Churchill's Secret War

by Madhusree Mukerjee

  The easiest way to begin estimating the number of famine deaths is to picture a pyramid representing a pile of corpses that towers over a flat expanse—as would be the norm. But with the 1943 Bengal famine, one is forced to try and separate a peak from the mountain upon which it sits. Where should a determination be made between the two? What level of mortality should be regarded as normal? It becomes as much a matter of inclination as of science.

  Beginning with Mahalanobis’s figure for the total number of deaths in 1943, Greenough corrected for infant deaths (which were 18 percent of the deaths in normal times) and subtracted the estimate of normal deaths provided by Sen to estimate a famine toll of 2 million for 1943. To that he added Sen’s estimate of mortality during 1944 and 1945 to get between 3.5 and 3.8 million as the number of deaths attributable to famine.17

  A more consistent approach is to stick with mortality rates for the entire calculation. Mahalanobis’s mortality rate of 5.3 percent, when corrected for infant deaths, yields a total mortality rate of 6.5 percent for 1943. The population of Bengal in January 1943 was 61.8 million, which gives a total of 4 million deaths for 1943. From this figure must be subtracted 2.5 million baseline deaths (calculated by using the normal death rate of 4 percent that Mahalanobis preferred). That gives 1.5 million for the famine toll in 1943. Doubling this figure, because death registrations were roughly symmetric around December 1943, provides a famine toll of around 3 million.18

  None of these estimates for famine mortality account for starvation deaths during 1942—although in coastal Bengal, scorched earth and cyclone had caused the famine to begin by at least the last quarter of that year. And it remains unclear how, if at all, Mahalanobis accounted for those individuals and families who had simply vanished. On the other hand, it is possible that the normal death rate was even higher than 4 percent, which would tend to reduce the famine toll. One thing is clear: the figure of 3 million does not include all fatalities from shortage of food, because deaths from malnutrition were undoubtedly occurring even in so-called normal years. If for comparison we were to use the death rate of 2.1 percent that was the norm for India (rather than Bengal) in 1942, the famine toll would be 5.4 million. Nor do these figures include famine deaths in the rest of the rice belt, such as in Orissa and Madras.

  IN 1949, A session of the Geneva Convention extended the guidelines for civilized warfare and included a prohibition against starving civilians in occupied territories. “To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary food-stuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate,” the convention declared. In 1977, additional protocols strengthened the injunction against starvation, prohibiting the removal or destruction of “objects indispensable to the survival of the population.” If the application of an economic blockade resulted in starvation, the convention further mandated the provisioning of essential supplies to the civilian population. In fact, depriving civilians of an occupied territory of vital foods and failing to supply them with adequate relief constitute war crimes as understood today.19

  Given that the War Cabinet enjoyed absolute control over shipping to and from India, that tens of thousands of nationalists were in prison, that in the estimation of military intelligence India was “an occupied and hostile country,” and that the War Cabinet spoke for Indians—by, for instance, turning down offers of grain on their behalf—India was presumed by the United Kingdom to be an occupied territory. If such provisions protecting civilians had been in place before the war, the Denial Policy and the failure of His Majesty’s Government to relieve the famine could conceivably have been prosecuted as war crimes.

  ALTHOUGH THE ACTIONS of the War Cabinet can be traced with some accuracy (mainly through documents of the Ministry of War Transport), its motives for denying adequate grain to India in the summer and fall of 1943 remain too various and intertwined to tease apart. One reason it chose not to relieve the famine derived from its determination to meet the target of 27 million tons of civilian imports for the United Kingdom. To Cherwell, at least, that meant no ships could be released from the import program. A second reason was the Balkan stockpile, close to Churchill’s heart, and also close to Cherwell’s because that reserve could take some of the pressure of feeding liberated Europe off the U.K. stockpile. A third reason appears to have been the avoidance of embarrassment, as in having to admit to American officials that the British Empire controlled enough ships and grain to send substantial relief to a colony imperiled by hunger.

  Saving face might seem to be a peculiarly trivial reason for permitting a famine to run its course, but perhaps it was not too trivial, given that the English government deemed the lives of Bengalis to be inconsequential. Churchill’s broad-brush loathing of the natives might have added impetus to the other rationales for failing to aid them, as might have the continued defiance of Subhas Chandra Bose, who was wildly popular among Bengalis. (The mere existence of the Indian National Army was a source of humiliation to the British, because it advertised the fact that armies of subjects in British colonies had chosen to fight alongside the Japanese, whereas the reverse was true in the Philippines, an American possession.) The War Cabinet’s shipping assignments made in August 1943, shortly after Amery had pleaded for famine relief, show Australian wheat flour traveling to Ceylon, the Middle East, and southern Africa—everywhere in the Indian Ocean area but to India. Those assignments suggest a will to punish.

