Churchill's Secret War (26 page)

Breaking the bad news to the viceroy, the secretary of state for India could offer scant comfort. He suggested that Linlithgow anyhow announce imports, but “without disclosing figures.” The viceroy replied (and a note of desperation broke through his usual bureaucratese): “A firm promise of 100,000 tons of barley and the possibility of small additional quantity of wheat will go nowhere in meeting our essential demands.” Whereas substantial imports of wheat would have broken the famine, barley was of little help because it had a negligible effect on prices.
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The situation was worse than Amery and Linlithgow realized. A Ministry of War Transport paper declared that “[t]he War Cabinet directive [of August 4] is not a precise instruction as no decision is taken whether any wheat is, in fact, to go to India and no time limit is laid down beyond the implication that the requirements of Ceylon and the Middle East for cereals are to receive priority.” In point of fact, the War Cabinet had not scheduled any relief at all for India.
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IN DEFENDING CHERWELL’S role in the decision to deny India famine relief, Thomas Wilson, the S branch economist who assisted him with Indian matters, would make several points. First, as he wrote in a book on the Prof’s wartime achievements, the United Kingdom
could not have added substantially to total supplies in India. That was correct—and irrelevant, because the relatively modest quantity of grain being requested by the viceroy would have brought considerable relief. Second, he declared that no one “could possibly say how much would be required” to make an impression on speculators. On the contrary, the Government of India had a good idea, based on the wheat required to feed the army and part of the urban populace until the next harvest; so also did the Gregory Committee. Third, the situation with available ships and where they could be deployed “was acutely critical at the time.”
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In truth, perhaps at no other period during the war than in the summer and fall of 1943 did the number of ships at hand so greatly exceed those already committed to Allied operations. The war against U-boats was won and American production of ships was increasing steeply; the net gain for the Allies had been 1.5 million tons of shipping in May alone. That month the president had transferred to British control fifteen to twenty cargo vessels for the duration of the war. By the summer of 1943, the British shipping crisis had given way to what historian Kevin Smith calls a “shipping glut” and the S branch would refer to as “[w]indfall shipping.” Lord Arthur Salter, who had headed the British shipping mission to Washington, returned to London to find that instead of worrying about the scarcity of ships, his colleagues were now concerned about the impact on postwar trade of too many ships in American hands. So many vessels would present at North American ports that autumn to be loaded with supplies to add to the United Kingdom’s stockpile that not enough cargo could be found to fill them. If ever during the war a window had opened for saving lives in Bengal—at no discernible cost to the war effort—this was it.
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The prime minister had other uses for the surplus ships, however. He had observed in mid-July that the “immense saving” in shipping had been “partly allowed for in our calculations and plans, but if maintained should require a further drastic re-examination of these in a favourable sense.” He urged that some of the extra ships be used to restore white bread to the United Kingdom. With the remainder, the War Cabinet would continue to bolster the United Kingdom’s stockpile—
and it would create a second one in the Mediterranean region, in preparation for a British liberation of the Balkans.
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As First Lord of the Admiralty during World War I, Churchill had pushed through a seaborne attack on the Ottoman Empire. The Gallipoli (or Dardanelles) campaign had ended in dismal failure, with more than 40,000 Allied troops killed, and Churchill’s superiors had forced his resignation. He had retained an interest in the region—and an apparent desire to prove, by means of a successful reprise, that his strategic concept had been sound. Churchill hoped that military successes in the vicinity of Turkey would induce that nation, which remained neutral, to join the war on the Allied side and provide an unconventional route for attacking Germany and supplying the Soviet Union. Historian A.J.P. Taylor would describe Churchill’s strategy as a “strange fantasy.” The venture was doomed for several reasons, including mountainous terrain in the Balkans that was easy for the enemy to defend, the Turkish determination to stay out of the war, and American hostility to the plan—which would lead the president and his generals to withhold vital military equipment.
