Churchill's Secret War

by Madhusree Mukerjee

  Amery wrote in his diary that Wavell was refusing to see that his insistence on consensus before freedom “means Pakistan and the breakup of India.” The viceroy nevertheless remained committed to breaking the political deadlock. After the war ended, prisoners who were members of Congress would have to be released, soldiers demobilized, and laborers thrown out of employment, he wrote to the prime minister in October 1944. The clamor for change would become deafening. “Indians are a docile people, and a comparatively small amount of force ruthlessly used might be sufficient; but it seems to me clear that the British people will not consent to be associated with a policy of repression, nor will world opinion approve it, nor will British soldiers wish to stay here in large numbers after the war to hold the country down.”11

  In addition to pushing for progress on the political front, Wavell requested part of the sterling balance to pay for reconstructing India after the war. At an evening meeting of the War Cabinet on November 6, 1944, Amery had what he called the “worst open row with Winston that I have yet had.” The prime minister “denounced Wavell for betraying this country’s interests in order to curry favour with the Indians, and went on at large about the scandal and disgrace” all around. Amery tried to control himself, “but could not help in the end exploding violently and telling him to stop talking damned nonsense.”12

  ON FEBRUARY 1, 1945, Winston Churchill was on board the HMS Orion, on his way to Yalta in the Crimea for a second meeting during wartime of all three Allied leaders. He wrote to his wife, recommending a book, Verdict on India by Beverley Nichols. “It is written with some distinction and a great deal of thought,” he told her. “It certainly shows the Hindu in his true character and the sorry plight to which we have reduced ourselves by losing confidence in our mission.”13

  Verdict on India was a kind of sequel to Mother India—a travelogue that, two decades earlier, had detailed the sexual perversions of Hindus, and which Churchill had admired. The poverty Nichols saw in India had at first inclined him to be charitable, he wrote. “But the flock of dreadful beings that fly towards you, attracted by the clink of coins, is too great; they seem to appear from nowhere, to drop from the sky and the trees, gibbering, spitting, moaning, screaming, and pointing to their sores.” The writer also saw several “QUIT INDIA” signs, proof of the government’s easygoing attitude toward dissent. Of course, “no breath of democracy had ever stirred the Indian dust until we came,” Nichols attested, and all such hard-fought gains would vanish with the imperialists. Should the Congress take over, the lower castes “might as well run to the nearest village well and hurl themselves into it en masse.” Untouchability was “as integral a part of the Hindu faith as anti-Semitism of the Nazi,” while the Congress party was “the only 100 percent, full-blooded, uncompromising example of undiluted Fascism in the modern world”—with Gandhi as its führer.14

  One Indian earned Nichols’s respect: “The most important man in Asia is sixty-seven, tall, thin, and elegant, with a monocle on a grey silk cord, and a stiff white collar which he wears in the hottest weather. He suggests a gentleman of Spain, a diplomat of the old school.” Mohammad Ali Jinnah was as different from a Hindu politician as a surgeon from a shaman, Nichols wrote, and with a surgeon’s precision he had dissected the status quo. The Muslim had nothing in common with the Hindu, Jinnah said disdainfully: “We eat the cow, the Hindus worship it.” And that was the least of their differences. The skirmishing between Muslims and Hindus had produced a cancerous society, Nichols summarized. “There is only one remedy for a cancer, in its advanced stages, and that is the knife. . . . To the knife it will have to come in the end, and surely one knife, used swiftly and with precision, is better than a million knives, hacking in blind anarchy in the dark?”15

  Thinking about India depressed him, the prime minister wrote to his wife. He received unceasing abuse for “holding on to this vast Empire, from which we get nothing.” And yet he had discovered within himself “a renewed resolve to go fighting on as long as possible and to make sure the Flag is not let down while I am at the wheel. I agree with the book and also with its conclusion—Pakistan.”16

  WHEN THE THREE Allied leaders met at Yalta, the Germans were fighting on their own soil on both the Eastern and Western European fronts, and President Roosevelt had just won a fourth term. Yet the bonhomie among the men felt hollow. Roosevelt was ill—too ill, perhaps, to deal effectively with a formidable ally such as Stalin. And relations between the president and the prime minister were worse than ever. The British were upset that the Americans were not doing more to stop the Soviets from overrunning Poland, while the Americans were appalled that Churchill had met privately with Stalin to chalk out their respective spheres of influence in the Balkans—in the process, bartering several small and prostrate nations.17

  When at Yalta the question of placing colonies under the supervision of the United Nations came up, Churchill exploded. He would never tolerate “forty or fifty nations thrusting interfering fingers into the life’s existence of the British Empire.” Jumping to his feet, he shouted, “Never, never, never!” He would not have “one scrap of British territory” handed over for inspection. “No one will induce me as long as I am Prime Minister to let any representative of Great Britain go to a conference where we will be placed in the dock and asked to justify our right to live in a world we have tried to save.” After he had been calmed down with promises that the scheme was not going to apply to the British Empire—which was not quite true, as the fine print would later reveal—he sat down and kept muttering “never, never, never” to himself.18

