Mitra was subsequently able to obtain rice through a military officer. When it arrived from Calcutta it was half-rotted and gritty with gravel, but food nonetheless, and by October 20 he had opened a hundred gruel kitchens all over Munsigunj. At first the kitchens provided just soft boiled rice and phyan, but later they began to offer a nourishing mixture of rice, lentils, and bits of potato or squash, flavored with salt, turmeric, bayleaf, and a little oil. The starving would fall upon this khichuri, eat their fill—and swell up like balloons, their arms and legs as translucent as the whites of uncooked eggs. Their bodies having partially consumed their cell walls, the fluids they ingested had flowed into the spaces between the cells.
“If you saw the thrill in their eyes, you couldn’t scold them for eating too much,” Mitra said. The mixture would hasten their demise, but he felt death was inevitable for them at such a late stage of starvation. “That they got some tasty food before they died was some comfort to me.” Most of those who perished in this manner were women and children; the men, he believed, had already died.38
AT THE TURN of the eighteenth century the marquess of Wellesley, governor-general of India, had ordered the construction of a residence grand enough for the ruler of the vast possession. The palace, built in a Greco-Roman style and surrounded by more than twenty acres of gardens, served as the seat of the British Raj for more than a century. Twelve white marble busts of Roman emperors, including those of Nero and Caligula, adorned its spacious public hall. Calcutta had long ceased to be the capital of India, but the governor’s residence was still the well-spring of imperial power in Bengal.
An Englishwoman said that while driving past the edifice during the famine, she saw that someone had laid the dead and the half-dead along the walls so that they formed a circle around the kilometer-long perimeter of the palace. The wreath of corpses marked the passing of empire.39
CHAPTER NINE
Run Rabbit Run
In late August 1943, the mayor of Calcutta cabled to President Roosevelt, appealing to him and to Churchill for grain shipments “in the name of starving humanity.” The president and the prime minister were in conference at Quebec, Canada. Churchill also received messages from the viceroy, which were seconded by the commander-in-chief in India, warning that the paucity of wheat shipments threatened all operations based in the colony. The secretary of state for India, for his part, continued to contend with the War Cabinet for grain for the remainder of that summer, as well as through the fall and the winter.1
At Quebec, the Allies agreed to create a collaborative military structure based in India, the South East Asia Command (or SEAC), in anticipation of an overland thrust into Burma in 1944. The forces in India were to be supplemented with troops and equipment that could be air-dropped into the dense jungle of the east Himalayan foothills, and these preparations for war would further strain the Indian economy. Churchill went on from Quebec to stay at the White House for about ten days, with a break for a lecture at Harvard, but whether or not he discussed the Bengal famine with Roosevelt is unknown.
On August 23, Amery informed Leathers that the U.S. consulate in Calcutta had offered to help buy wheat in America and transport it to Bengal. The consulate had added that “shipping for 20,000 tons or so should not present serious difficulty.” Amery asked Leathers, who was at the Quebec conference, to follow up on the offer with his American counterparts—but the minister had other views. “There is no wheat to spare on the East Coast of North America,” a Ministry of War Transport paper noted, “owing to inland transportation difficulties.” Wheat might be bought on the West Coast, but shipping from there was not straightforward. “There seems therefore little to be gained from this proposal,” British officials concluded. Notwithstanding such reluctance, two U.S. military ships were loaded with 5,000 tons of Canadian wheat the following month, for transport to India.2
News of the Bengal famine broke in American newspapers at this time but was buried in inside pages—whereas the popular prime minister’s visit filled the front pages. By then, the United Kingdom had won American hearts. The spreading of “enlightenment,” as the British called their propaganda in the United States, had been assiduous, with careful attention paid to answering any U.S. criticism of British policies. For instance, when Ambassador Phillips met with a group of Harvard intellectuals and told them that democracy in India was no more than “a kind of modern frosting of the old imperial cake,” a British agent took notes. These were passed to a supposedly independent Indian journalist who was to address the same gathering, so that he could counter the specific points that Phillips had raised.3
The U.S. State Department was, however, receiving its own reports on the condition of Calcutta’s pavements. According to historian M. S. Venkataramani, on August 30 a concerned official asked the Combined Food Board, the Anglo-American agency that allocated supplies, to set aside some rice for Bengal. The British representative on the board protested that wheat was available in Australia and, after checking with London, reported that the Government of India “was coping with the situation.” He insisted that His Majesty’s Government alone would provide information on the famine, and he did not permit the food board to hear a representative from the Government of India’s supply mission to the United States.4
“When a serious famine developed in Bengal in 1943, we made efforts to secure from the all too inadequate rice stocks in the Western Hemisphere an allocation of rice for India,” Secretary of State Cordell Hull would write in his memoirs. “The British representatives on the Combined Food Board in Washington insisted, however, that the responsibility for Indian food requirements be left to Britain, and we per-force had to agree.”5