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As a prelude to what he envisioned as a full-scale campaign in the region, on August 3, 1943, Churchill had instructed his military chiefs to prepare for an occupation of islands in the Aegean Sea (which lies between Greece and Turkey). Australian wheat and the surplus ships would meanwhile be used to build up a substantial stockpile for feeding the civilian population of southeastern Europe—just in case these inadequately supported but prospectively heroic efforts in the eastern Mediterranean led to freedom for Greece, Yugoslavia, and other Balkan countries. By December, German forces would have routed the British Empire’s soldiers and sailors from their island outposts, in what Stephen Roskill, the official historian of the United Kingdom’s naval war, would describe as “the Aegean fiasco . . . a tragic, and one may feel a wholly unnecessary ending to a year which had brought important and long-awaited successes.”
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In the fourth part of his defense of the War Cabinet’s policy toward the Indian famine, Wilson stated that rice was hard to get hold of, and no grain other than rice would have sufficed to forestall mass fatalities.
Some rice was actually available in 1943. That year, around 150,000 tons of rice were exported from Egypt, most of it going to Ceylon, and the United Kingdom imported 131,000 tons from unknown sources. British authorities would also turn down offers of rice for Bengal, as will be discussed in later chapters. And it was mistaken to maintain that starving Indians would eat only rice. This untruth appears so regularly in British accounts of the Bengal famine, in one of three forms—that Bengalis “would sooner starve to death” than eat wheat, had difficulty digesting wheat, or did not know how to prepare wheat—that it deserves special scrutiny.
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Wheat was one of the ancient crops of Bengal and is one of the nine plants symbolically offered to the goddess Durga. When Bengalis worship her in October, they eat a wheat paste as a sacral offering. They have no trouble digesting it; on the contrary, better-off Bengalis use cream of wheat to wean infants. Chitto Samonto said that rather than shun wheat, he and other villagers regarded it as a luxury food to be enjoyed at certain festivals. Those who could not afford to buy wheat would visit wealthier homes, where they would help prepare, and subsequently feast on,
pithe
(filled crepes) or
luchi
(fried bread). All that it took to make
ruti
, or flat bread, out of wheat flour was to knead it with water into dough, roll it out, and toast it.

However, when people have been starving for a long time, their bodies would have partially consumed themselves, rendering the intestines paper-thin. At that point in starvation, the ingestion of any solid food—including rice—could be fatal. Famine victims would not have possessed griddles, so the ruti would have turned out crusty and possibly risky to eat. But there was another option. Civil servant Olaf Martin, who was later pressed into famine relief, fed rescued orphans with a concoction of whole-meal wheat flour, butter, and molasses. “This was boiled up into a sweet porridge which all children would eat eagerly and digest easily,” he wrote in his memoir. “And about 10 days of this diet put them in a condition to eat ordinary cooked rice and vegetables. These children recovered very rapidly in our orphanages, mental and physical condition improving simultaneously.”
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Bengalis did have trouble digesting coarse grains, and relief workers came to believe that even the gruel made out of these was causing diarrhea. “One of the extraordinary features of Bengal is that although all this time they have been talking of shortage of supplies, they practically refuse to use either millets or gram [small chickpeas],” stated Robert Hutchings in 1944. “This year they have told me ‘For goodness sake stop sending millets.’ Now they say stop sending gram because we cannot use it. They are quite willing to take wheat.” The famine commission ignored such testimonies and thus abetted the they-won’t-eat-bread theory, claiming that commission members saw wheat rotting in warehouses because Bengalis did not want it. But that argument is inconclusive, because the Bengal government held stores of rice for the war effort that were also rotting.
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The only problem in feeding wheat to Bengalis was that the people lacked the means to grind it, which meant it would have had to be milled into flour before distribution. Australian wheat was mainly exported as flour, however; and in any case the Government of India had asked for wheat shipments not so much to feed Bengali villagers but to unburden the people of the demand to fill the stomachs of soldiers. Because of the wheat shortage, the army would eat 115,000 tons of rice during 1943—twice the quantity it had consumed the year before. An assurance of receiving enough wheat to feed the war effort might have prompted the authorities, if not others, to release to the starving some of the rice they had stockpiled.

