Churchill's Secret War Read online

  Dhara became entranced with one of the women: Kumudini Dakua was dark-skinned, sweet-faced, and quick-witted, with almond eyes that “held an inexplicable allure.” It was just as well that a few years earlier, when his mother had pressed him to get married, Dhara had sworn to remain celibate until the land became free. Kumudini was the wife of his close friend Khudiram Dakua, with whom he had played pranks on unsuspecting elders when both had been in school and later in the same prison. She found Dhara attractive as well. His deep voice “had a magical ability to entice,” Kumudini Dakua would recall decades later, and his impassioned recital of the poem Bidrohi (Rebel) “made revolutionaries of us all.” Soon the women were touring the countryside, exhorting everyone to help the movement in any way they could. With Dhara around, “none of us felt any fear at all,” Dakua remembered. His high spirits, his patriotic songs and poetry recitals, and his attention to the trainees’ every need made it fun to become a sadhinawta songrami, or fighter for freedom.65

  As they trekked around the villages, urging the people to refuse help to the government, Dhara and his fellow rebels often found shelter in the homes of ordinary villagers. “We were very young, would run around a lot,” Dakua related. “Once, we were all sleeping on the upper floor of a mud hut, and we were so many and so rowdy that the roof fell. We were terribly embarrassed. The lady of the house came up and said, ‘That’s okay—the old roof fell so we’ll build a new roof. Why should you be upset?’ The villagers loved us so much, they’d keep piling food on our plates even when we were stuffed.”

  During 1941—as Churchill crossed the Atlantic Ocean to seek help for the war from the United States, Amery dispatched Indian troops to secure the oilfields of Iraq and Iran, Bose strove to gain German assistance for Indian liberation, Hitler attacked the Soviet Union (unknowingly sealing his own fate), Nehru languished in prison, and Gandhi fretted about the scarcities stalking the land—a suppressed but powerful surge of excitement was mounting in rural Bengal. No matter what their imperial rulers believed, “slowly the people were realizing that the era of the British was coming to an end,” Dhara wrote. At the same time, war-related shortages of food, cloth, and kerosene (used for lighting lanterns—rural Bengal had no electricity) were making survival ever more difficult. In every villager’s heart a small flame of rage was spontaneously coming alive. “We began to fan the flames,” Dhara recalled, “in the hope of uniting them all into one gigantic conflagration.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Harvesting the Colonies

  “Shoot Gandhi, and if this doesn’t suffice to reduce them to sub mission, shoot a dozen leading members of Congress; and if that doesn’t suffice, shoot 200 and so on until order is established,” Adolf Hitler had advised the viscount of Halifax (formerly Lord Irwin, viceroy of India) when they met in November 1937. “You will see how quickly they will collapse as soon as you make it clear that you mean business.” Hitler esteemed Britons and Germans as superior races that nature had designed for hegemony over lesser peoples. Divining the British Raj to be the source of English pride and affluence, he sought to bestow a similar empire on his compatriots. As he saw it, Britons could continue ruling over Indians, while Germans would subjugate Slavs; the labor of the vanquished races, and the natural resources of their former territories, would nourish and enrich the victors.1

  Hitler’s determination to carve the Third Reich out of the countries on Germany’s eastern border would place him on a collision course with the United Kingdom—even as the conviction of shared destiny would complicate his attitude toward the British, the adversaries he could not but admire, and undermine his prosecution of the war. Perhaps because of his racist worldview, Hitler did not comprehend the extent to which the Indian freedom movement, along with other developments of the twentieth century, had weakened imperial controls over the colony. The days of formal empires were numbered—and, ironically, the conflict he initiated would deal the fatal blow. To commandeer Indian manufactures and produce for the war, His Majesty’s Government would have to deploy inflationary monetary policies in preference to straightforward confiscation of the colony’s products or revenues, which would have met with resistance from the colony’s business elites and politicians. In the short run, the United Kingdom’s wartime financial arrangements with India would set the stage for famine, and in the long run they would hasten the disintegration of the British Empire.2

