Churchill's Secret War

by Madhusree Mukerjee

  Amery was talking to the wrong person. Leathers was a former shipping magnate who had been brought in by Churchill to run the British Empire’s merchant shipping during the war. He was reputed to be very competent; but he lacked the authority, and by all accounts the inclination, to release ships for any purpose that the prime minister had not approved. Nor was the timing propitious. Gandhi, who remained in custody, appeared to be embarking on a fast—sparking anxiety in London because of the likelihood that it would influence opinion in Washington. According to Amery, Churchill began the War Cabinet meeting of January 7 “with a terrific tirade against apologising for the Empire, appeasing the Americans, etc.”20

  On January 10, 1943, Amery received an even more desperate plea from India’s Department of Food. The army’s wheat reserves would run out in a month. The remainder of the wheat promised to the army was waiting in Australia and must be brought in by February; and if shipping could not right away be found for 600,000 tons, at least 200,000 tons must come by April. “The vital necessity for expedition cannot be exaggerated as we have to carry on with practically no supplies for civil population till some of these shipments arrive,” the officials warned.21

  IT WAS TOO late. On January 5, 1943, the prime minister had slashed the number of ships operating in the “Indian Ocean area.” The term, used in connection with wartime shipping, referred to the entire span of water rimmed by Australia, Arabia, and Africa (as well as the British Empire territories and dominions surrounding this composite body of water). The United Kingdom controlled the merchant ships there, whereas the United States ran the Pacific. Of the forty vessels that remained in the Indian Ocean area after the cut, the lion’s share would go toward supplying Operation Torch, an invasion of French colonies in North Africa, leaving only a handful of ships to ply to and from India—just enough to collect whatever goods the colony could still provide to the outside world.22

  Churchill seems not to have mentioned this crucial decision when, at a War Cabinet meeting on January 12, 1943, Amery brought up India’s serious food problem. Instead of wheat shipments, the War Cabinet offered to send to the colony an official who had experience, from a stint in the Middle East, of prying grain out of cultivators. Unusually for the prime minister when India came up, he was “full of internal glee”—because, it turned out, he was shortly to depart for Casablanca to meet the U.S. president.23

  At the Casablanca Conference, a misunderstanding between American and British planners precluded a realistic allocation of shipping to different theaters. The British wanted to focus their war initiatives on the Mediterranean region and persuaded the Americans to participate in an attack on Sicily in July. American generals, in contrast, wanted a cross-Channel assault on France by September, to which Churchill nominally agreed. But the battles around the Mediterranean would absorb so many resources that the landing in Normandy would have to be postponed until 1944. The Allies also agreed upon Operation Anakim, a plan involving a sea-borne assault on Burma—although the cut in vessels in the Indian Ocean would deprive the forces based in India of essential war materials and had doomed the invasion even before it could be launched. Anakim would eventually be canceled, so that India ceased to be an important war base until the very end of 1943. But the colony remained responsible for feeding 2 million troops, whether or not they fought.24

  While Churchill and Cherwell were away in Casablanca, Amery described India’s plight to a shipping committee and warned of “dissident elements” gaining leverage from the food shortages. The committee determined that ships with a carrying capacity of between 40,000 and 50,000 tons, then loading for the United Kingdom at foreign ports, should instead take wheat to India. Cabling the viceroy, Amery suggested that Indian ships supplying the war effort in the Middle East might also be released to ferry a total of 130,000 tons. (These ships were not in fact made available.) “H.M.G. regret that they find it impossible at this stage in view of the heavy sacrifices already assumed on behalf of India and of the present pressure from all sides on our shipping, to consider your further request” for 400,000 tons, Amery concluded.25

  Four days later, on January 20, the Government of India informed the secretary of state for India that it was dispensing with price controls on wheat, and in another few days it approved the Bengal government’s decision to do the same with rice. An official paper attributed the action to the desperate straits in which the authorities found themselves. The viceroy explained to the provinces’ governors on February 3 that although some wheat was on the way, with regard to “the rice problem no help can be expected from outside the country and we are forced back on our own resources.”26

