Churchill's Secret War Read online

  Hardly any defense existed in eastern and southern Bengal, Pinnell would subsequently state to a Famine Inquiry Commission that was set up in 1944. Nobody knew “whether, by the next cold weather, Calcutta would [be in] the possession of the Japanese.” To prevent anyone from potentially hearing Axis broadcasts, the authorities confiscated all the radios they could find. Allied forces established observation posts, linked by wireless sets to the old fort in Calcutta, every ten miles along the seacoast and on the banks of major rivers. Military authorities had already requisitioned all serviceable trucks and cars, as well as most buses; now the officials confiscated from southern and eastern Bengal virtually all other forms of conveyance. Bicycles, steamers, boats carrying more than ten passengers, bullock carts, and even a few elephants were commandeered, destroyed, or forced to move north of the denial line. From Midnapore alone, the police removed close to ten thousand bicycles.20

  Boats were the primary form of transport in riverine Bengal. Most villagers were so poor that they either walked or boarded a ferry. Boats took traders to the market, fishers to the sea, potters to their clay pits, and farmers to their plots, which were often marooned between vast swathes of river. Demolishing boats meant destroying livelihoods: as Pinnell confessed, “for anyone who knows the Bengal cultivator it was a completely heart-breaking job.” Of 66,500 registered boats, more than two-thirds were rendered inoperable in coastal Bengal. Pinnell said that in fact nine-tenths of the larger boats that could be found were taken out, and he could not be sure how many still plied within the denial area. Of the surviving vessels, many would be used for transporting jute (needed for sandbags, a necessity of war), of which Bengal was the world’s only significant source. As a result, the rice crop harvested at the end of 1942 could be moved from regions of surplus to those of scarcity only with great difficulty. When a member of the famine commission asked if “boat denial” had ended up “killing” the economy of certain locales, Pinnell replied: “I do not think a consideration of that sort would have been of any weight at all.”21

  Boat denial “completely broke the economy of the fishing class,”13 he further testified. In December 1943 a journalist visited Faridpur in eastern Bengal and was told by an elderly survivor that in his fishing village of 200 households, 50 had perished in entirety. The 35,000 families that lost their homes and fields to military barracks and aerodromes would also feature prominently among the victims of famine.22

  ANOTHER ASPECT OF the scorched earth policy, called “rice denial,” would impact the economy of Bengal just as fiercely. Just when the authorities began to remove rice stocks from the coastal and eastern parts of the province is unclear. When civil servant Asok Mitra arrived in Munshiganj in eastern Bengal in early February 1942, he found less than 10 tons of rice in riverside storehouses that should have held thousands of tons. The police, he was told, had gone around destroying or seizing the stocks. Journalist Sukharanjan Sengupta alleges that thousands of tons of rice stored at three river ports of eastern Bengal were thrown into the water, while a villager told radio correspondent Nazes Afroz that he saw soldiers setting fire to stacks of rice.23

  Bengal’s elected chief minister, Abul Kasem Fazlul Huq, further charged that in April the governor of Bengal, Sir John Herbert, ordered a British official to remove “excess rice from three districts within 24 hours.” Since the Bengal administration did not have the staff to enforce such a drastic order—its only village-level employees were chowkidars, or night watchmen—the official had advanced 2 million rupees to a merchant to buy up rice. The businessman was Mirza Ahmad Ispahani, a key financier of the Muslim League. Herbert described his political adversaries in the province as “Caste Hindus” and regarded members of the Muslim League as “enemies of our enemies” and thus as natural allies in his task of committing the productive capacity of Bengal to the war effort. The Ispahani Company would become the government’s principal buying agent, with the power to commandeer rice if the owners refused to sell.24