  Hitler had been influenced in his thinking about Indians by the eugenicist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whom he dubbed the Prophet of the Third Reich. Chamberlain admired India’s caste system as having been engineered to preserve the purity of Aryans—but he nonetheless considered modern Indians to be a bastard people hopelessly contaminated by inferior blood. During the nineteenth century, tomes from ancient India had been translated into European languages, revealing a prehistory of colonization of that subcontinent by whites. Around 2000 B.C., Caucasian nomads on horseback who called themselves arya had poured into the Indian plains through passes in the northwestern Himalayas. They had settled on the banks of western rivers, adopted agriculture, and founded a civilization. Their earliest text, the Rig Veda, spoke of battles against the aboriginal dasyu, or dastards. The Aryan god of storms, with his bolt of lighting, “flays the enemy of his dark skin, kills him and reduces him to ashes,” the Rig Veda proclaimed of the dastards. Many of the dasyu were expert farmers and city-builders, but in defeat they became the dasa, or slave. They were inducted into the lowest ranks of a severely hierarchical and patriarchal social structure called caste, over which reigned priests—Brahmins—and warriors.3

  Western eyes could still discern the Aryans’ stock in the northwest of India, where the men were tall and light-skinned. But as the invaders had penetrated the subcontinent, bedding native women, their pure warrior blood had succumbed to dilution, according to Herbert Risley, a late-nineteenth-century anthropologist. Every successive tribe of conquerors “became more or less absorbed in the indigenous population, their physique degenerated, their individuality vanished, their energy was sapped, and dominion passed from their hands into those of more vigorous successors.” In the distant east, where the influence of aboriginal women had been strongest, the ancient miscegenation had resulted in the feminized Bengalis, whom “no necessity would induce to fight,” another British scholar commented.4

  According to Hitler, if anyone had asked Lord Robert Clive by what right he had seized the riches of Bengal, he would have replied, “I am an Englishman!” Racial superiority entitled the British to the possession of India, Hitler informed a student body in Munich. Accordingly, the führer considered the anti-colonial movement—“a rebellion of the lower Indian race against the superior English-Nordic race”—to be as futile as it was contemptible. “The Nordic race has a right to rule the world and we must take this racial right as the guiding star of our foreign policy,” he said in 1930. Hitler had only a secondary interest in regaining the German colonies in Africa that had been confiscated by the Allies after World War I. What he wanted most of all was to conquer an extended backyard that could be defended by a land-based army. Germans would thus realize their inherent eminence and restore their prosperity by acquiring Lebensraum, or room to live, toward the east.5

  In two books (the second of which was published long after his death), in prewar speeches, and in wartime after-dinner monologues, Hitler laid out a blueprint for the economic regeneration of Germany that drew on the British Empire as a prototype. White men, he stated in a 1932 address that won him the support of leading German industrialists, had exercised their “extraordinarily brutal right to dominate others” (which they possessed by virtue of their race) in order to reorganize the economy of lesser peoples, in India and in the Americas—thereby procuring their own prosperity. The English, in particular, had achieved a “wonderful marriage of economic conquest with political domination” that had given rise to “a remarkable development: instead of expanding in space, instead of exporting men, they have exported goods an
d have built up an economic world-system.” Thanks to such a process, white nations had come to possess “gigantic world-central-factories” for which “the rest of the world provides enormous markets for the disposal of goods and enormous sources of raw materials.”6

  This state of affairs, Hitler maintained, could persist only “so long as the difference in the standard of living in different parts of the world continues to exist.” The imperial lifestyle required lesser races to be preserved in poverty. Different countries had safeguarded their economic superiority in different ways, he continued, “most brilliantly of all perhaps England who has always opened up for herself new markets and immediately anchored them through political dominance.” Germans—having been, in Hitler’s view, idealistic rather than pragmatic in their approach to colonies—had failed to make adequate use of them and thus had been unable to guarantee an adequate standard of living for the fatherland’s domestic industrial workers, laying themselves open to the specter of communism.7

