Churchill's Secret War

by Madhusree Mukerjee

  The large province of Bengal was instead broken up along linguistic lines, with Bihar and Orissa becoming separate states. India itself would no longer be administered from Calcutta but from New Delhi, far beyond Bengal. “[I]t will be a very good idea to move the Government offices away from the Bengali Babus, who now swarm in every office,” noted a visitor to the city. “No Englishman has a good word for them: they are said to have less character and backbone than any other Indians, and to be intolerably conceited, besides being seditious.” In 1912, when the viceroy ceremonially entered the newly built capital city on a caparisoned elephant, some revolutionaries lobbed a bomb that seriously injured him. The chief conspirator, who escaped to Japan, turned out to be a Bengali babu.40

  “Bengal is the seat of bitterest political unrest—the producer of India’s main crop of anarchists, bomb-throwers and assassins,” observed American writer Katherine Mayo in Mother India, a 1927 travelogue that described Hindu males as pedophiles enervated by excessive sex. “Bengal is also among the most sexually exaggerated regions of India; and medical and police authorities in any country observe the link between that quality and ‘queer’ criminal minds—the exhaustion of normal avenues of excitement creating a thirst and a search in the abnormal for gratification.” This book, the outcome of a tour organized by British intelligence, would so captivate Winston Churchill that he would pass it around among friends.41

  ON AUGUST 4, 1914, the British Empire went to war against Germany. India presented £100 million to the United Kingdom as a contribution for war expenses and sent troops to the Middle East and Europe; more than 60,000 of its soldiers would die fighting World War I. In rural India, wartime inflation, the export of grain to the war theaters, and drought made it difficult for the poor to afford enough food. Epidemic forestalled famine: the Spanish flu, which soldiers brought home from the icy trenches of Europe, thrived on emaciated frames and killed an estimated 12 million.42

  Mainstream Indian nationalists cooperated with the British war effort and expected political concessions as a reward. So when the Government of India hailed the end of World War I by enacting a repressive law, Indian rage boiled over. Among other provisions, the Rowlatt Act of 1919 allowed the government to imprison indefinitely and sentence by tribunal—not trial—anyone suspected of sedition. A visionary leader, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, stepped to the fore and called for civil disobedience against what he termed a “devilish” law.

  Gandhi was forty-nine and had returned to India a few years earlier, after a twenty-two-year sojourn in southern Africa. Born in Gujarat in western India in 1869, he had trained as a lawyer in England and moved to Natal, a British colony, to set up a practice. There Gandhi had come to identify with impoverished Indian laborers who worked on plantations and mines, and had championed their rights. In the process he had forged a political and moral weapon that he called satyagraha, transliterated as “passion for truth.” Someone who offered satyagraha—by, for instance, refusing to obey an unjust law—had to follow a path “as sharp as the sword’s edge,” Gandhi wrote. He or she had to abjure violence and bear no animosity toward the opponent, no matter how intense the hardship: “Satyagraha postulates the conquest of the adversary by suffering in one’s own person.”43

  Gandhi was sensitive to the charge that Indians were cowards. He recalled in his autobiography a ditty in his native Gujarati, which he and his schoolmates used to chant:44 Behold the mighty Englishman

  He rules the Indian small,

  Because being a meat-eater

  He is five cubits tall.

  As a child growing up in a strictly vegetarian family, he had secretly sampled meat because a friend had assured him it would make him brave enough to fight the English. Yet the adult Gandhi repudiated what he regarded as the Western definition of courage: a willingness to take life. In his view, true courage lay in upholding one’s own values, and especially in enduring all manner of torment, without being provoked into violence.45

  But India was not ready for satyagraha. During the civil disobedience movement, crowds took to rioting and many died in police firing, so Gandhi called it off. He had yet to learn about the massacre in Amritsar, a city hallowed by Sikhs. On April 13, 1919, General Reginald Dyer had placed troops at the entrance of an enclosed park where men, women, and children had assembled, some to celebrate their New Year and others to listen to a speech. Gatherings of more than five were forbidden. Dyer had issued a warning and ordered the troops to open fire; the death toll was 379 by the official count, and more than 1,000 by the Indian reckoning.46

  It was “an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation,” Winston Churchill declaimed at the House of Commons when it discussed the affair a year later. The elder son of Lord Randolph, Churchill was then the forty-five-year-old secretary of state for war in the British cabinet. He privately agreed with military officers on “the necessity to shoot hard,” but he was also aware of the importance of Sikhs to the Indian Army. One needed to remember that the colony was not ruled by force alone, he continued in his speech, and that a sense of unity and cooperation “must ever ally and bind together the British and Indian peoples.”47

  It was too late for such sentiments. Muslims, who were also vital to the Indian Army, had been angered by the breaking of a British promise: to maintain the control of the Ottoman emperor over holy cities such as Mecca. After the war the victors proceeded to divide up that empire, with the United Kingdom acquiring portions of the Middle East—not so much for the oil as to secure the region around the Suez Canal. Leopold Amery, a Tory politician and a leading strategist, asserted that it was necessary to develop a contiguous British Empire that would run “from Cape Town through Cairo, Baghdad and Calcutta to Sydney and Wellington.”48

