Churchill's Secret War (13 page)

Kalikakundu in modern times is a collection of hamlets separated by expanses of low-lying rice fields. Coconut palms, banana groves, and ponds cluster around the mud or brick huts of each hamlet, while rice plants of day-glo green stick out of the flooded fields everywhere else. Raised ridges, paved with crumbly red earth, radiate across the fields to link the hamlets, each of which is home to a specific religious group or a single extended family. Chitto Samonto knew individuals in every hamlet—whether worshippers of Kali, Krishna, or Allah—well enough to merit a cup of tea and intimate details of life and death.

Samonto was born in 1926, the youngest of four children. His father was one of the most educated men of the locale, boasting a master’s degree, and he taught Bengali and arithmetic in several high schools at some distance away, which meant he came home to Kalikakundu only once or twice a month. “I feared my father,” Samonto said. “He had elevated tastes. If I spotted him coming across the fields, I would have to run home, lay out a reed mat, put out water to wash his feet, pour drinking water into a cup, and be ready to offer his pipe stuffed with his favorite aromatic tobacco.” The patriarch had tutored the princes of Mohisadal—the sons of the local zamindar—and they had once invited the teacher to the palace to play chess for a full week. For all that, he earned a pittance. The teacher’s annual salary was around 150 rupees, whereas every year the Mohisadal rajas collected 1.3 million rupees in rent alone.

Cornwallis’s reforms of 1793 had transformed zamindars, who used to be tax collectors and administrators, into English-style landlords who owned fields, rivers, pastures, ponds, and groves that were once collectively
held by villagers. The landlords maintained private security forces that assisted them in collecting rent and in wresting fields from the ownership of defaulters. Often the farmers who lost their land continued to cultivate it, supplying the seed, plough, bullocks, and fertilizer and bearing the risk of natural calamity while being entitled to at most half the crop. In a lean year the cultivators had to borrow grain or cash in order to stay alive, and either repay the debt with interest or work without wages to pay it off—thereby entering a state of ever-deepening subjugation.
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Chitto’s mother was beautiful but illiterate, hailed from a neighboring village, and grew rice on the small plot of land the family owned in Kalikakundu. With help from her children, she also cultivated a large field belonging to the Mohisadal zamindars. “My mother worked all the time,” Samonto recalled. “It is very hard work, transplanting the rice plants into flooded fields, bent over all day, come sun or rain. You can’t stop when it rains.” The managers of the Mohisadal estates usually claimed three-quarters of the crop. In consequence, all this effort gained the Samonto family enough rice for only three or four months a year, and the rest had to be bought or borrowed. Each sackful of rice borrowed had to be repaid by one and a half sackfuls from the next harvest. It was a no-win game, yet his mother somehow pulled the family through. “I still dream of her,” Samonto confessed. “She is feeding me, taking care of me.”

Chitto’s sisters had finished primary school, after which they were married, and his brother had gone on to middle school. But by the time Chitto was old enough to study, the economic depression had arrived and the family could barely eat. The boy desperately wanted an education: “My father was a teacher—I didn’t want to let him down.” He managed to attend a primary school in a nearby village. It had perhaps sixty students, three or four teachers, and a huge portrait of King George V to which everyone had to render
pronam
, a gesture of obeisance. But the only way Chitto could afford to study was by living with and working for a better-off family in that village.

“They gave me food and I went to the school. I did everything for them—cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, scrubbing dishes, you name
it,” Samonto said. The boy had to get the groceries, make meals, spoon-feed the family’s feeble old patriarch, clean up drunken messes left by his bachelor son, and run errands for the other son and his wife (who, fortunately, were often away in Calcutta). Chitto had no books, and in any case his chores left very little time for study. “It took me years to get through primary school. By the time I finished I was twelve or thirteen.”

