George Orwell: A Life in Letters

by Peter Davison

  i. What number of Burmese voluntarily evacuated themselves along with British troops etc. leaving India, and what proportion of these were officials.

  ii. Attitude of Burmese officials when breakdown appeared imminent. Whether there was a marked difference in loyalty between Burmese and Indian officials. To what extent Burmese officials are known to be carrying on under the Japanese occupation.

  iii. Behaviour under fire of the Burma regiments and military police. Whether any actual Burmese (not Kachins etc.) were fighting for the British.

  iv. What difference appeared between political attitude of the Burmese proper and the Karens, Shans, Chins, Kachins.1

  v. What number of the Eurasian community, especially in Rangoon, Moulmein, Mandalay evacuated with the British and how many stayed behind under the Japanese occupation. Whether any who remained behind are known to have changed their allegiance.

  vi. Behaviour of the Burmese population under bombing raids. Whether these produced resentment against the Japanese, admiration for Japanese air superiority, or mere panic.

  vii. The native Christians, especially Karens.2 Whether interpenetrated to any extent by nationalist movement.

  viii. Number of shortwave sets known to have been in Burmese, Indian and Eurasian possession before the invasion.

  ix. Detailed information about the Burmese nationalist and leftwing political parties. The main points are:—

  a. Numbers and local and social composition of the Thakin party.3

  b. Extent to which Buddhist priests predominate.

  c. What affiliations exist between the Burmese nationalist parties and the Congress and other Indian parties.

  d. Burmese Communists, if any, and what affiliations.

  e. Extent of Burmese trade union movement and whether it has affiliations with trade unions in India or Europe.

  x. Estimated number of Burmese actually fighting on side of Japanese. Whether people of good standing or mainly dacoits etc. Whether they are reported to have fought courageously.

  xi. Extent of Japanese infiltration before the invasion. Whether many Japanese are known to speak local languages,4 especially Burmese, and to what extent they are likely to be dependent on Burmans for monitoring and interpretation generally.

  Eric Blair

  [XIII, 1174, pp. 327–8; typewritten]

  1.In addition to Burmese people, the Burmese nation is composed of many ethnic groups, of which these four are among the most important. There were then more than a million Shans, 1.25 million Karens, half a million Chins, and 200,000 Kachens in a total population of approximately 17 million, many of them being hill peoples. By 1984 the population had doubled.

  2.Most Burmese are Buddhist, as are the Karens, but some 175,000 Karens are Christian.

  3.The Thakin movement developed among radicals in the Young Men’s Buddhist Association schools (later the National Schools), who resented British rule. Two university students, Aung San and U Nu, who joined the movement after the student strike in 1936, were instrumental in leading Burma to independence. Aung San was among a number of Burmese politicians murdered in July 1947 at the instigation of a former prime minister, U Saw. When Burma became an independent republic, on 4 January 1948, U Nu became prime minister. Aung San’s daughter, Suu Kyi, born shortly before his murder, has led a long fight against the military government of Burma (Myanmar). Her National League for Democracy won a landslide victory in 1990 but was not allowed to govern. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.

  4.Orwell, when serving in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, passed the language examinations in Burmese and in Shaw-Karen.

  On 27 June 1942, Picture Post published ‘the first article in an important new series’, ‘Britain’s Silent Revolution’ by J. B. Priestley. The series asked ‘What is happening in Britain? What kind of a country is being shaped by the war?’ At the head of Priestley’s article was this statement in bold type: ‘We are threatened with decay—but the war has saved us. Some of the old are uprooted; some of the new blessings are steadily growing. Here is our great chance to fashion a really healthy society.’ On 4 July, Vernon Bartlett, MP, wrote on ‘The Revolt Against Party Politics’ and on 11 July, a column was run, ‘What They Say About Bartlett and Priestley’. Two letters were printed in response to Priestley’s article, one from the Bishop of Bradford and this from Orwell.