  Fiercely evident through almost every War Cabinet discussion on India in 1943 is Churchill’s inchoate rage: rage because the colony was slipping out of his grasp, and rage because in violation of the laws of nature and man it had turned from being a debtor to a major British creditor. As late as 1947, Churchill would write in a draft of his war history that India was “the greatest war profiteer.” (A similar charge could be made of His Majesty’s Government. It stockpiled food during famine, and by selling such liquid assets “must have made a considerable profit on the rising market after the war,” according to historian R. J. Hammond.) Churchill and Cherwell were convinced that for the United Kingdom to owe money to India was a “monstrous” injustice, and that the colony should be forced to bear the entire burden of war expenses. All the evidence points to the prime minister and his closest adviser having believed that Indians were ordained to reside at the bottom of the social pyramid, such that their financial ascendancy as creditors during the war became a source of frustration and fury. Long after India had obtained independence, the Prof would describe “the abdication of the white man” as the worst calamity of the twentieth century—more deplorable than two world wars and the Holocaust.20

  In the end, it is not so much racism as the imbalance of power inherent in the social Darwinian pyramid that explains why famine could be tolerated in India while bread rationing was regarded as an intolerable deprivation in wartime Britain. Cherwell, for instance, did not think much of the British working class either, but he was deeply engaged in feeding it and placating it. Economist Amartya Sen observes that famine has never occurred in a functioning democracy—a form of government that inverts the traditional power structure by making rulers accountable to those whom they rule.21

  If Cherwell lavished attention on British civilians, that was no doubt because all of his considerable power derived from his friendship with Churchill, whose own power and popularity would be tested in postwar elections in the United Kingdom. References to public opinion are frequent among the S branch papers. While urging the shipping cut to the Indian Ocean, for instance, the Prof had warned of “political repercussions” unless his advice was heeded. Remonstrating against promises of food for postwar Europe, he had asserted that if these pledges were “fulfilled at the expense of U.K. rations we shall be blamed at home.” During the war, Cherwell protected Churchill’s domestic flank with the single-minded devotion and ferocity of a guard
dog. Indians did not vote in British elections.22

  The central evil of imperialism is the inability of subject peoples to hold their rulers accountable—and all the rest, even the racism, may flow from that essential powerlessness. In her classic treatise on totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt distinguished between “race-thinking,” the categorization of humans by perceived characteristics, and racism, the ranking of these categories into high and low. She argued that racism was a direct consequence of imperialism, which “would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible ‘explanation’ and excuse for its deeds, even if no race-thinking had ever existed in the civilized world.” The British imperial need to demonize Hindu males vanished overnight with India’s independence—which points to the accuracy of Arendt’s observation.23

  ONE PERSON WHO emerges from the famine with remarkably clean hands is Leopold Amery. True, he had urged ruthlessness in implementing the War Cabinet’s scorched earth policy, had initially hoped that the viceroy would muddle through without grain imports, and had relayed Churchill’s demands for continued rice exports from India. And given that Amery appears to have orchestrated a cover-up—by, for instance, ensuring that the famine commission would refrain from discussing shipping constraints, and (probably) issuing the order to destroy certain India Office documents relating to grain exports from the colony—it is imaginable that in some other way, which may never be known, he had aggravated the famine. But after mass starvation was reported to the government, he did urge upon the Ministry of War Transport and the War Cabinet the necessity of sending grain.

  Amery’s willingness to endure opprobrium for the Bengal famine may have been a form of atonement for the actions of his son. John Amery had been in France when the Nazis invaded, and after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union he had gone to Berlin to offer his help. Convinced that the United Kingdom should oppose the Soviets instead of aiding them, he had tried to recruit his countrymen to what he called a British Legion of St. George that would fight the Russians on the eastern front.

  John Amery was captured in April 1945 and brought back to England for trial. He protested that he was an anti-communist rather than a Nazi, but he pleaded guilty to treason, apparently to spare his family further pain. He was executed that December. At the time his father circulated among friends a poignant note explaining why John had acted as he did. He had spent so much time on the Continent that he thought himself more European than English. He was also rather psychologically disturbed, had a broken marriage, suffered a bankruptcy that he blamed on Jewish bankers, and claimed to have seen atrocities in Spanish concentration camps that had given him a horror of communism. Amery gave him this epitaph:24 At end of wayward days he found a cause.

  ’Twas not his Country’s—Only time can tell

  If that defiance of our ancient laws

  Was treason—or foreknowledge. He sleeps well.

  Leopold Amery’s patriotism was never in question, but the stanza perhaps hints at his own subterranean affinities—in particular, his deep empathy for Jews, which motivated at least in part his lifelong support for the cause of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. After his tenure as secretary of state for India ended in 1945, Amery never returned to political life. Behind the scenes, he continued to urge that Britain discourage a partition of India. A secret patron of Israel, he visited that new nation in 1950, where President Chaim Weizmann received him. Amery also embarked on an autobiography. He had written three large volumes without getting much into discussions of the war when he died in 1955, at the age of eighty-one.25

  IN THE SPRING of 1949, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru declared that India would like to remain within the Commonwealth. To Churchill that meant that the British Empire might endure in spirit, and it thrilled him. Meeting Nehru in London, he said with emotion that he had done him great wrong, hailing the Indian leader as a “prodigal who has returned to the fold of the family.” Nehru was on his way to Washington, D.C., and Churchill said he would have liked to introduce him to America as having “conquered two great human infirmities: you have conquered fear and you have conquered hate.”26