  After the Amritsar tragedy, when Gandhi was finally allowed to enter the Punjab, a vast and emotional crowd greeted him at the railway station. “The entire populace had turned out of doors in eager expectation, as if to meet a dear relation after a long separation, and was delirious with joy,” he remembered. The official inquiry into the atrocity, he concluded after conducting his own investigations, was a “whitewash.” Until then, Gandhi had believed that the British Raj, though liable to make mistakes, was fundamentally benign and just. Renouncing that faith, he cast about for ways in which to achieve swaraj.49

  On August 1, 1920, the Indian National Congress, acting in concert with prominent Muslims, called for civil disobedience—and received a staggeringly positive response to their summons. Every corner of India erupted, each with its own cause. Peasants organized against landlords, laborers in tea plantations struck work, indigenous peoples defied the law to hunt and gather in forests, students walked out of schools and colleges, and prominent lawyers quit lucrative practices. A Bengali babu named Subhas Chandra Bose, who had just passed the Indian civil service examinations in London with high marks, abandoned his prospectively prestigious career and joined the Congress. A Muslim leader called upon Muslims to quit the Indian Army and was promptly arrested. Even the revolutionaries shelved their arms for a year to give Gandhi’s method a chance. They were all to be bitterly disappointed. In a small town in northern India, policemen fired on a procession—whereupon the irate mob chased them into the police station and set it afire, burning twenty-three people to death. The incident horrified Gandhi, who persuaded the Congress to call off the movement in February 1922.50

  Despite its abortive end, the protest revealed that, for the first time, overwhelming numbers of Indians were united under a single banner and inspired by Gandhi, who came to be called Mahatma, or “Great Soul.” Gandhi’s moral stature and popularity, even among some English men and women, made him the most baffling adversary that the British Empire had ever encountered. “I often wish you took to violence like the English strikers, and then we would know at once how to deal with you,” a South African official had said to him, only half in jest. “But you will not injure even the enemy. . . . [
T]hat is what reduces us to sheer helplessness.” Gandhi was a contradiction in terms, fragility turned into strength, a “Dangerous Feminine Man.” To Winston Churchill, who was profoundly committed to the British Raj, as well as to the knightly values of valor, honor, and chivalry, Gandhi came to represent Hindu guile—a “malignant subversive fanatic” and “a thoroughly evil force.”51 WHEN WORLD WAR II broke out in September 1939, the people of the United Kingdom turned to Winston Churchill for leadership because he personified the British Lion, indomitable in adversity. “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty,” Churchill declaimed, “and so bear ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and Empire lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’” The prime minister’s fierce determination buoyed Britons and helped them to rise above the tribulations to come. “One caught Churchill’s infectious spirit that this was a great time to be alive in; that Destiny had conferred a wonderful benefit upon us; and that these were thrilling days to live through,” remembered historian Robert Rhodes James.52

  Churchill’s utterances also indicated his dedication to the British Raj. He hoped at least “to see the British Empire preserved for a few more generations in its strength and splendour,” as he had written to the viceroy of India. But in March 1942, three months after escalating the war with the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces smashed the empire’s defenses and occupied Burma. They thereby cut off a vital source of rice imports for the Indian poor and simultaneously established themselves at the colony’s mountainous eastern border. Fearing that India itself would be invaded, British authorities acted on a “scorched earth” order issued by the War Cabinet, the group of ministers and officials who made all the key decisions of the war. They removed provisions such as rice, and transport facilities such as barges, from coastal Bengal, where the enemy was expected to arrive by sea—creating another of several conditions that would culminate in famine.53

  At the same time, India’s people were reluctant to fight a war that held little promise of freedom for them. In August 1942, the Indian National Congress called for civil disobedience to protest the colony’s forced participation in World War II. Gandhi and other nationalist leaders were swiftly arrested, unleashing what the viceroy would describe as the most serious rebellion since 1857. The authorities arrested more than 90,000, and killed up to 10,000 political protesters. India was “an occupied and hostile country,” a British general declared. At the same time, the Indian Army continued to fight in theaters around the Mediterranean Sea, and Indian fields and factories supplied them and other troops with foodgrains, uniforms, boots, parachutes, tents, ammunition, and innumerable other necessities. Virtually all of India’s industries had by now been redirected toward supplying the war effort, and the government was printing paper money to enable its purchases. The price of grain spiraled ever upward, a cyclone damaged Bengal’s rice harvest, the local administration stocked up on rice to feed soldiers and war workers, and famine broke out in early 1943.54

  According to an agreement drawn up three years earlier, a portion of India’s war expenditure would ultimately be reimbursed by His Majesty’s Government. The amount owed to India, called the sterling debt, swelled during the course of the war until it came to reverse the traditional economic relationship between colonizer and colony. For the past century, India had owed money to the United Kingdom—because of the mutiny charge, the investment for building railways, the pensions owed to British civil servants, and other loans and expenses. Now, for the first time ever, the United Kingdom owed money to India. The sterling debt worsened Britain’s postwar economic prospects and became a source of immense frustration to the prime minister and his closest adviser, Lord Cherwell. Cherwell, a scientist of German aristocratic lineage who was so deeply racist that the presence of any black person evoked “physical revulsion which he was unable to control,” aided Churchill with logistical matters such as the distribution of shipping and allocation of food supplies. Ominously, his recommendations almost always prevailed.55