 

AN ALTERNATE VIEW of the August meeting on famine relief can be found in Amery’s diary. After propounding the urgent Indian need for food “in as strong terms as I could,” he fended off a counterattack. According to Amery, the War Cabinet treated the demand for rice “as a bluff on India’s part aimed at loosing existing hoards with less trouble than by other methods, while the discussion rapidly developed into an attack on India’s failure to deal with the inflationary position.” The S branch regarded inflation as an instrument by which Britons were “being exploited” by Indians. Because the real value of the rupee had fallen
steeply since 1940, when it had been pegged against the sterling, Cherwell believed that the money being expended in India was buying less than it should, which left the sterling debt three times too high. Amery, in contrast, held that the enormous demand for Indian goods would normally have led to the rupee
rising
in value instead of falling: had it not been pegged down, the sterling debt would have been three times greater than its already high amount. He pointed out that “nothing could counteract the immense amount of our purchases, not repaid in any amount by consumer commodities. I fought hard and expressed myself very freely about the nonsense talk by Professor Cherwell whom Winston drags in on every subject and who obviously knows nothing of economics, but, like Winston, hates India.”
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By then, the prime minister’s several sources of anger with Indians had fused into one fury. In May 1943 he had accused Field Marshal Wavell of “creating a Frankenstein by putting modern weapons in the hands of sepoys” and had brought up the specter of 1857. In June he had warned that native troops might “shoot us in the back,” demanding that suspect peoples, including Bengalis, be purged from the Indian Army—an action that had turned out to be unfeasible. The prime minister “hates India and everything to do with it,” Wavell observed in his diary on July 27, after witnessing an outburst in the War Cabinet. “Winston drew harrowing picture of British workmen in rags struggling to pay rich Indian mill-owners; and wanted to charge India the equivalent of our debt to her for saving her from Japanese invasion.” The field marshal pointed out that “India had defended us in the Middle East for the first two years of war” rather than the other way around. Amery, for his part, noted that it was not a good idea “when driving to catch a train for life or death, to lean through the window and tell the taximan that you do not mean to pay the fare at the station because you have a moral counter-claim against him.” Because it was patently counterproductive to seek a revision of the financial agreement at that juncture, the prime minister had been frustrated in his resolve to abolish the balance owed to India.
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It became clear during the August 4 meeting on famine relief that the sterling debt was still embedded in the lion’s paw. Instead of sending
relief, the War Cabinet recommended “forceful propaganda” and curbs on inflation as measures against famine. It also used the session to set up a committee for studying Indian inflation and finding ways to reduce the sterling debt.
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Lawrence Burgis, a secretary who attended that meeting, took sketchy notes that point to yet another factor prompting the denial of relief. After Amery spoke of the famine, Churchill’s associates questioned the necessity of meeting the Indian demand for wheat. Leathers argued that Ceylon’s needs should receive priority, while Cherwell suggested an attempt to “bluff Indian hoarders” by announcing that enough grain was being imported to bring prices down. Sir Percy James Grigg, the secretary of state for war, said that bluffing would not help—in his view, not even the half-million tons of wheat that the viceroy sought would actually help, because the shortage was of rice. (Grigg appears to be the source of the myth that wheat would not suffice to thwart the famine.) Churchill opined that the food crisis pointed to the “failure of Indians” in higher echelons of government. At least the essential war workers should be fed, he felt; but although shipping 50,000 tons posed no difficulty, sourcing wheat from Australia could be a problem. As for barley from Iraq, India could have “as much as [possible].”
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That fall, Ceylon and the Middle East were to receive each month 75,000 tons of Australian wheat to meet the regions’ continuing needs, according to the Ministry of War Transport. In addition, building a stockpile required “to meet potential demand for re-occupied S. Eastern Europe” would consume 70,000 tons of wheat by the end of October and a further 100,000 tons by the end of 1943. Churchill must have had the Balkan stockpile in mind when he commented on the necessity of conserving Australian supplies: because Europeans, if and when they were liberated, would need wheat, Indians would have to make do with barley. Cherwell, Leathers, and Grigg must also have known that the surplus shipping and Australian wheat were to be used for building the Balkan stockpile, and could not be spared to relieve famine in India; these most loyal of Churchill’s aides were no doubt looking for reasons to reject the viceroy’s request.
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