  On the president’s voyage back to the United States, a reporter asked if the prime minister really wanted all his colonies back, just the way they used to be. “Yes,” Roosevelt replied. “He is mid-Victorian on all things like that.” In March 1945 the president reiterated his concern for “the brown people in the East.” Many of them were “ruled by a handful of whites and they resent it. Our goal must be to help them achieve independence.”19

  Back in London, Churchill told his private secretary that “the Hindus were a foul race ‘protected by their mere pullulation from the doom that is their due.’” (Pullulation means rapid breeding.) He wished that Air Chief Marshall Arthur Harris, the head of British bomber command, could “send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them.”20

  MEANWHILE, IN OCTOBER 1944, Wavell had offered to fly home in order to consult with the War Cabinet and press it to take a decision on India. Amery had agreed: otherwise, it seemed that Churchill would stall as long as he possibly could. He appeared to be waiting not just for the end of the European war but also for the election to follow: should he become prime minister again, he would have a stronger hand to play.21

  With Amery constantly hectoring him, Churchill had passed the matter to a committee of the War Cabinet. A Labour politician, Clement Richard Attlee, headed this so-called India Committee (to be distinguished from the Committee on India Foodgrains and the Committee on Indian Inflation). If Attlee could be trusted with the future of the British Raj, that was because he was more of an imperialist than his credentials would suggest: he was “frankly horrified” at the prospect of ceding power to a “brown oligarchy” of Indians. And although Cherwell was not on this committee, Grigg was. So Amery found little support for his idea of turning India into a dominion, if not granting actual independence, right away. Years later, he would write with sadness: “I still believe it was the only solution that might have saved Indian unity.” The viceroy returned to England, but when at long last he got to meet Churchill, on March 29, 1945, the prime minister “launched into a long jeremiad about India which lasted for about 40 minutes. He seems to favour partition into Pakistan, Hindustan, Princestan, etc.”22

  Wavell also met Leathers to ask for continued wheat shipments to India, but, as always, the minister of war transport pleaded a lack of ships. “I asked where all the ships were,” wrote Wavell, “and the answer seemed to be, mainly in the Pacific, where 6
to 7 million tons is absorbed in shipping used simply as storehouses.” Another food crisis had come up in the colony, but Leathers “seemed indifferent to the possibility of famine in India,” while the foodgrains committee, “on the basis of Cherwell’s fatuous calculations, simply tried to show that we already had enough food in India.” Wavell pointed out that for several months he had received only half the wheat promised, which in turn was half of what was needed. Sitting through a routine War Cabinet meeting on April 9, he was struck by “the very different attitude towards feeding a starving population when the starvation is in Europe. In this case it is Holland which needs food, and ships will of course be available, quite a different answer to the one we get whenever we ask for ships to bring food to India.”23

  AT 3:35 P.M. ON APRIL 12, 1945, the president died in his cottage at Warm Springs, Georgia, of a stroke.

  At the House of Commons, the prime minister spoke in soulful tones of the man “whose friendship for the cause of freedom and for the causes of the weak and poor have won him immortal renown,” and adjourned the session as a mark of respect. But that very day, in an outright repudiation of Roosevelt’s trusteeship scheme, a representative at a Commonwealth conference announced the United Kingdom’s refusal to hand over its colonies to international supervision. The president’s dreams for the dispossessed were buried before he was.24

  The rift between India and the United States widened right away. The previous December, Nehru’s personable sister, Vijaylakshmi Pandit, was working on famine relief and rehabilitation in Bengal when she unexpectedly heard from an American general and, days later, found herself in the bucket seat of a military transport plane, a small bag by her side, flying to New York. It could only have happened, she guessed, if the initiative had come from the president himself. She had used the American visit to campaign for Indian freedom and even lunched with Eleanor Roosevelt at the White House. When the president died, her luck changed. In June 1945, Pandit would go to a United Nations conference being held at San Francisco—but despite the best efforts of the India League she would not be allowed to represent her country. Of the major Allies, the Soviet Union alone would favorably influence Indian opinion when its delegate, Vyacheslav Molotov, expressed sympathy for nationalists.25

  ON APRIL 30, 1945, just before Soviet troops entered Berlin, Hitler shot himself.

  “I FEEL VERY lonely without a war,” Churchill confided to his doctor, Lord Moran. “Do you feel like that?” On May 5, three days before the Allies accepted the surrender of Germany, Churchill had ordered a committee to review postwar security. Its appraisal identified the Soviet Union as the West’s new adversary. India, which enabled access to the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the Soviet Union, and which was also a source of fighting men, was projected to remain vital to British security. “It is of paramount importance that India should not secede from the Empire,” the appraisal declared. If, however, the colony could not be held, the alternative was to keep a strategic piece of it under British control—possibly Baluchistan in the far northwest, “on the ground that it may be relatively easy to exclude this territory” from India. (Baluchistan would ultimately become the westernmost province of Pakistan.)26