  “At the moment we are facing a rice famine in Bengal” because of the governor’s policies, Huq protested in August 1942. Just as worrisome, brokers from Ceylon and other Indian provinces were also buying rice in Bengal. After the fall of Burma, the Government of India had undertaken to do without the usual rice imports from the east—and moreover to supply rice to those parts of the British Empire that could no longer obtain it from Southeast Asia. As a result, whereas Bengal had imported 296,000 tons of rice in 1941, it would export 185,000 tons in 1942. The price of rice soared.25

  EVEN AS INDIA waded into an economic morass, the president of the United States had been trying to throw a bridge across the ideological chasm between the Indian National Congress and His Majesty’s Government. The prevailing political stalemate was embittering nationalists and endangering the prosecution of the war against Japan. On March 11, 1942, Roosevelt had written to the prime minister, likening the Indian predicament to that of the thirteen American colonies facing the War of Independence. The colonies had joined to form a stopgap government in order to fight the British, he pointed out. During the war, confusion had prevailed among the “separate sovereignties”—but then “the experiment was still in the making and any effort to arrive at a final framework would have come to naught.” Roosevelt asked Churchill to similarly allow a temporary government, headed by representatives of the various political groups, to be set up in India.26

  The United Kingdom’s left-wing politicians had also upped the pressure on the British government, which in March led it to dispatch to New Delhi Sir Richard Stafford Cripps, a socialist committed to the cause of Indian emancipation, to negotiate with the nationalists. But Cripps had been sent merely “to prove our honesty of purpose and to gain time,” the prime minister privately assured the viceroy, while Amery further clarified that Cripps would probably fail. “We shall have shown our good will to the world and India,” he informed Linlithgow.27

  Cripps presented to the Indian National Congress the proposal he had brought. During the war all matters pertaining to defense would remain in British hands; afterward India would get dominion status. But nestled within the offer lay “the Pakistan cuckoo’s egg,” as Amery put it: any province that wished to could break away. Amery did not believe that partition was practicable or desirable but had inserted the egg to please Jinnah. Furthermore, he anticipated that “most of the Hindus will set up a howl of protest against the thought of dividing Mother India”—and sure enough, Gandhi balked at dismemberment. He dismissed the offer as “a post-dated check” and, leaving detailed negotiations to Congress politicians, departed New Delhi for his ashram in western India.28

  On April 3, 1942, Colonel Louis Johnson arrived in the city as President Roosevelt’s personal representative. Johnson had fought in World War I and had helped organize the American Legion; he understood military matters and hoped to facilitate a speedy settlement so that Indians would wholeheartedly support the war. Johnson worked tirelessly with Cripps and Congress leaders, and ultimately told the latter that they would get control of a new defense ministry, which would oversee India’s war effort while leaving all military decisions to the commander-in-chief. But Viceroy Linlithgow, who resented his powers being negotiated away, informed London of the “Johnson offer”—which the Congress had indicated it would accept.29

  Churchill was incensed. He cornered Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s friend and emissary in London, who calmed him down by saying that Johnson was “not acting as the representative of the President in mediating the Indian business.” That was not quite true, but in effect it withdrew American backing from the Johnson offer. On April 9 and 10, Cripps received forceful telegrams from London. When he next met Congress leaders, he told them that the Johnson offer was off the table; instead of directing the domestic war effort, their role in defending India could stretch to running army canteens and implementing scorched earth. Stunned and upset, Nehru and others turned him down. “I fancy most of us feel like someone who has proposed for family
or financial reasons to a particularly unprepossessing damsel and finds himself lucky enough to be rejected,” Amery confessed to his diary.30

  The American representative concluded that the War Cabinet had intended its overture to the Indian National Congress to fall through. “Cripps is sincere, knows this matter should be solved,” Johnson cabled to Roosevelt. “He and Nehru could solve it in five minutes if Cripps had any freedom or authority. London wanted a Congress refusal.” One last time, the president tried. On April 11, 1942, he cabled Churchill requesting that Cripps stay on in India for another attempt. Americans felt that “the deadlock has been caused by the unwillingness of the British Government to concede to the Indians the right of self-government, notwithstanding the willingness of the Indians to entrust technical military and naval defense control to the competent British authorities,” Roosevelt wrote. He asked Churchill to instead make “a real offer and a fair offer” to the Indian people.31

