Churchill's Secret War Read online

  Chitto’s sisters had finished primary school, after which they were married, and his brother had gone on to middle school. But by the time Chitto was old enough to study, the economic depression had arrived and the family could barely eat. The boy desperately wanted an education: “My father was a teacher—I didn’t want to let him down.” He managed to attend a primary school in a nearby village. It had perhaps sixty students, three or four teachers, and a huge portrait of King George V to which everyone had to render pronam, a gesture of obeisance. But the only way Chitto could afford to study was by living with and working for a better-off family in that village.

  “They gave me food and I went to the school. I did everything for them—cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, scrubbing dishes, you name it,” Samonto said. The boy had to get the groceries, make meals, spoon-feed the family’s feeble old patriarch, clean up drunken messes left by his bachelor son, and run errands for the other son and his wife (who, fortunately, were often away in Calcutta). Chitto had no books, and in any case his chores left very little time for study. “It took me years to get through primary school. By the time I finished I was twelve or thirteen.”

  Thereafter the boy had wandered from house to house in other villages, begging to be allowed to stay, work, and study at a nearby middle school. “I was willing to do anything for them, even then it was impossible.” Giving up, he had hung out at home, helping his mother in the fields or making flattened rice and carrying almost 40 kilograms of it, stuffed into a sack and balanced on his head, to sell at Geokhali town, eight miles away. After two years he was lucky to be admitted with free board to a school run by a Hindu charity. Chitto emerged with good grades—and immediately suspended his studies. It was August 1942. British forces had departed Southeast Asia, the Japanese were at India’s border, Gandhi had just been arrested, India had erupted into the most concerted rebellion since 1857, and the teenager wanted to help make history.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Scorched

  “If, after India has made the very great material effort in defence of the Empire which she has already made, she should be attacked and find herself without any of the necessary materials and equipment for defence, the political effect would be disastrous,” General Archibald Wavell had warned in September 1941, two months after arriving in India as commander-in-chief of the Indian Army. Earlier that year, British forces sent to defend Greece had been routed by Germans, a debacle that had led the prime minister to remove Wavell as general officer commanding-in-chief of the Middle East Command.1

  Wavell’s new command was to prove at least as challenging as his old one. The Indian Army numbered almost a million at the time, but the majority of troops were poorly trained and had no equipment to speak of. The seven best Indian divisions—the only ones with up-to-date weaponry, functioning vehicles, technical expertise, and experience—were fighting in the deserts around the Mediterranean. Not a single armored car or modern tank, bomber, or fighter plane was to be found on the entire subcontinent. India’s cities and military installations were defended by only 30 anti-aircraft guns but required at least 520. General Claude Auchinlek, who had preceded Wavell as commander-in-chief in India, had asked the War Cabinet for tanks in order to prepare at least one armored division in India, to which the prime minister had replied: “But General, how do you know that they wouldn’t turn and fire the wrong way?” Amery, for his part, had been consistently urging aircraft production in the colony, and had been just as consistently turned down. “Winston,” he observed in his diary, “hates the idea of Indians producing anything for themselves in the way of defence.”2

  India was unprotected from Axis attack for several reasons. The prime minister believed that the Japanese would not dare to take on the fabled Royal Navy and, in any case, that the fortress of Singapore would halt any significant advance toward India. Moreover, he worried that if Indian troops with contemporary weapons were on home ground, they would turn on their superiors—just as they had in 1857. After that rebellion, the Indian Army had been remade with men from the so-called martial races; it was meticulously structured so that ties of kinship and ethnicity translated into loyalty to commanding officers and, thence, to the Crown. But by the time World War II arrived, the army had expanded so much that officers of diverse origins—even Bengalis—had had to be inducted. Being educated, the officers were more politicized than rank-and-file soldiers, and 60 percent of them expected independence for their homeland as a reward for their services in the war. To make matters worse, Axis propaganda, engineered by Subhas Chandra Bose in Berlin, was urging nationalists to join the army and subvert it from within.3

  Churchill’s suspicions of the Indian Army were well founded. Nevertheless, leaving India without the means to defend its eastern flank would prove to be an error—as fatal to the stature of the British Empire as to the security of its subjects.