  To Picture Post

  11 July 1942

  I am in agreement with Mr. Priestley as to the general direction in which our society is moving, but do not share his apparent belief that things will inevitably happen fast enough to prevent the old gang getting their claws into us again. Two years ago I would have echoed his optimistic utterances more confidently than I would now. At that time an appalling disaster had brought this country to what looked like the first stage of revolution, and one could be excused for believing that class privilege and economic inequality would quite rapidly disappear under the pressure of danger. Obviously this has failed to happen. But I do agree with Mr. Priestley that the sort of society we knew before 1939 is not likely to return. I don’t share the belief which some people still seem to hold, that ‘this is a capitalist war,’ and that if we win it we shall simply see the British ruling class in power again. What I should like to hear about in Mr. Priestley’s next article is not ‘What?’ but ‘How?’—just how we are to set about getting the truly democratic society we want.

  George Orwell, Abbey Road, NW 8.

  [XIII, 1269, p. 391; typewritten]

  To Alex Comfort*

  15 July 1942

  10a Mortimer Crescent

  London NW 6

  Dear Mr Comfort,

  The Partisan Review sent me a copy of the letter you had written them, along with some others. I believe they are going to print all the letters, or extracts from them, and my reply. But there was one point I didn’t care to answer in print. You queried my reference to ‘antisemitism’ (by the way I didn’t say antisemitism but Jew-baiting, a very different thing) in the Adelphi. Of course I was thinking of Max Plowman*, who hated Jews, and though he was aware of this tendency in himself and struggled against it, sometimes let it influence his editorship. I had two particular instances in mind. The first was when Macmurray’s book The Clue to History was published in 1938. This was a rather unbalanced book and extremely pro-Jew in tendency. Max was infuriated by this and had the book reviewed by five separate people, including himself and myself, in one issue of the Adelphi. His own review (you could look it up—round about December 1938) was definitely provocative in tone. Later on he got the Adelphi involved in a controversy with some Jew whose name I don’t remember, Cohen I think, about the alleged warmongering activities of the Jews. Having got the Jew hopping mad and said his own say in a very snooty manner, Max suddenly declared the controversy closed, not allowing the Jew to reply. This would be some time in 1939. Since the war Murry has at least once referred with apparent approval to Hitler’s ‘elimination’ of the Jews.

  The reason why I don’t care to print anything about this is because Max was a very old friend of mine and was very good to me, and his wife might hear about [it] and feel hurt if I actually name names. In my reply in the Partisan Review I put in a note to the effect that I was answering this privately, but I daresay they’ll omit both this and your query,1 as I have explained the circumstances to Dwight Macdonald.*

  Yours truly

  George Orwell

  [XIII, 1282, pp. 405–6 (including

  Comfort’s response); typewritten]

  Alex Comfort replied on 16 July 1942:

  Dear Mr. Orwell

  Thank you very much for writing to me. I didn’t know about Max in this connection, and you were entirely right. I shouldn’t really have replied to you where the Adelphi was concerned, as I have only known it since the war: I rather took it that you meant that Jew baiting in it was a recent thing—a feature which had cropped up during the period you were reporting on. (I suppose Max’s foible was of pretty long stand
ing).

  I thought some of the things you said should have been far more fully answered, but doubted if P.R. would have room for more than a squib-retort. I honestly don’t think that the last lot of us are any more constructively pro-Fascist than our predecessors, but from the people I encounter, I would say they were nearer to Russian nihilism than any contemporary line of thought.

  However, I often want to remonstrate with Peace News, not for being Fascist, but for trying, as you say, to get away with both ends of the same argument. I have written a commination to J.M. Murry but he did not print it. He needs another beginning ‘cursed is the man who imagines one can assume opposite viewpoints and say that whichever turns out to be true, his main contention is right.’

  I’d like an opportunity of congratulating you over that Horizon article on Donald McGill°. It was the best example of an analysis I think I ever read.

  I’ll be writing to the editor of P.R. and explain that I entirely agree with you, on seeing the references. I didn’t want to put you on the spot over a personal question like that, and I apologize for my ignorance.