  Also in 1943, the nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose came to head a liberation army based in the Far East. The so-called Indian National Army comprised expatriate Indian laborers and captured soldiers of the (British) Indian Army, and was allied with Japan. It threatened India’s eastern border with attack—while insurgents on Bengal’s coast prepared to welcome Bose and his forces, should they arrive. With the empire at risk from a military invasion, and discord rife even as Bengal’s people began to starve, Churchill was called upon to make a choice that would tilt the balance between life and death for millions: whether or not to expend valuable wheat and shipping space on providing famine relief to Bengalis.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Empire at War

  “In my view England is now beginning a new period of struggle and fighting for its life,” Winston Churchill wrote in 1933, “and the crux of it will be not only the retention of India but a much stronger assertion of commercial rights.” As the world began to edge toward war, none of the globe’s other empires, such as the French or the Dutch, were about to relinquish their possessions; and Japan was already conquering new realms. According to Churchill, who was urging armament against a newly resurgent Germany, this crucial moment was no time to cede political powers to Indians, as the British government was planning to do. In the conflict to come, he believed the United Kingdom would need its huge and resource-rich possession as never before.1

  Six years after Churchill’s avowal and two days after the Nazis began their blitzkrieg into Poland, on September 3, 1939, the United Kingdom declared war on Germany. So did the viceroy of India, on behalf of nearly 400 million subjects of the British Empire. The colony was vital to the defense of British interests around the world. It sat in the middle of the supply and communication route that stretched from the United Kingdom, through the Suez Canal or around the Cape of Good Hope, and across the Indian Ocean to Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand. Throughout World War II, ships would transport food, armaments, and troops from the colonies and dominions on the periphery of the Indian Ocean to the United Kingdom, as well as to war theaters around the Mediterranean Sea or in Southeast Asia.

  The Indian population would play a significant role in the war. Of the colony’s prewar budget, a third went toward defense, and that fraction had increased to two-fifths by 1939. The Indian Army’s primary domestic tasks were to guard the northwestern border against Soviet incursions southward across Afghanistan and to ensure internal security. Just as important, this army was ideally situated to defend British dependencies in the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia, and could be dispatched to diverse theaters under direct orders from London. At the start of the war, it comprised 43,500 British and 131,000 Indian troops, some of whom had already been sent to Egypt and Singapore. Churchill, then a member of the War Cabinet, recommended that a further 60,000 British troops “be sent to India to maintain internal security and complete their training,” while at least 40,000 trained troops be brought back. While being trained, the white soldiers would forestall any uprising among the increasingly restive population of Indians intent on independence.2

  “I was kept for this job,” Churchill confided to his doctor when he succeeded Neville Chamberlain as prime minister on May 10, 1940. Over his sixty-five years, Churchill had repeatedly placed himself in danger and had had several narrow escapes, which had bolstered his profound conviction that he was destined for a mighty task. It had taken him most of his life to discover what that something was: to lead The Island Race, as he would entitle his history of the British, in a great struggle. “I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial,” Churchill wrote of his accession to the most powerful position in the British Empire. Three days after his appointment he addressed the Parliament and the nation, promising nothing but “blood, toil, tears and sweat.” The aim of the war, he declared, was “victory, victory at all costs . . . for
without victory, there is no survival. Let that be realised; no survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal.” The prime minister would not only defend the British Isles from invasion and subjugation by Hitler’s armies; he would safeguard its vast and sprawling empire. But India, like some of the other colonies and dominions, would sacrifice at least as much as the United Kingdom did in the defense of an empire from which it had long been struggling to break free.3

  To make sure India obeyed him and did its part to support the war, Churchill needed a lieutenant with a record of firmness in dealing with colonies. The very day he gave his rousing “blood, toil, tears and sweat” peroration, the prime minister summoned the respected elder statesman Leopold S. Amery and asked him to serve as secretary of state for India.

  Amery was bitterly disappointed by the request. He was sixty-six, a year older than Churchill, and up to that point his career had broadly paralleled that of the prime minister. Amery had covered the Boer War as a correspondent, had served in World War I, and had subsequently been appointed first Lord of the Admiralty and colonial secretary. At the very least, he had expected a significant role in the War Cabinet helping to direct the war effort. It was even said that if Amery had been “half a head taller and his speeches half an hour shorter” he might have become prime minister himself. Amery had also just played a central role in the Tory Party mutiny that had brought down Chamberlain and installed Churchill. A week earlier, he had denounced Chamberlain from the floor of Parliament: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing,” Amery had declaimed, invoking the words of Oliver Cromwell, the seventeenth-century British leader who had deposed and killed King Charles I: “Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”4