Churchill's Secret War (33 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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“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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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MEANWHILE, AN INTELLIGENCE summary from Chittagong, the base for the upcoming jungle war, warned that soldiers were so distressed by 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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 local 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.”)