  Churchill was clearly thinking of himself. A “tyrant” when at the top of a wave, as Beaverbrook had once observed, after the wave crashed he could be a remarkably introspective man. “Now the arrogance and self-assertion have gone, and there is left a deep humility,” Moran had observed of him after the Tory loss in postwar elections.27

  The war memoirs turned Churchill into a hero, and in 1951 he was elected prime minister. In that capacity he had cause to interact further with Nehru, with whom he had something in common: they were both graduates of Harrow. These encounters prompted Churchill to revise some more of his long-standing prejudices. “When you learn to think of a race as inferior beings it is difficult to get rid of that way of thinking; when I was a subaltern the Indian did not seem to me equal to the white man,” he confided to his doctor.28

  In June 1953, after witnessing the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, Churchill found himself standing next to Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, while they both waited for their cars to drive up. “You must have hated the British for the treatment meted out to your father,” Churchill said. “It is remarkable how he and you have overcome that bitterness and hatred.”

  “We never hated you,” she responded.

  “I did, but I don’t now,” he replied.29

  Not long after, Churchill suffered a debilitating stroke. Believing that he was about to die, he told Moran, albeit with a great many reservations, “that he had been wrong about India.” What exactly he regretted, the doctor’s account gives no clue.30

  Lord Cherwell suffered no such qualms. He continued to complain bitterly to friends that Indians and Egyptians “had defrauded us” during the war. After Churchill became prime minister for the second time, Cherwell moved into 11 Downing Street, from where he could stroll into Number 10 through an interconnecting door. He was the prime minister’s adviser on nuclear warfare. From time to time, with what economist Roy Harrod called an “expression of extreme severity,” the Prof would express his profound dismay at the demise of the colonial system. He hated the cold of winter and longed to retire to a warm place, such as Jamaica, but he was deterred by his phobia of blacks. Eventually he returned to Oxford to live in his former rooms and in 1957 died in his sleep.31

  Churchill lived for seven years longer, slipping inexorably into the sort of depression that had beset him previously in his life. He would sit for hours in front of a fire brooding on the past. “If Winston has believed in anything at all in the course of his long life it has been in the British Empire and all that it stands for,” Moran wrote. “Some of his happiest hours as a young subaltern were spent in India—and India was gone.” In the memoirs that Churchill had written about the war, he had tried to justify all that he had done, and managed to convince almost everyone of the rightness of his actions. “But have there been black hours when he has not been so sure?” the doctor mused. “There was the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse and the lives of the English sailors lost in that unhappy affair. And there was——. But the mind of the man of action does not work like that. When he has taken a decision on which thousands of lives depend, he puts it away from him. How otherwise could he keep sane?” The blank that Moran left in his memoir cannot be filled in until at least the 2020s, when some of his draft manuscripts will be opened to the public. Moran continued: “And yet, when all this is said, my doubts remain. Does the artist, for that is what Winston is, really escape so lightly?”32

  On January 24, 1965, Winston Spencer Churchill died at his home in London, at ninety years of age.

  A MONTH BEFORE Indian independence, Sushil Dhara was released from prison and came home to a hero’s welcome. Asked to address the crowd, he broke down in tears. He cried for the youths he had led to their deaths in September 1942, who had not gotten to enjoy the liberty they craved.

  Kumudini Dakua’s husband had also been released from p
rison. He took to traveling extensively in connection with his social work, which led Dakua to draw ever closer to Dhara. When Dhara’s sister-in-law perished in childbirth, leaving three young children, Dakua joined the household as their surrogate mother.

  Dhara’s last sojourn in prison had given him time to read and reflect, and had turned him back into a Gandhian. Entrusted with all the cash that remained after the Tamluk government’s books were balanced, he used it to build a maternity hospital—a venture aided by Chitto Samonto. Samonto also helped Dhara with other projects inspired by Gandhi’s ideas for restoring self-sufficiency to villages, such as perfecting a formula for soap made of local ingredients.

  SOON AFTER INDEPENDENCE, Samonto walked to a high school owned by Mohisadal’s zamindars and, summoning up all his courage, asked to see the headmaster. The great man was seated on a chair mounted high on a platform, like a judge, and asked in a booming voice what the youth wanted. “Free schooling,” Chitto replied.

  The headmaster glanced over his old grade reports, regarded the young man carefully, and agreed. Chitto would, however, have to pay 5 rupees for the first three months, after which his fees would be waived. His brother came up with the money, and Chitto was admitted. All the other boys in the school were from wealthy families and would spend their time smoking and lazing around, but Chitto did not even have the money to buy textbooks. He had an idea. “In those days you could get thin paperbacks, mostly biographies, for a quarter of a rupee. Whatever money I could collect, I would spend on buying one of these. I started a library service, would lend to the boys. With the money I earned, I bought more for my library and kept some aside to buy my own books.” Chitto also cooked and sold food at fairs. “My classmates bought snacks from me, and sometimes helped me out at the stall. I used to walk every day from here to Mohisadal and come back the same way. In winter it would be dark by the time I got back.”