  By the end of May, Viceroy Wavell had thrashed out with the India Committee a formula to resolve the political status of the colony. Subject to War Cabinet approval, he would choose a new Viceroy’s Council, or executive body, containing 40 percent each of Caste Hindus and Muslims from lists supplied by the leading political parties. Although Muslims comprised fewer than a quarter of India’s population, they were to be regarded as a separate nation and by that logic were given representation far beyond their numbers. (The two or three remaining members of the council would be Sikh, lower caste, tribal, or Christian.) Such a council would inevitably safeguard British power—through the enmity between the Congress and the Muslim League. These factions were hardly likely to agree on anything, but should they do so, the viceroy proposed to retain the power to overrule his council.27

  At the War Cabinet meeting to discuss the plan, “Winston was in his most truculent mood, and really very difficult,” recorded Amery. The discussion continued into the next day, May 31, with the prime minister delivering “a long polemical statement” against any proposal to cede control to Indians. Yet when the meeting resumed that night, Wavell found to his amazement that Churchill “made just as forcible an address in favour of my proposals as he had made in their damnation.” He even “exuded good will towards India and myself at every pore.” The viceroy assumed that the change of heart had to do with upcoming elections: because public opinion favored easing the controls over India, Churchill could not afford to be seen as holding back progress there. “Everything ended on the happiest of happy notes,” commented an equally relieved Amery.28

  Back in India, the viceroy ordered the top eight Congress leaders to be released and invited selected politicians to the resort town of Simla to talk things over. Given that its rank and file remained in jail, the Congress had no choice but to be cooperative. Jinnah refused to be as agreeable, however: he insisted that every Muslim on the viceroy’s new council belong to his League, which presented a problem because the conference included a number of prominent Muslims, one of whom was a staunch British ally but despised Jinnah. Accordingly, Wavell drew up his own list of council members. It contained five Muslims, four of whom were associated with the Muslim League, with the fifth an independent from the Punjab. The War Cabinet insisted, however, that Wavell get Jinnah’s approval of the lineup. Grigg declared that it was out of the question to have a council that the Muslim League did not like: “We risked losing our friends.”29

  Jinnah refused to accept Wavell’s list—he was adamant that only the Muslim League should represent Muslims—and Wavell declared that the conference had failed. He had, after all, won the War Cabinet’s consent for the proceedings on the understanding that the Muslim League would be on board to counter the Congress. The prime minister “would have been outraged,” wrote historian Penderel Moon, if the result of the Simla conference “had been a proposal to form a Congress-dominated council unbalanced by the League.”30

  “So ended my efforts to save a united India,” Amery wrote in his diary. Churchill had missed some War Cabinet meetings, having been away campaigning for the forthcoming elections; but the diehard members of the War Cabinet, who spoke for the prime minister in his absence, had wanted the Simla talks to break down, he observed. Grigg, for instance, was “completely obsessed with his hatred of all Hindus” and accused Amery of “selling up four hundred million Indians to a handful of greedy Hindu industrialists”—who, he feared, were conspiring with the Congress to supplant British businessmen in India.31

  Intriguingly, Wavell subsequently discovered that someone from the India Committee had gone behind his back to confer with members of his existing council who had been in London at that time. And Jinnah told a confidante that “friends in England” had communicated to him, via a member of that council, that if Jinnah held fast to his demands he “would get Pakistan.” Another of his colleagues reported that a member of London’s India Committee “was advising Jinnah to stand firm.” To top it off, Churchill later confided to Wavell that he had let him go ahead with his attempt at an Indian settlement only because, as the viceroy wrote in his diary, “the India Committee had all told him [Churchill] it was bound to fail!”32

  Jinnah had his own reason for rejecting the viceroy’s list—the presence of an independent Muslim would have undermined his claim to represent all Muslims—and the extent to which Churchill’s advisers actually influenced his decision may never be known. But it is clear that the prime minister and his supporters did their best to sabotage the Simla talks, commonly considered a major fork on the route to the creation of the nation of Pakistan. Churchill obstructed India’s future as a united and peaceable nation, while simultaneously seeking to give the appearance of being progressive.

  Such maneuvers were not enough to s
tem the slide in the prime minister’s fortunes. A restless electorate was primed for change in the postwar era. In late July 1945, the United Kingdom’s election results came in: a landslide victory for Labour and its party head, Clement Attlee. Churchill’s tumultuous tenure as leader of the British Empire was, at least for the present, over.

  The defeat shocked him. “For five years he had enjoyed the trust and affection of the whole country, and then, in a night, the confidence of his countrymen was withdrawn,” Lord Moran wrote. “Why had they deserted him in the hour of victory?” Grateful as Britons were for his leadership during the war, they could not envisage Churchill as a successful peacetime prime minister. When, months after he had departed 10 Downing Street, Wavell went to visit him, Churchill’s parting admonition to the viceroy was “Keep a bit of India.”33

  ON THE BRITISH Empire’s far eastern border, World War II was not yet over. By the spring of 1945, British and Indian forces had traversed the foothills of the eastern Himalayas and poured into the river plains of Burma. The Americans had departed the region, because it was easier to lead an assault on Japan from islands in the Pacific than from China; the battles in Burma were now purely about restoring imperial territory.