  The timing of the decision to lift price controls is significant. It indicates that a sudden realization of the stranglehold on shipping, along with supplies being set to run out within weeks, prompted the Government of India to give up on trying to control the economy and instead buy up all the grain it could get. So the cut in shipping—or more broadly put, the prioritization of the United Kingdom’s needs over those of the colonies—motivated the February 13 order to “go to any place and purchase at any price” that detonated the famine in Bengal.

  THE ALLIED SHIPPING crisis had built up slowly but inexorably. During 1942 German U-boats, operating mainly in the Atlantic Ocean, had taken a heavy toll, sinking 1.3 million gross tons of British-controlled shipping in the last quarter alone. The buildup of forces for Operation Torch, in North Africa, had also absorbed many more shiploads of supplies than had been anticipated. The minister of war transport had met that contingency by withdrawing ships from the Indian Ocean and from the United Kingdom’s civilian program, so that the rate at which imports reached the island nation had fallen to less than half of what it had been before the war.27

  The United Kingdom intended to bring in 27 million tons of food and raw materials in 1943, plus around 15 million tons of liquids (mostly petroleum). In November 1942, British representatives had approached President Roosevelt with a request for 7 million tons of American shipping toward the dry-cargo import program. The president had acquiesced—but told them that some of the ships were in use and might not be released for three months.28

  At the S branch, Lord Cherwell’s most trusted assistant, Donald MacDougall, became concerned that imports were not arriving fast enough. (Roy Harrod, the more experienced economist, had left by that time.) MacDougall was convinced that if the United Kingdom did not get more shipping for civilian needs, stocks of food would “quite possibly fall to dangerously low levels before very long.” He figured that stocks could, however, be adequately protected by cutting the number of ships serving the Indian Ocean area down to 60 percent and bringing the rest over to the Atlantic to serve the import program. “I told Prof he would never get away with such a dramatic reduction and had better suggest 80,” MacDougall related in his memoir. “He replied that, on the contrary, he would put in 40–50, which would be argued up by the military to my figure of 60, which he believed.”29

  Thus was born one of Churchill’s most far-reaching decisions. On January 2, 1943, the Prof informed the prime minister that the United Kingdom’s imports would increase by a million tons if the ninety monthly sailings to the east were cut to fifty during January, February, and March; and by 1.25 million tons if the cut were to forty sailings. Moreover, the “gain would be increased to 3½ millions if the cut were prolonged up to the end of June.” (A more nuanced calculation, taking into account the delay in transferring ships from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, would find that the last cut actually yielded 2 million tons of imports.) Failing such strong action, “factories will have to close down for lack of materials, with all the political repercussions this involves,” Cherwell asserted.30

  Although the first option seemed enough to meet the United Kingdom’s needs, the memo did not state that; nor did it mention any negative consequences of such cuts. Accordingly, Churchill circled the most drastic, last option, marked it “A,” and wrote on the memo “We must g
o for A.” Thanks to the Prof, MacDougall’s suggestion to cut Indian Ocean shipping down to 60 percent ended up as an even deeper cut, to 44 percent—and for twice as long.31

  Ships that went to the Indian Ocean generally made loops, going from port to port within the region before heading back to the United Kingdom or the United States. Combined with the imperative to supply troops in North Africa, the shipping cut meant that very few vessels would be available on the run between Australia and India. The shipping cut “must portend violent changes and perhaps cataclysms in the seaborne trade of large numbers of countries,” the Ministry of War Transport warned the prime minister.32

