussion on any topic even for a few minutes.” All that Bose got out of the long-awaited meeting was a cigarette case.16

  Traveling to Asia from Europe had become very difficult for an Axis sympathizer, and Bose’s three guardians—Germany, Italy, and Japan—could not agree on which route was safest. Eventually it was decided that he would travel by German submarine to a point near Madagascar and switch in mid-ocean to a Japanese one. After three months of undersea travel he surfaced in Sumatra on May 6, 1943.17

  Bose flew right away to Tokyo, where he insisted on meeting Prime Minister Tojo Hideki. Again he had to cool his heels, but when they did confer, Tojo was impressed enough to pledge his support. Bose went on to Singapore to assume leadership of the Indian Independence League and the Indian National Army (INA)—which had become moribund. The idealistic Fujiwara Iwaichi had gone, so that the INA’s founder, Mohan Singh, had fallen out with the Japanese and was in prison.

  Bose’s arrival electrified the INA. Although he was a civilian and a Bengali, his passion and directness convinced the soldiers that he was the man to take them where they most wanted to be: home. “It was absolutely fantastic,” Lakshmi Swaminathan, a doctor who would come to head the INA’s female brigade, told historian Peter Ward Fay. “They didn’t get any word of command, they just stood up and put their rifles in the air—you could see a forest of rifles.” Bose had a similar effect on expatriate Indian civilians. After he spoke, housewives would come up and strip their arms and necks of gold to serve the cause of freedom.18

  A new government of Burma was about to be born, and at the invitation of Ba Maw, the soon-to-be head of state, Bose went to Rangoon in late July. He met local leaders, senior Japanese officers, and representatives of the Indian community, and he won them all. “When Bose really got down into his subject,” wrote Ba Maw, “he gave you a feeling that you were listening not to a man but to a force or something big and impersonal like that, to a long-pent, primordial force suddenly breaking through.”19

  Because he had Tojo’s backing and had once headed the Indian National Congress, Bose possessed a clout and credibility that no other exiled nationalist had ever enjoyed. He also had the money and the influence to deliver the rice that he was promising for Bengal. British authorities resolved, however, to treat the offer as if it were propaganda. They recognized that since his arrival in Southeast Asia the rebel had become more potent, and “we are of course particularly anxious to discredit Subhas Bose in every possible way,” wrote a senior official. Censors ensured that no mention of his offer appeared in the press.20

  “The British must have thought his offer was genuine,” opined historian Sugata Bose (and grandnephew of Subhas Bose) in an interview. “If they really thought it was a bluff they would have called it.” Had the leader failed to keep his promise, he would have been destroyed as a political force. “When it came to a question of Bengalis starving to death, Subhas Chandra Bose would not have engaged in a propaganda stunt,” Sugata Bose added. “When you look at his life, he was engaged in social work—plague relief and flood relief—since childhood.”

  The War Cabinet knew of Bose’s rice offer (having received at least one of the pertinent intelligence summaries), but whether or not the issue was discussed is unclear. Although ships capable of traversing the oceans were scarce, hundreds of smaller vessels were plying along the Indian coast, most of them under government control. The proximity of Calcutta to Rangoon or other Burmese ports meant that Bose’s rice could have arrived within a week or two, had the authorities chosen to collect it. Distributed at the rate of a half-kilogram per person per day, 100,000 tons would have fed 1.6 million people for four months—after which Bengalis would be harvesting their own winter crop.