Another U.S. agency, the Board of Economic Warfare, asked the War Shipping Administration, which was responsible for allocating shipping space to diverse American authorities, if some grain could be loaded onto the vessels departing for India with military stores. American soldiers in the colony were getting certain foods, such as canned meat, from home, but for wheat and rice they relied on local supplies. The shipping officials had, however, come to resent the amount of tonnage that the United Kingdom had already obtained for its domestic import program. It was up to the British to make more ships available, they replied; and if the U.S. military could find space to spare for grain, it must be in possession of more ships than it needed, in which case some would be taken away.6
American generals, for their part, had long been irritated by what they saw as British foot-dragging in the war against Japan. After instituting the January 1943 shipping cutback to the Indian Ocean, the British had approached the Americans with a request for 113 sailings to India (from the United States or the United Kingdom) to carry equipment for the Anakim military campaign and supplies for civilians. Subsequently, however, the British had been willing to forgo that shipping in lieu of a firm commitment of additional vessels for their domestic import program. So American general Brehon B. Sommervell had found himself pushing for a shipping allotment to India that the British themselves seemed to have lost interest in. On top of that, U.S. commanders entertained “an open suspicion” that a significant portion of the materials that the British had originally requested was intended for troops who would fight not the Japanese but the Indians.7
Americans were adamant that they would not help “re-build the British Empire.” Yet whether the troops in India fought Indians or Japanese, they would have to eat—and if they did not get supplies from outside, then they would feed off the people. William Phillips, who was still the president’s representative to India, was upset with his superior’s inaction on the colony’s affairs. He argued in September that the combination of British-Indian political deadlock and Bengal famine would destroy American credibility in India, and he urged the president to take steps to break the stalemate and feed the starving. Nothing came of it.8
MEANWHILE, AN INTELLIGENCE summary from Chittagong, the base for the upcoming jungle war, warned that soldiers were so distressed b
y the famine that they were “feeding beggars with their own rations, even though they are disobeying orders by so doing.” Whether they were British or Indian, soldiers generally believed that the government had fallen down on its responsibilities. Recognizing the discontent in the ranks, the military leadership took up the challenge of advocating to the prime minister for increased grain shipments. On September 8, 1943, General Auchinlek wrote to the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Alan Brooke, asking him to use his influence. The Chiefs of Staff obliged with a memo to the War Cabinet: the situation was so grave as to threaten the prosecution of war against Japan, they asserted, and only grain imports could resolve the crisis. Amery supported their appeal by adding that “in the light of the Cabinet decision” (precisely which decision is unclear) American offers of rice and wheat had had to be “discouraged,” but the situation in Bengal provided “a very dangerous handle to Japanese propaganda of which full use is being made”—an apparent reference to the offers of rice from Bose.9
The day before the War Cabinet was to discuss the Bengal famine for the second time, Lord Cherwell sent a memo to the prime minister, who had just returned from Washington. Once again the Prof expressed incredulity that a half-million tons, which the Government of India wanted by year-end, could make any difference. “But if conditions are really as bad as we are told it might be well, in view of the easier shipping position, to increase the loadings of grain for the time being,” he suggested. Such shipments should only continue, he added, if provincial governments disgorged their supplies. Tom Wilson, the S branch researcher for Indian matters, pointed out to Cherwell that although a half-million tons of imports were indeed a small amount compared to the total crop of India, “this broad statistical comparison of orders of magnitudes is likely to be seriously misleading.” The harvest was unevenly distributed, as would be the relief, so weighing the total crop against the quantity of relief yielded a ratio with no relevance to reality. Since the deficit of grain was concentrated in certain locales, even the modest relief requested could substantially check the famine.10
BY THE TIME the War Cabinet revisited the issue of the famine, on September 24, 1943, Amery had obtained permission for the 50,000 tons of wheat mentioned on August 4 to go to India rather than to Ceylon. The first consignment could be loaded no earlier than October, and since the journey from Australia took a month, it must have arrived in India in November. The 5,000 tons of Canadian wheat must also have reached the colony in November and was counted as part of the 50,000 tons.11
At the meeting, Field Marshal Wavell, soon to be the viceroy of India, said that rations for the Indian Army had had to be cut earlier in 1943, while he was commander-in-chief, and the current situation looked much worse than it did then. According to the minutes, Leathers responded that it was now too late to relieve the famine. Although more ships were available to the British Empire, “it would not be possible to work additional ships into positions from which they could lift grain for delivery in India before the next Indian harvest.” The most that he could manage before year-end was 30,000 tons of barley a month from the Balkan stockpile and 30,000 tons of wheat that were to have been sent to the Middle East but were no longer needed.12
The members of the War Cabinet decided, however, that Balkan stocks should not be drawn down unduly. That meant they felt no more than 50,000 tons of wheat and barley could be spared (in addition to the 150,000 tons promised earlier, which were still being processed). After the standing orders for Ceylon and the Middle East, as well as the diversions to India, were met, “up to six ships surplus to these requirements” would present for loading at Australia in November. These would continue to transport wheat to the Balkan stockpile.13