  As ships gradually left the Indian Ocean, the cessation of trade deranged the economies of the colonies on its rim. They were already reeling from wartime inflation and scarcity, and “the menace of famine suddenly loomed up like a hydra-headed monster with a hundred clamouring mouths,” related C.B.A. Behrens in the official history of wartime British shipping. Desperate appeals began pouring into colonial offices. Several British possessions bordering the Indian Ocean, such as Kenya, Tanganyika, and British Somaliland, suffered famine that year. Historians attribute the calamities to a combination of drought, wartime inflation, acquisition of grain for the armed forces, and hoarding by Indian traders. That all the famines, including the one in Bengal, occurred in 1943 suggests, however, that the shipping cut also played a role. “In the Indian Ocean area the burden of paying for victory, shifted from place to place to ease the weight, finally came to rest,” summarized Behrens.33

  ON JANUARY 6, 1943, the viceroy of India relieved his hectic schedule with a duck shoot in a princely state. The party boasted fifty-two guns and bagged 2,310 birds on a single winter’s day.34

  A political crisis was flaring up at that time, and it too involved starvation. Gandhi was depressed. His personal secretary had died shortly after having been arrested; his countrymen were in desperate straits and, because he was in custody, he was unable to help them. Moreover, “palpable departures from the truth” in the government’s portrayal of recent events were adding to his distress. Gandhi asked for an audience with the viceroy to explain his reasons for having launched the Quit India movement. If he was not granted even a meeting, he wrote, he might “crucify the flesh by fasting.”35

  In response, the viceroy accused the captive of having unleashed a “sad campaign of violence and crime.” That Gandhi himself advocated nonviolence was “no answer to relations of those who have lost their lives, and to those themselves who have lost their property or suffered severe injury as a result of violent activities on the part of Congress and its supporters.” Gandhi responded that the authorities had “goaded the people to the point of madness.” Still, the viceroy’s allegations rankled him, and he announced a fast of three weeks. He wished “not to fast unto death, but to survive the ordeal, if God so wills,” and to that end he would drink water, with a little citrus juice to make it palatable.36

  Gandhi held twenty-one days to be the limit of his endurance and appears to have seen the fast as a trial before God. The viceroy charged that it was “an easy way out” and “a form of political blackmail.” The War Cabinet had long decided that if Gandhi chose to fast he would be allowed to die. But some Indian members of the viceroy’s council worried about Gandhi’s perishing in prison, and Linlithgow fretted that they might resign their seats if he were at risk of dying. Such weakness infuriated Churchill, who raged on February 7, “what did it matter if a few blackamoors resigned! We could show the world that we were governing.” If indeed Gandhi died, “[w]e should be rid of a bad man and an enemy of the Empire.” His anger persisted into the next day’s War Cabinet meeting. The British had scored victory after victory in North Africa, the Soviets had fought the Nazis to a standstill, and the Americans were pounding the Japanese—“and this our hour of triumph everywhere in the world,” he said, “was not the time to crawl before a miserable little old man who had always been our enemy.”37

  The viceroy nevertheless proposed to release Gandhi from prison for the duration of his fast, an offer he declined. So the ordeal began, and as each excruciating day crawled by, Indians came to besiege the new American envoy with pleas for help. William Phillips once arrived at his office to find twenty-five agitated schoolgirls camped in the hall outside. He asked the viceroy for permission to visit Gandhi and was turned down. But when Indians realized “that I could not intervene without instructions and that the President would not intervene with Churchill, American stock in India fell rapidly,” Phillips recounted in a memoir. On February 19 he was finally able to hand Linlithgow a telegram from Cordell Hull, the American secretary of state, expressing the president’s alarm at the prospect of Gandhi’s death.38

  Linlithgow explained to Phillips that if Gandhi should die, the worst would be “six months unpleasantness steadily declining in volume; little or nothing at the end of it.” After it was all over, India would be “far more reliable as a base for operations.” The prime minister instructed Lord Halifax, the ambassador in Washington, to leave no doubt that any interference from the United States would “cause great embarrassment between the two Governments.”39