  To be sure, Subhas Chandra Bose was a despised enemy of the United Kingdom; he was an Axis collaborator and a target of British assassins. But when occupied Greece underwent famine in the winter of late 1941, Germany had permitted humanitarian agencies such as the International Red Cross to bring in relief and distribute it, a remarkable instance of Axis-Allied cooperation during the war. When it came to Bengal, His Majesty’s Government would turn down even those offers of cereals that came not from adversaries but from friends. The dominions of Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and Canada all asked how they could help. “Australia could supply all the wheat needed for the starving in India provided the United Kingdom could provide the ships,” stated a minister in Canberra, as reported by Reuters on September 28. “Wheat was practically waiting to be loaded on boats.”21

  Virtually all dominion shipping was under the War Cabinet’s control, as were seventeen merchant ships registered in India, amounting to around 80,000 gross tons, that were capable of the journey to Australia. “Almost all our ships have been taken away,” Sir J. P. Srivastava later told the famine commission. (Srivastava was the member of the viceroy’s executive council who was responsible for food.) At “one time I asked whether these ships could not be released to us to carry foodgrains. But nothing came of it.” As a result, only highly compact foods could be loaded onto the ships that were already destined for India from the empire’s ports. Amery informed the New Zealand government, which had authorized £10,000 of famine relief, that “a free gift of powdered or condensed milk to this value would be the most useful form of gift as shipping could be most easily arranged for that.”22

  Ireland sent £100,000, and Prime Minister Eamon de Valera asked his compatriots for more; meanwhile, the leader of the country’s Labour Party reminded the Irish people that when their forefathers had starved under British rule in the previous century, Indians had sent help. Private charities in the United Kingdom and the United States also began to collect money. The Red Cross started operations in Calcutta, but it could provide only milk powder, vitamins, and medicines. These were valuable, but no substitute for rice or wheat.23

  DUKHAHARAN THAKUR CHAKRABARTY, a sixteen-year-old who lived near Howrah, once went with a group of communist medical students who were distributing powdered milk and medicines they had obtained from the Red Cross. In a neighboring village, the teenager saw row after row of disintegrating huts, some missing their tin roofs, which the owners had pawned for food before abandoning them. Hearing sounds from within one hut, the students knocked. A tiny girl opened the door. Dukhaharan looked in and saw her father lying on a reed mat on the mud floor. He was sick and moaned in a continuous refrain, “Ore, ami ar banchbo na re,” meaning Oh, I won’t live any longer. The girl said her mother had gone somewhere, and started crying. “We gave them some milk and medicines, couldn’t do much else,” Chakrabarty recalled.

  Another time, the teenager was about to cross a busy street near the railway station in Howrah when he saw a truck full of men come to a stop on the far side of the road. They began to grab people from the pavement and throw them onto the truck. “I didn’t know who they were, but they were merciless. They were catching hold of old men, beggars, anyone they could grab. They picked up a girl, of perhaps fifteen. Her sari fell off, and I saw that she was naked u
nder it, nothing on her but the ring in her nose. ‘Hau mau kore kandchhe’”—she was howling desperately. “I stood rooted to the spot.”

  It was the first time Chakrabarty had seen a naked female, and the vision never left him. “I still wonder, where did they take her, what happened to her? I wish I had run forward, protested, done something to help her,” he said sixty years later. “But I just stood there.”

  THE TRUCK WAS from a government program to cleanse Calcutta’s streets. Near the end of August, Governor Herbert had come down with an inflamed ulcer and appendix. Shortly afterward, Chief Minister Nazimuddin summoned civil servant Olaf Martin to Calcutta and asked him to take charge of the relief operation. Martin had run such programs in 1936—but that year he’d “started work in January, and had found that this was not a day too soon,” Martin commented in his memoir. “Here was a much bigger calamity.” Eventually it dawned on the civil servant that his job was not so much to begin gruel kitchens or work-for-food programs in the countryside, for which there was not enough grain, as to rid the city of unsightly beggars “as quietly as possible. The Army was demanding this, and had the support of the Viceroy.” It was a matter of morale—Calcutta being the place where soldiers billeted in the east went for recreation.24

  With the help of politician Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, Martin rented space for relief centers just outside the city. But the refugees took to hiding when they spied the trucks that went around to collect them, because most of them were waiting for relatives who had gone in search of food. They had to be chased, grabbed, and thrown onto the trucks. The cleansing of Calcutta broke up many families, and although Martin would eventually set up a camp where those with missing relatives could go and search for lost family members, the problem of involuntary separation was never solved.