Again, Amery’s diaries provide an angry insight into the motives behind the proceedings. “I fought my battle for Indian food as hard as I could,” he wrote. “Winston was prepared to admit that something should be done but very strong on the point that Indians are not the only people who are starving in this war and that as far as the war goes it is just as important to get food to Greece. . . . Winston may be right in saying that the starvation of anyhow under-fed Bengalis is less serious than sturdy Greeks, but he makes no sufficient allowance for the sense of Empire responsibility in this country.” Wavell’s account is just as revealing: “Apparently it is more important to save the Greeks and liberated countries from starvation than the Indians and there is reluctance either to provide shipping or to reduce stocks in this country.” (Wavell offers the only hint that there was a discussion of supplying Bengal or southern Europe from the United Kingdom’s import program.) “I pointed out military considerations and that practically the whole of India outside the rural districts was more or less engaged on war effort, and that it was impossible to differentiate and feed only those actually fighting or making munitions or working some particular railways, as P.M. had suggested.”14
At the Quebec conference the Americans had firmly rejected a plan for an invasion of the Balkans, and Churchill did not have the military resources necessary to pursue the venture alone. That rebuff had done nothing to dull his enthusiasm for the project. According to Field Marshal Brooke, the prime minister “hated having to give up the position of the dominant partner which we had held at the start,” and which the United States was inexorably assuming. “As a result he became inclined at times to put up strategic proposals which he knew were unsound purely to spite the Americans.” The humiliation inflicted by multiple British defeats, at Japanese and German hands, must also have rankled him, leading Churchill to hold “in the back of his mind the desire to form a purely British theatre when the laurels would be all ours.” The Balkans still held out hope for being such a front.15
IN OCTOBER, AT a sendoff dinner for Wavell—now elevated to the peerage to befit the Viceroyalty he was about to assume—Churchill gave a speech on India. “When we look back over the course of years we see one part of the world’s surface where there has been no war for three generations,” he declaimed. “Famines have passed away—until the horrors of war and the dislocations of war have given us a taste of them again—and pestilence has gone.” To his profound sorrow, these accomplishments were not appreciated. “It was thought in many parts of the world that all we did was to sit on the top of India exploiting the poor unfortunate people and taking away their hard-earned sustenance in order to enrich ourselves.” But should the day come, “as I pray it may not, when we cast down for ever our responsibilities there, and vanish from the scene, this episode in Indian history will surely become the Golden Age as time passes, when the British gave them peace and order, and there was justice for the poor, and all men were shielded from outside dangers. The Golden Age.”16
Lord Wavell, a quiet man of firm convictions, had spent several frustrating months trying to get the War Cabinet to endorse some fresh political proposal so that he would not arrive in India empty-handed. He rose to respond. According to Amery, he “directly challenged Winston’s whole position” by indicating that his own goal was a self-governing India. The War Cabinet subsequently discussed Wavell’s proposal, which was to invite ten Indian leaders, including Gandhi and Jinnah, for discussions on the country’s future. “Winston let himself go in a longish and pretty strong harangue, getting warmed up towards the end in an eloquent but irrelevant discourse on the worthlessness and probable disloyalty of India’s large and well-equipped army,” recorded Amery. As for Wavell, he grimly concluded that some “face-saving” formula would finally emerge from the War Cabinet discussions, “designed to carry them on and get me out there, but with every intention of blocking any progress. The more I see of politicians, the less I respect them.”17
The next day Amery and Wavell perused a document that Churchill had drafted on India. “Peace, order and a high condition of war-time well-being” were essential for the eventual thrust against Japan, it noted. “Every effort must be made, even by the diversion of shipping urgently needed for war purposes, to deal with lo
cal shortages.” The viceroy must ensure fairer distribution of resources, restore peace between Hindu and Muslim, and move toward self-government. “[Y]ou are wafted to India on a wave of hot air,” Wavell wrote that Amery told him. (Amery would remember the wave as a “gentle breeze.”)
When the viceroy-designate went to bid farewell to the prime minister, Churchill was “menacing and unpleasant.” He “indicated that only over his dead body would any approach to Gandhi take place,” Wavell recorded in his diary. Despite the sentiments he had put on paper, Churchill remained determined to stop any political advance in India.18
Viceroy Linlithgow, writing from Simla, the picturesque summer retreat of the colonial government, dispatched a valedictory letter to the secretary of state for India. “I can feel as I lay down this great charge that I leave the country in pretty good trim,” he summed up. The leaders of Congress were “in jail and forgotten,” and Gandhi “is equally out of the way of doing mischief.” Linlithgow’s only unresolved concerns were inflation and “the food position.” A communication from Bengal’s governor observed, however, that the famine “does not constitute grave menace to peace or tranquillity of Bengal or any part thereof, for sufferers are entirely submissive and emergency threatens, not maintenance of law and order, but preservation of public health and economic stability.”19
Meanwhile, Lady Linlithgow had written to the prime minister requesting an American Liberator bomber in which to fly home, because it had twice the capacity of the one that had been assigned to her and the outgoing viceroy. Having endured seven and a half “very strenuous years” in India, she wrote, “I would like to be rewarded by a free trip home in this Liberator in which we can take quite a lot of luggage!” Churchill obliged, sending Wavell and other officers out in two civilian aircraft that would bring back the former viceroy and his wife.20
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