  Gandhi’s moral stature nevertheless posed a serious problem to the British. Since he was holding out longer than expected, the prime minister asked the viceroy to check if he was sneaking some glucose with his water: “Would be most valuable [if any] fraud could be exposed.” Gandhi had refused glucose, Linlithgow responded. On February 21 the old man’s condition suddenly worsened, but the crisis passed. A British doctor attested that one of the Indian doctors might have panicked when Gandhi appeared to be on the verge of death and secretly given him a dose of glucose, but the old man could not have known and so could not be exposed as a cheat. No matter: Churchill would write in The Hinge of Fate that it “was certain however at an early stage that he was being fed with glucose whenever he drank water.”40

  The viceroy thanked the prime minister for standing firm against “a wicked system of blackmail and terror” practiced by “the world’s most successful humbug.” Churchill had meanwhile come down with pneumonia and was on his own irksome diet. “I do not think Gandhi has the slightest intention of dying,” he complained in a letter to Prime Minister Jan Smuts of South Africa (who, three decades earlier, had had his own share of troubles with the Indian). “I imagine he has been eating better meals than I have for the last week.”41

  AS LUCK WOULD have it, while the prime minister was down with pneumonia and irascible over Gandhi’s fast he received a complaint from Cherwell about the transportation of grain to India. Upon returning from Casablanca, the Prof had vehemently protested the shipping committee’s promise to send the colony at least 40,000 tons of wheat. The consignment would cost the United Kingdom dearly in terms of shipping, Cherwell argued, and India’s annual output of cereals was so enormous (a little above 50 million tons) that even the 600,000 tons that the viceroy wanted could make no conceivable difference to its food supply. He trusted that “no further gestures of this sort will be encouraged.”

  Churchill concurred. “I am much concerned about these heavy inroads into your shipping due to the improvidence of the various Governments in the East concerned, and the failure of their crops,” he wrote to Leathers, the minister of war transport. “I hope you will be as stiff as you can. There is no reason why all parts of the British Empire should not feel the pinch in the same way as the Mother Country has done.”42

  In his January memo to Leathers, Amery had noted that the food stringency in India was a result of high prices, arising from the cessation of Burmese imports, crop failure, and the demands of the army and of Ceylon, all of it compounded by hoarding. With prices on the rise, cultivators were refusing to sell while traders and householders were buying grain and storing it for future use, forcing prices even higher. Imports would render the army and part of the urban population less dependent on open-market purchases of grain until the summer wheat was harvested, reducing prices
and greatly alleviating the problem.43

  Compared to Amery’s incisive analysis, Cherwell’s drop-in-the-bucket argument was shallow. Indeed, India’s harvest was large. The problem lay in distributing it so that everyone got enough—which was more likely to happen if everyone was confident of getting enough. For instance, the people of the United Kingdom knew that their government would take care of them and felt no need to stockpile essentials. The residents of Bengal, in contrast, knew that famine was impending and were equally sure that the government would not take care of them. That awareness had led landowners to store grain for survival, unscrupulous agents to hoard for speculation, and the government itself to stockpile for the war effort. Had the War Cabinet sent significant consignments of grain, it would have demonstrated a resolve to not let the colony starve and signaled that hoarding would be unprofitable. Those holding stocks in excess of their immediate needs would therefore have released them to the market, reducing prices and saving many lives.44

  As it happened, the Government of India had already announced that wheat was coming, so Leathers felt obliged to send some. But after arranging for ships to carry 26,000 tons from Australia to India, he found that amount adequate to meet the United Kingdom’s immediate needs from the colony—and became reluctant to assign any more vessels. (During 1943, the United Kingdom continued to draw tea, oilseeds, and cotton from India.) Soon after, the Government of India reported that the lifting of price controls had enabled it to procure enough grain for the time being. In view of the simultaneous grain crisis in eastern Africa, the secretary of state for India asked the viceroy to forgo the shipments already promised.45