  No suggestion that the president made to the prime minister was “more wrathfully received,” as biographer Robert E. Sherwood would recall Hopkins saying years later. Although it was 3 A.M. on a Sunday when the cable arrived, Churchill summoned Hopkins and stormed at him. A national government like the one the president proposed would “almost certainly demand the recall of all Indian troops from the Middle East,” he charged. Hindus would conspire with the Japanese, allowing them to cross the country in exchange of military support against Muslims, princes, and Untouchables. If it would help with American opinion, the prime minister would give up his position and “retire to private life,” but nothing whatsoever would change British policy.32

  Hopkins was a man of frail health, and when the president heard of his late-night trial he ordered a general to put him to bed under armed guard for twenty-four hours. Roosevelt also received a telegram from Churchill, indicating that Cripps had already left India. In any case, the prime minister stated, he could not take responsibility for defending the colony against Japanese attack “if everything has again to be thrown into the melting pot at this critical juncture.” The president’s views meant a great deal to him, however. “Anything like a serious difference between you and me would break my heart and surely deeply injure both our countries at the height of this terrible struggle.”33

  The threat of discord that could harm the Allied effort finally silenced Roosevelt. A few months later, when a senior official urged the president to guarantee Indian independence, he replied: “You are right about India but it would be playing with fire if the British Empire were to tell me to mind my own business.”34

  In his memoir The Hinge of Fate, written after the war (which Roosevelt did not survive), Churchill described the president’s proposal on India as “an act of madness” that fate had fortuitously rendered impossible to implement. “The human race cannot make progress without idealism, but idealism at other people’s expense and without regard to the consequences of ruin and slaughter which fall upon millions of humble homes cannot be considered as its highest or noblest form,” he wrote. The British could not have deserted the Indian people in their hour of need, “leaving them to anarchy or subjugation.”35

  IN EARLY APRIL 1942, Japanese airplanes showed up over Calcutta, dropping a few bombs and thousands of leaflets urging Indians to rise up against their overlords. Japanese bombers also attacked several coastal towns in southern India, which had no air protection at all, and sank two cruisers, a light carrier, a destroyer, and possibly twenty merchant ships in and around the Bay of Bengal. The colony possessed fourteen outdated bombers, which were useless against the aircraft carriers from which the Japanese were operating. “India can not repeat not be held against likely scale and method of Japanese attack,” Wavell warned in a series of cables demanding immediate consignments of military equipment and trained troops.36

  The prime minister perceived no such urgency. The Japanese would not be so foolish as to take on the subcontinent while still engaged in subduing China, Churchill told Wavell on April 18, 1942. Did the commander-in-chief “really think it likely that Japan would consider it worth while to send four or five divisions roaming about the Madras Presidency?” he asked. “What could be achieved comparable to the results obtainable by taking Ceylon or by pushing north into China and finishing off Chiang Kai-shek?” On May 4, Churchill remarked at a War Cabinet meeting that the Japanese already had all the territory that their plans called for. Hence, the enemy was “unlikely to make a heavy attack either on Australia or on India. For why hasn’t he done it earlier?”37

  Unconvinced, Wavell protested that it was “sheer madness” to leave him with so little by way of men and materials: “India parted with all her trained troops for Mideast and Iraq and then sent half-trained troops to try to save Malaya and Burma and will take time to recover.” He further requested that the few Indian officers who commanded British troops be permitted to discipline them—provoking a Churchillian outburst on the “poor much harassed British soldier having to face the extra humiliation of being ordered about by a brown man,” as Amery recorded. Notes on the War Cabinet meeting of July 27 show that a War Office representative concurred with Churchill. The “face of white man in East is low enough and this is not the time to do it,” he said, and cited “Gandhi’s likely movement” as a further argument against enhancing the powers of Indian officers.38