Thereafter the boy had wandered from house to house in other villages, begging to be allowed to stay, work, and study at a nearby middle school. “I was willing to do anything for them, even then it was impossible.” Giving up, he had hung out at home, helping his mother in the fields or making flattened rice and carrying almost 40 kilograms of it, stuffed into a sack and balanced on his head, to sell at Geokhali town, eight miles away. After two years he was lucky to be admitted with free board to a school run by a Hindu charity. Chitto emerged with good grades—and immediately suspended his studies. It was August 1942. British forces had departed Southeast Asia, the Japanese were at India’s border, Gandhi had just been arrested, India had erupted into the most concerted rebellion since 1857, and the teenager wanted to help make history.

“I
f, after India has made the very great material effort in defence of the Empire which she has already made, she should be attacked and find herself without any of the necessary materials and equipment for defence, the political effect would be disastrous,” General Archibald Wavell had warned in September 1941, two months after arriving in India as commander-in-chief of the Indian Army. Earlier that year, British forces sent to defend Greece had been routed by Germans, a debacle that had led the prime minister to remove Wavell as general officer commanding-in-chief of the Middle East Command.
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Wavell’s new command was to prove at least as challenging as his old one. The Indian Army numbered almost a million at the time, but the majority of troops were poorly trained and had no equipment to speak of. The seven best Indian divisions—the only ones with up-to-date weaponry, functioning vehicles, technical expertise, and experience—were fighting in the deserts around the Mediterranean. Not a single armored car or modern tank, bomber, or fighter plane was to be found on the entire subcontinent. India’s cities and military installations were defended by only 30 anti-aircraft guns but required at least 520. General Claude Auchinlek, who had preceded Wavell as commander-in-chief in India, had asked the War Cabinet for tanks in order to prepare at least one armored division in India, to which the prime minister had replied: “But General, how do you know that they wouldn’t turn and fire the wrong way?” Amery, for his part, had been consistently urging aircraft production in the colony, and had been just as consistently
turned down. “Winston,” he observed in his diary, “hates the idea of Indians producing anything for themselves in the way of defence.”
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India was unprotected from Axis attack for several reasons. The prime minister believed that the Japanese would not dare to take on the fabled Royal Navy and, in any case, that the fortress of Singapore would halt any significant advance toward India. Moreover, he worried that if Indian troops with contemporary weapons were on home ground, they would turn on their superiors—just as they had in 1857. After that rebellion, the Indian Army had been remade with men from the so-called martial races; it was meticulously structured so that ties of kinship and ethnicity translated into loyalty to commanding officers and, thence, to the Crown. But by the time World War II arrived, the army had expanded so much that officers of diverse origins—even Bengalis—had had to be inducted. Being educated, the officers were more politicized than rank-and-file soldiers, and 60 percent of them expected independence for their homeland as a reward for their services in the war. To make matters worse, Axis propaganda, engineered by Subhas Chandra Bose in Berlin, was urging nationalists to join the army and subvert it from within.
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Churchill’s suspicions of the Indian Army were well founded. Nevertheless, leaving India without the means to defend its eastern flank would prove to be an error—as fatal to the stature of the British Empire as to the security of its subjects.

 