  The führer would repair German fortunes by creating sources of cheap food and raw materials, as well as expansive export markets; this would necessitate acquiring fresh territories. The Ukraine would supply the ruling race with bread, the Black Sea with an inexhaustible supply of fish, the Crimea with oranges, cotton, and rubber; and the crowning glory, Russia, would be an insatiable captive market for German “cotton goods, household utensils, all the articles of current consumption.” (The Slavic areas would also provide fields for Germans rendered “superfluous” by industrialization—an aspect of Hitler’s dream that was inspired not by India but by the colonization of North America by white farmers.) Such expropriations of the colonies’ resources and products would result in the deaths of tens of millions of Slavs by famine and disease, estimated a Nazi policy paper formulated in 1941.8

  Because Germans would deploy divide and rule to retain control, only a few selected officers would be needed to administer the vast new territory. “The Russian space is our India,” Hitler elaborated. “Like the English, we shall rule this empire with a handful of men.” His favorite movie, the 1935 Hollywood production Lives of a Bengal Lancer, depicted the adventures of a few such valiants: English cavalry officers at India’s northwest frontier. The movie illustrated the feats that the warriors of an inspired race could perform in service of their homeland, and Hitler made it compulsory viewing for SS guardsmen. A great deal about Hitler remains mysterious, but his daydreams of world conquest were transparently inspired by what might be called Empire Envy.9

  “ENVY IS ONE of the less pleasing features of the German character, and there is a peculiar German word [Brotneid], envy of another for earning the bread that might be yours, which conveys tersely what Germans felt about our wealth and the vast resources of our Empire,” wrote Leopold S. Amery in his autobiography. “Looking back on the costly struggles and sacrifices of their own history they felt that our Empire had been far too cheaply won; largely won, indeed, by utilizing Germany as a pawn in our long struggle with France. Not only cheaply won, but cheaply held; not by the kind of sacrifice which conscription imposed upon Germany’s manhood to maintain her frontiers, but by a Navy.”10

  In 1934 Amery had read Mein Kampf and found it “very interesting and stimulating,” as he wrote in his diary. Hitler’s “intense sincerity and clear thinking on some points, as well as really careful study of propaganda methods, attracted me very much.” On the other hand, the author was clearly “quite insane about Jews and Socialists,” Amery observed. The next year, when he was holidaying in the Bavarian Alps, Hitler had invited him for a meeting. The führer looked unprepossessing, rather like a salesman in a gent’s clothing store. Amery did not find “the hypnotic charm I had heard of, and no attempt to exercise it, but liked his directness and eagerness to let his hearer know his mind.” Amery judged that Hitler had a “grip on economic essentials and on many political ones, too, even if it is crude at times and coloured by deep personal prejudice.”11

  Like Hitler, Amery believed that less developed parts of the world, such as India, should provide raw materials and markets for the highly industrialized centers of imperial power. Amery did not regard Indians themselves as greatly inferior, however: his confidence in their abilities underlay his later attempts, as secretary of state for India, to secure the assistance of native politicians and manufacturers in provisioning the war effort. In part because of personal experience, he was aware that political disadvantage did not necessarily indicate feebleness in character or intellect. Historian William D. Rubinstein has discovered that Amery’s mother came from a distinguished Jewish family, many of whose members had converted to Christianity. Amery himself had a deep-seated empathy for Jews and was one of the architects of modern Israel. But he kept his origins a close secret throughout his life and dropped not a hint of his Jewish ancestry in three portly volumes of autobiography (which he could not complete).12

  Given this background, Amery’s rather positive appraisal of Hitler is astonishing. Like many others, he may have assumed that Hitler could not possibly carry out the exterminations that he had hinted at in Mein Kampf. Nor could Amery have foreseen a bizarre personal tragedy: his troubled elder son, John, would turn into an anti-Semite and, finding himself in Europe in 1942, would travel to Berlin to assist Hitler with his war effort.13