  PRESIDENT FRANKLIN D. Roosevelt could scarcely believe that their two nations were fighting a war against fascism but would not also try to free the world of colonialism, as he remarked to Winston Churchill in August 1941. The comment made Churchill apoplectic. The prime minister had traveled to Placentia Bay in Newfoundland in order to woo his benefactor and inform him of the United Kingdom’s vital needs. For the president, the Atlantic Conference was a chance to size up his ally—and to impose his own democratic views.4

  Also present was Elliott Roosevelt, the president’s fourth son, who later published a controversial account of his father’s wartime conferences. “The cigars were burned to ashes, the brandy disappeared steadily,” he wrote of Churchill after one dinner. But the tongue remained lucid, and the president provoked it by bringing up the empire’s economics. No stable peace was possible, he suggested, if the colonies remained poor—and dated methods of taking out raw materials and giving nothing back made progress impossible. According to the younger Roosevelt, Churchill’s neck reddened and his sentences lengthened into paragraphs—and the president, having said his piece, let him talk. After 2 A.M. Elliott was finally able to help his wheelchair-bound father to his cabin and sit awhile to share a smoke. The prime minister was an old-fashioned Tory, the president said, but they would be able to work together just fine. They would, his son warned, as long as the two men stayed off the topic of India.5

  The conference resulted in an inspiring statement of war aims, known as the Atlantic Charter. The document offered the first hint of the president’s goal of a United Nations to police the postwar peace. It also asserted that the United States and the United Kingdom would “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and that they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.” Leopold Amery—who worried that the Americans would use the war to undermine the British Empire and turn it into “a lebensraum for their exports”—was disgusted by the charter. “We shall no doubt pay dearly in the end for all this fluffy flapdoodle,” he confided to his diary. At his urging, the prime minister clarified to the House of Commons that the Atlantic Charter applied only to those countries conquered by the Axis powers. The colonies were exempt.6

  ON DECEMBER 7, 1941, Japanese bombers devastated the American fleet in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, bringing the United States into the war. That night Churchill slept the sleep of the saved, because he believed the entry of the United States into the war meant ultimate victory. The United Kingdom immediately declared war on Japan, as did India. For the moment, however, things got worse.

  Churchill had earlier dispatched two battleships, the Repulse and the Prince of Wales, toward Singapore in the hope of deterring an Axis advance toward the British Empire. But within days “an army of highly trained gangsters,” as Wavell described the Japanese invaders, landed in Siam and Malay and sped toward the city of Penang—on bicycles. Japanese bombers flattened Penang ahead of the army’s advance and torpedoed the two British battleships, which were bereft of air cover, and sank them. It was
the single worst day of the war for Churchill, who had traveled on the Prince of Wales for his meeting with Roosevelt.

  If the Japanese reached India, the natives might welcome them in. So when Churchill visited Washington later that December, Roosevelt broached the prospect of political reform in the colony. “I reacted so strongly and at such length that he never raised it verbally again,” the prime minister would write in his history of the world war.7

  Churchill’s defiance could not conceal the grave threat to the British Empire. Singapore was indeed impregnable if approached by sea, but in January 1942 Japanese soldiers traversed seemingly impenetrable jungles on foot and arrived at the city’s vulnerable northern side. “India had been sucked dry of trained troops by the requirements of the Middle East, Iraq, and Iran,” Wavell would later note, and most of the British, Indian, and Australian soldiers who were rushed to face the enemy were rookies. Worse, the invaders had air cover, whereas the defenders had none. “There must be at this stage no thought of saving the troops or sparing the population,” Churchill cabled. “Commanders and senior officers should die with their troops. The honour of the British Empire and the British Army is at stake.”8