PRESIDENT FRANKLIN D. Roosevelt could scarcely believe that their two nations were fighting a war against fascism but would not also try to free the world of colonialism, as he remarked to Winston Churchill in August 1941. The comment made Churchill apoplectic. The prime minister had traveled to Placentia Bay in Newfoundland in order to woo his benefactor and inform him of the United Kingdom’s vital needs. For the president, the Atlantic Conference was a chance to size up his ally—and to impose his own democratic views.
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Also present was Elliott Roosevelt, the president’s fourth son, who later published a controversial account of his father’s wartime conferences.
“The cigars were burned to ashes, the brandy disappeared steadily,” he wrote of Churchill after one dinner. But the tongue remained lucid, and the president provoked it by bringing up the empire’s economics. No stable peace was possible, he suggested, if the colonies remained poor—and dated methods of taking out raw materials and giving nothing back made progress impossible. According to the younger Roosevelt, Churchill’s neck reddened and his sentences lengthened into paragraphs—and the president, having said his piece, let him talk. After 2 A.M. Elliott was finally able to help his wheelchair-bound father to his cabin and sit awhile to share a smoke. The prime minister was an old-fashioned Tory, the president said, but they would be able to work together just fine. They would, his son warned, as long as the two men stayed off the topic of India.
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The conference resulted in an inspiring statement of war aims, known as the Atlantic Charter. The document offered the first hint of the president’s goal of a United Nations to police the postwar peace. It also asserted that the United States and the United Kingdom would “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and that they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.” Leopold Amery—who worried that the Americans would use the war to undermine the British Empire and turn it into “a lebensraum for their exports”—was disgusted by the charter. “We shall no doubt pay dearly in the end for all this fluffy flapdoodle,” he confided to his diary. At his urging, the prime minister clarified to the House of Commons that the Atlantic Charter applied only to those countries conquered by the Axis powers. The colonies were exempt.
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ON DECEMBER 7, 1941, Japanese bombers devastated the American fleet in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, bringing the United States into the war. That night Churchill slept the sleep of the saved, because he believed the entry of the United States into the war meant ultimate victory. The United Kingdom immediately declared war on Japan, as did India. For the moment, however, things got worse.

Churchill had earlier dispatched two battleships, the
Repulse
and the
Prince of Wales
, toward Singapore in the hope of deterring an Axis advance toward the British Empire. But within days “an army of highly trained gangsters,” as Wavell described the Japanese invaders, landed in Siam and Malay and sped toward the city of Penang—on bicycles. Japanese bombers flattened Penang ahead of the army’s advance and torpedoed the two British battleships, which were bereft of air cover, and sank them. It was the single worst day of the war for Churchill, who had traveled on the
Prince of Wales
for his meeting with Roosevelt.

If the Japanese reached India, the natives might welcome them in. So when Churchill visited Washington later that December, Roosevelt broached the prospect of political reform in the colony. “I reacted so strongly and at such length that he never raised it verbally again,” the prime minister would write in his history of the world war.
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Churchill’s defiance could not conceal the grave threat to the British Empire. Singapore was indeed impregnable if approached by sea, but in January 1942 Japanese soldiers traversed seemingly impenetrable jungles on foot and arrived at the city’s vulnerable northern side. “India had been sucked dry of trained troops by the requirements of the Middle East, Iraq, and Iran,” Wavell would later note, and most of the British, Indian, and Australian soldiers who were rushed to face the enemy were rookies. Worse, the invaders had air cover, whereas the defenders had none. “There must be at this stage no thought of saving the troops or sparing the population,” Churchill cabled. “Commanders and senior officers should die with their troops. The honour of the British Empire and the British Army is at stake.”
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Singapore fell on February 15, 1942. At an extraordinary ceremony the following evening, Indian soldiers and officers who had defended Siam and Malay watched as a commander, Colonel Hunt, formally surrendered them to the Japanese before embarking with his compatriots for safety. With surgical precision, the white men in an army that had hitherto trained and fought as a unit separated themselves from the brown. Fujiwara Iwaichi, a Japanese commander unusual in his belief in liberating colonies, encouraged a personable Sikh officer, Captain
Mohan Singh, to recruit the captive soldiers into an Indian National Army that would eventually march back to their homeland to fight the British. Of the 67,000 soldiers who surrendered, more than 20,000 would join this liberation army.
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Next in the line of attack was Burma—defended by a Burmese division and an Indian division that had been partially trained and equipped for desert warfare, and possessed no tanks or anti-aircraft guns. During the awful retreat, a commander precipitously ordered a bridge to be blown up, leaving thousands of his own troops on the wrong side of a mile-wide river. On March 8 Rangoon fell, and the Japanese were at India’s border.
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