  LEOPOLD S. AMERY was born in northern India in 1873, to an English forester and a woman of east European extraction. When Leo was three, he went to England with his mother and younger brother, and in their absence his father abandoned the family and moved to Canada. Leo’s mother was forced to live in boardinghouses while she spent all her money educating her sons. “Nobody could ever give herself over so helplessly to laughter, and laughter was a large ingredient in our childhood’s atmosphere,” Amery remembered. Leo was precocious and spoke Hindi fluently when he left India. From his father’s side he inherited a diminutive frame (he was five feet four) and from his mother’s a gift for languages, of which he would learn fifteen. He read parts of the Mahabharata in Sanskrit and once astonished a London audience by reciting the first book of the Koran in classical Arabic. 14

  At Harrow the brilliant youngster garnered most of the prizes—and encountered a bumptious redhead by the name of Winston Churchill. During Winston’s first summer at Harrow, he spent hours by the swimming pond, eating buns and sneaking up behind unsuspecting boys to push them in. One day he saw a student standing right on the edge of the pond and gave him a shove. “I was startled to see a furious face emerge from the foam, and a being evidently of enormous strength making its way by fierce strokes to the shore,” Churchill recounted. He ran, but his pursuer easily caught him and flung him into the pond. It was Leopold Amery of the Sixth Form: “He is Head of his House; he is champion at Gym; he has got his football colours.” Mortified, Winston approached the “potentate” the next day and explained: “I mistook you for a Fourth Form boy. You are so small.” Since Leopold did not seem at all calmed, Winston brilliantly improvised: “My father, who is a great man, is also small.” Leo laughed and indicated the end of the episode. Neither ever forgot this introduction, however.15

  Amery went on to Oxford University and eventually became a fellow of All Soul’s College—in whose lounges not only scholars but also “cabinet ministers, bishops, Members of Parliament, civil servants, lawyers, journalists and businessmen” conversed on equal terms. It was the intellectual soul of the empire, and Amery, one of its brightest lights. He served on several fronts of World War I as an intelligence officer, went on to hold important positions in the British government, and drafted the Balfour Declaration of 1917 that promised Jews a home in Palestine. By 1938, Amery understood the ferocity of Hitler’s ambitions and joined Churchill in attacking the British government’s policy of appeasement. Listening to a broadcast of one of the führer’s speeches, he found it terrifying: “It was the most horrible thing I have ever heard, more like the snarling of a wild animal than the utterance of a human being.”16

 
IN APRIL 1941, a week after his arrival in Berlin, Subhas Chandra Bose submitted to the German foreign ministry a couple of detailed memoranda on how the goals of Indians could mesh with those of the Axis. In Mein Kampf, Hitler had described India’s nationalists as “a coalition of cripples” and asserted that he could not link “the destiny of my people” with that of such an inferior race. His contempt for the Indian independence movement indicated a reversal of German policy, which during World War I had been strongly supportive of Indian insurgents. In 1915 German agents, acting in concert with Sikh émigrés in Canada and the United States, had sent a shipload of arms to Bengal’s revolutionaries. (The plot was foiled by the British.) Aware of Hitler’s attitude, Bose anticipated resistance from the German government; he nevertheless hoped that rational self-interest would prompt the Nazis to take him seriously.17

  “It is one of the cardinal principles of British diplomacy to adopt a sanctimonious role when she is fighting in reality for her own selfish interests,” Bose wrote in his proposal. His Majesty’s Government had, for instance, allowed several European nations to set up governments-in-exile and thereby acquired credentials as a champion of freedom. “Why should not the Axis Powers adopt the same policy and pay England back in her own coin?” Germany should shelter a free Indian government and—through broadcasting incendiary messages, sending weapons and other supplies to revolutionaries, and other means—incite the subcontinent to rebellion. Moreover, he asserted, if the Axis powers publicly committed to liberating British colonies, they would prompt defections among Indian soldiers fighting in the Middle East and Africa. And once the loyalty of the Indian Army was shaken, the arrival of “a small force of 50,000 men with modern equipment” on the colony’s border would be enough to topple the British Raj.18