  Singapore fell on February 15, 1942. At an extraordinary ceremony the following evening, Indian soldiers and officers who had defended Siam and Malay watched as a commander, Colonel Hunt, formally surrendered them to the Japanese before embarking with his compatriots for safety. With surgical precision, the white men in an army that had hitherto trained and fought as a unit separated themselves from the brown. Fujiwara Iwaichi, a Japanese commander unusual in his belief in liberating colonies, encouraged a personable Sikh officer, Captain Mohan Singh, to recruit the captive soldiers into an Indian National Army that would eventually march back to their homeland to fight the British. Of the 67,000 soldiers who surrendered, more than 20,000 would join this liberation army.9

  Next in the line of attack was Burma—defended by a Burmese division and an Indian division that had been partially trained and equipped for desert warfare, and possessed no tanks or anti-aircraft guns. During the awful retreat, a commander precipitously ordered a bridge to be blown up, leaving thousands of his own troops on the wrong side of a mile-wide river. On March 8 Rangoon fell, and the Japanese were at India’s border.10

  The evacuation of Burma was chaotic. White administrators and civilians commandeered all available transport and piled in, leaving everyone else to seek his or her own way. Some 600,000 Indians who worked in Burma, and who also feared the Japanese, took to the sea on horribly overcrowded ships or trudged over rain-sodden Himalayan passes in an attempt to reach their homeland. Around 80,000 would die on the way. Women and children sank into ferocious mud; feces and bodies mingled in campsites with living, starving people; and cholera became endemic.

  Congress leaders imprisoned in the fall of 1940, during Gandhi’s satyagraha movement against the war effort, had been released just before Pearl Harbor, after a prolonged argument that Amery had won in the War Cabinet. (“A most unnecessary waste of time and generation of heat owing to Winston’s refusal to accept things as they are and not as they were in 1895,” he commented in his diary.) Nehru toured transit camps in the northeast and found that white evacuees had food but the brown ones had none—yet the native peoples were being prevented from leaving the camps lest they carried their germs further. The catastrophic exodus devastated the myth of the brave Briton standing firm in defense of his charges.11

  WITH THE BURMA Road to China closed, American forces began pouring into Calcutta and traveling northeast into the Indian province of Assam. They constructed runways and flew thousands of tons of war supplies, brought by rail from the western ports of India, over the Hump: the perilous eastern Himalayas. As long as China kept resisting them, the Japanese could field fewer forces in the Pacific. India became a beneficiary of Lend Lease, with the United States providing tanks, jeeps, aircraft, and other war equipment in exchange for clothing, services, and food. India was also set to provide shelter and supplies to troops from China, the United Kingdom, Africa, and Australia—around a half-million foreign soldiers in total.12

  If Calcutta fell, the supply route to China would be cut off. An anxious Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Chinese nationalists, visited India in early 1942 to ask for the support of Congress leaders and was shocked to find them indifferent to the Japanese threat. At his urging, President Roosevelt instructed a representative in London, Averell Harriman, to suggest to the prime minister the desirability of reaching a settlement with Indians that would rouse them to fight for the Allies. Churchill responded that he could not alienate the Muslims, who, he stated, constituted three-quarters of the Indian Army. (In reality, the fraction was one-third.) He also sent the president a letter that the government had received from Mohammad Ali Jinnah, reiterating the demand for Pakistan as the price for Muslim cooperation.13

  The stunning reversals of Allied fortunes in Southeast Asia had made Churchill politically vulnerable, and critics in the Labour Party were also insisting that the Indian National Congress be won over to the war effort. As a result, that February the prime minister came up with an astonishingly liberal scheme for India: an enlarged viceroy’s council consisting mainly of elected members to assist in the war effort and, subsequently, to formulate a constitution. This time, it was Viceroy Linlithgow who protested, declaring that Muslims would “refuse to serve on any body in which they would be an ineffective minority.” An army general further warned that “any concessions to Congress” could anger Muslim soldiers and result in “the ruin of the Indian Army as at present constituted.” Such concerns convinced Amery, who ended up telling Churchill, “we must reassure the Moslems that they are not to be outvoted over a constitution.”14