  All good wishes and many thanks

  Alex Comfort

  I’d like to have started an argument over that review of yours,2 but the Adelphi hadn’t room to unleash me. Anyhow, thank you for doing it. It made me revise several ideas.

  1.Partisan Review omitted all reference to this topic.

  2.For Orwell’s review of Comfort’s novel, No Such Liberty, see XIII, 855, pp. 389–44.

  To Routledge & Sons Ltd.

  23 July 1942

  The BBC

  Broadcasting House

  London W 1

  Dear Sir,

  My attention has just been drawn to a book published by you entitled Victory or Vested Interests, in which you have included a lecture of mine delivered last year for the Fabian Society. I submitted this lecture to you in type-written form, and, I believe, corrected the proofs. I now find that you have been through it and made the most unwarrantable alterations about which I was not even consulted—a fact which I should never even have discovered if I had not bought a copy of the book, as you did not even send me one. I am communicating with my literary agents to see what remedy I have against this treatment, but meanwhile, I should be glad to have an explanation from you. I shall be obliged by an early answer.1

  Yours truly,

  Geo. Orwell

  [XIII, 1319, p. 424; typewritten]

  1.T. Murray Ragg, the Managing Director, replied on 24 July explaining that they had made no alterations and had delivered copies as instructed by the Fabian Society. He suggested that someone at the Society had made the alterations. (For a full account see XIII, 884, pp. 66–7.)

  On 8 August 1942, Captain Basil Liddell Hart wrote to Orwell expressing surprise that someone of his penetration had been misled by Philippe Barrès’s Charles de Gaulle, which Orwell had reviewed in the Observer on 2 August (XIII, 1346, pp. 443–4), in so far as it discussed the evolution of mechanised warfare and the use of armoured divisions. He sent Orwell six pages of notes to show that it was not de Gaulle who had devised modern methods of tank warfare, which the Germans, rather than the French or British, had adopted, but a British officer, Colonel J. F. C. Fuller (1878–1966; CB, DSO) in 1927. (Fuller was identified by the security service as ‘the military strongman willing to take part in, if not preside over, a British Vichy’.) Two years later, the British War Office had issued ‘the first official manual on mechanized warfare . . . embodying the new conception’. This included the organisation and methods that were to become the foundation of Panzer attacks. General de Gaulle’s book, Vers L’Armée de Métier (1934), had only ten of its 122 pages devoted to tactics, in the English translation. This, said Liddell Hart, was hardly surprising, since de Gaulle’s ‘first personal experience with tanks was not until three years later, in 1937’. Niall Ferguson in his The War of the World (2006) discusses the considerable influence Liddell Hart had on tank and aircraft strategy – alas, ‘it was hugely influential not in Britain but in Germany’, especially on Heinz Guderian, commander of the 19th German Army Corps (pp. 386–7).

  To B. H. Liddell Hart*

  12 August 1942

  10a Mortimer Crescent

  NW 6

  Dear Captain Liddell Hart,

  Many thanks for your letter. I am sorry I accepted too readily the legend of the Germans having taken their tank theories from de Gaulle. The Observer had to compress my review of Barrès’s book by cutting out a passage from de Gaulle’s memorandum of early in 1940. I hadn’t seen this memorandum till seeing it in Barrès’s book, and it certainly did seem to me to foretell what happened a few months later with considerable prescience. The story of ‘the man the Germans learned from’ had already been built up elsewhere, and I had already more or less accepted it, not, of course, being much versed in military literature. I had read many of your own writings but didn’t realise that the Germans had drawn on them to that extent. And I was more ready to accept de Gaulle as a revolutionary innovator because of the obviously old-fashioned nature of the French army as a whole. I was in French Morocco from the autumn of 1938 to the spring of 1939, and with war obviously imminent I naturally observed the French colonial army as closely as I could, even to the point of getting hold of some of their infantry textbooks. I was struck by the antiquated nature of everything, though I know very little of military matters. I could if you wish write to the Observer and say that I was mistaken and had transferred some of your thunder to de Gaulle, but from a political point of view I don’t like writing de Gaulle down. It was a misfortune that we didn’t succeed in getting a leftwing politician of standing out of France, but since de Gaulle is the only figure we have at present to represent the Free French we must make the best of him.