  At the Battle of Midway on June 4–6, 1942, American bombers had devastated the fleet of aircraft carriers from which the Japanese were operating in Southeast Asia, and days later Churchill had written that a Japanese invasion of India “seems extremely improbable at the moment.” Within a few months, the British Raj had shifted its sights from a Japanese threat to India to a Congress uprising within India.39

  CHURCHILL WAS CORRECT in his assessment that Japan was not interested in a full-scale invasion of the colony. China alone had proved indigestible to the python (as Hitler described his ally) and India was too large for it to tackle without help from other forces. Crucially, Axis strategists could not agree on how the colony fit into their long-term plans. The Japanese envisioned India as an independent, if subordinate, country at the periphery of their empire, which they called the Co-Prosperity Sphere. Should Japan have to invade India, in order to oust the Allies from a vital base, it would need an influential nationalist backed by a declaration of independence to reassure the highly politicized natives of Axis intentions. Germany held “the supreme trump card in the person of S. C. Bose,” as historian Milan Hauner put it—and it refused to play along.

  A linkup through Russia and Afghanistan with Japanese forces in India did feature among the German flights of fancy. Not Hitler’s, though. He had mixed feelings about the Japanese triumph in the Far East, so much so that a German diplomat recorded that the führer would “gladly send the British twenty divisions to help throw back the yellow men.” The Nazi boa was in any case choking on the Soviet Union, which it had attacked in June 1941.40

  So for the remainder of 1942 and, as it would transpire, all of 1943, India was safe from attack. Instead of the experienced Indian divisions, which were still needed abroad, the War Office estimated that the colony could use thirty-four British battalions made up mostly of half-trained recruits. They could train in India to take on the Japanese sometime in the future, and meanwhile would uphold “internal security”—which meant combating Congress agitators. The Indian Army numbered 900,000 at the time, of whom a third were abroad, with 50,000 men being hired each month. The War Cabinet nevertheless expended valuable shipping resources to transport to the colony British soldiers who resembled their Indian counterparts in being inadequately trained to fight the Japanese. Those soldiers’ immediate objective was to deal with the rebellion that everyone could see coming.41

  IN MAY 1942, soldier Clive Branson arrived in India with the Royal Armoured Corps. He felt “very fit, and in good spirits,” he wrote to his wife. Born in India to an army officer, he had been taken to England as a baby and now was returning at the age of thirt
y-five. In letters written over the next nine months, Branson would describe to his wife much that he saw and felt, providing a chronicle of the war in India through the eyes of a soldier with an acute sense of compassion.42

  Branson’s squadron was sent for training to the arid west of India. Gazing at the landscape, he was enthralled. “The other evening the sun was just setting making the whole sky a brilliant hard yellow. A labourer came past, his skin a brown black; round his head the folds of gleaming white cloth. The road, the dry earth, a pale mauve with strips of lemon-green sugar patches,” Branson wrote. In the 1930s he had become a communist and volunteered to fight fascists in Spain, where he had spent eight months in a prison camp. By the time he was called up for World War II, Branson, a gifted painter, had a family. An aristocrat’s daughter had given up a life of luxury to share his quarters in the poorest section of London and had also borne him a girl. But Branson hated fascism and did not regret going to war again.43

  To his annoyance, all that his unit seemed to do in India was hang around waiting. At least Branson had time to explore his surroundings. Virtually all the other British soldiers were getting their first glimpse of the colony, and they were “filled with amazement at the appalling conditions in which the people live.” Branson made friends with the few natives he met: the chicko or little kid who brought in hot tea many times a day and the laundry boy who returned his clothes clean and pressed. The food was excellent, the fruit plentiful; the Englishman enjoyed the dry heat and even, when it came, the rain, which gave the countryside “a lovely rich earth and green look.”44