  A year earlier, Amery had expressed concern about the deepening division between Hindus and Muslims, to which Churchill had replied, “Oh, but that is all to the good.” Amery had since become sensitized to Muslim sentiment, possibly because he had helped dispatch Indian troops to take control of oilfields in the Middle East. During World War I, some Muslim soldiers from India had mutinied upon being ordered to battle the Turks, and once again the British Empire was asking Muslims to fight Muslims. The last thing Amery needed was for Jinnah to inflame any incipient Muslim anger. Amery even wondered whether, with the Japanese at India’s door, “it would not be better, for the moment at any rate to go back more to the spirit of Mutiny days and revive British Rule in its most direct and, if necessary, ruthless form.”15

  IF THE JAPANESE invaded, they would probably land on the coast of Bengal, which adjoined Burma. Because of the inadequate defensive installations, they would be impossible to resist; worse, they might even be welcomed by the locals. On January 21, 1942, Linlithgow had warned Amery: “Recent reports from military authorities in eastern India [are] to the effect that there is a large and dangerous potential fifth column in Bengal, Assam, Bihar and Orissa, and that, indeed, potentiality of pro-enemy sympathy and activity in eastern India is enormous.” Many Bengalis, including Sushil Dhara of Midnapore, were elated by news of Japanese successes—and the events to follow would only increase their disaffection with the British.16

  On November 14, 1941, the prime minister had urged a “scorched earth” policy involving “ruthless destruction in any territory we have to surrender.” The following January the War Office ordered such measures in colonies on the periphery of the Indian Ocean, which were at risk of seaborne Japanese attack. Amery relayed the instructions to India. The army was to destroy industrial, military, and transport facilities, while the civil administration should deprive the enemy of sustenance. “Water supplies and minimum stocks of essential foodstuffs should be left for local inhabitants but latter should as far as possible be distributed to population before withdrawal takes place to avoid bulk supplies falling into enemy hands,” the order elaborated. If some resource could not be burned or blown up, “dumping in sea or rivers may suffice.”17

  In Bengal th
e winter crop had just been harvested, so scorched earth would not mean literally burning the fields. Instead, the rice would have to be removed from traders’ storehouses and landowners’ golas, or miniature silos. In the confusion and panic, the vital caveat of leaving enough food for the people would be disregarded.

  Wavell hoped to retake such regions as the Japanese might occupy, and he protested the demolition of industrial facilities. Amery cabled back on March 27: “it is essential that destruction should be ruthless and should achieve without fail total denial of such resources as would assist enemy operations.” Removal of river craft, which the Japanese might use to advance along Bengal’s waterways, “should commence now repeat now,” he urged. The viceroy sided with the commander-in-chief, however. Demolition along a coastline as long as India’s would “give handle for agitation,” the viceroy wrote; and with “enormous population in threatened areas any scorched earth policy will mean that we will have millions on our hands who it will be quite impossible to feed.”18

  Thus scorched earth was reduced in scope and limited to coastal Bengal, where it went by the less incendiary name of Denial Policy. The province was selected because it adjoined Burma, and perhaps also because its populace was deemed treasonous: one War Office memo warned that in Bengal saboteurs and provocateurs could “gravely impair the efficiency of Indian defence.” Military planners drew on the map a line that ran east to west some twenty miles south of Calcutta. South of that line, the Japanese would be denied transport and food. Civil servant Olaf M. Martin, who was posted in eastern Bengal, recalled that army chiefs were demoralized and “temporarily obsessed with the supposed necessity of ‘denying transport’ to any invading force.” Vital records and white women were swiftly moved out of the demarcated region. The government advised “wise men” to keep two months of rice in stock—amounting to a confession that the public would be left to its own devices. The viceroy sent his private secretary, Leonard George Pinnell, to Bengal to implement the Denial Policy.19