  No, I didn’t write Bless ’Em All.1 I am not in the army because I am not physically fit (Class IV!) but I have been in the Home Guard from the beginning and could write a rather similar booklet about that. I don’t know who the author is except that he is an Australian. The book has had a fairly large sale, 15–20,000 copies, and has probably done a lot of good.

  I should like to meet you some time when you are in London. I never get out of London as I am working in the BBC. I expect Humphrey Slater is a mutual friend of ours.

  Yours sincerely

  Geo. Orwell

  [XIII, 1379, pp. 471–2; typewritten]

  1.Liddell Hart asked Orwell whether he had written Bless ’Em All because he so admired the book that he had ‘distributed quite a number of copies . . . in quarters where I thought it might do some good’. The full title of the book, published pseudonymously by Boomerang, is Bless ’Em All: An Analysis of the British Army, Its Morale, Efficiency and Leadership, Written from Inside Knowledge (1942). ‘Boomerang’ was Alan W. Wood, an Australian who had worked on Beaverbook newspapers before the war and who, according to Fredric Warburg, ‘died far too young’. It sold 37,625 copies in the first fifteen months.

  To Tom Wintringham*

  17 August 1942

  Dear Wintringham,

  I am in general agreement with the document you sent me,1 and so are most of the people I know, but I think that from the point of view of [a] propaganda approach it is all wrong. In effect, it demands two separate things which the average reader will get mixed up, first, the setting up of a committee, and secondly, the programme which that committee is to use as a basis for discussion. I should start by putting forward boldly and above all with an eye to intelligibility a programme for India coupled with the statement that this is what the Indian political leaders would accept. I would not start with any talk about setting up committees; in the first place because it depresses people merely to hear about committees, and in any case because the procedure you suggest would take months to carry through, and would probably lead to an inconclusive announcement. I should head my leaflet or whatever it is RELEASE NEHRU—REOPEN NEGOTIATIONS and then set forth the plan for India in six simple clauses, viz
:

  1). India to be declared independent immediately.

  2). An interim national government from the leading political parties on a proportional basis.

  3). India to enter into full alliance with the United Nations.

  4). The leading political parties to co-operate in the war effort to their utmost capacity.

  5). The existing administration to be disturbed as little as possible during the war period.

  6). Some kind of trade agreement allowing for a reasonable safe-guarding of British interests.

  Those are the six points. They should be accompanied by an authoritative statement from the Congress Party that they are willing to accept those terms—as they would be—and that if granted these terms they would cooperate in crushing the pro-Japanese faction. Point 6 should carry with it a rider to the effect that the British and Indian Governments will jointly guarantee the pensions of British officials in India. In this way at small cost one could neutralise a not unimportant source of opposition in this country.

  All I have said could be got on to a leaflet of a page or two pages, and I think might get a hearing. It is most important to make this matter simple and arresting as it has been so horribly misrepresented in the press and the big public is thoroughly bored by India and only half aware of its strategic significance. Ditto with America.

  Yours,

  [No name/position]

  [XIII, 1391, pp. 479–80; typewritten]

  1.Tom Wintringham had sent Orwell a copy of the press release issued by the Common Wealth National Committee on 15 August 1942. This was issued over the names of J.B. Priestley (Chairman), Richard Acland (Vice-Chairman; see 24.11.38, n. 4), and Tom Wintringham* (Vice-Chairman). The stature of the novelist, playwright, and commentator, J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) was considerable at this time and was further enhanced by his inspiring broadcasts, especially after Dunkirk. He was seen by many as akin to Churchill in his dogged determination; even in the darkest days he was sure the war would end in Britain’s favour. He also argued forcefully for a better Britain when peace came.