Madhusree Mukerjee (1961-) Churchill's Secret War (2010)
The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II
To those who fell so that I could be born free
Chapter Nine. Run Rabbit Run
...“I hope that out of the present surplus of grain you will manage to do a little more for the domestic poultry keeper,” the prime minister directed the day after this meeting. If their hens could get more grain, Britons would get more eggs.
...The War Cabinet did not permit the Government of India to apply for aid-a necessary formality before it could be sent. British authorities did, however, donate $30 million of the colony’s wartime earnings to the UNRRA, making India the sixth-largest contributor to the fund.
...Throughout that autumn, the United Kingdom’s civilian stocks of food and raw materials continued to swell, so that by the end of 1943 they would stand at 18.5 million tons, the highest total ever. The United Kingdom imported that year 4 million tons of wheat grain and flour, 1.4 million tons of sugar, 1.6 million tons of meat, 409,000 heads of live cattle, 325,000 tons of fish, 131,000 tons of rice, 206,000 tons of tea, 172,000 tons of cocoa, and 1.1 million gallons of wine for its 47.7 million people-a population 14 million fewer than that of Bengal. Sugar and oilseeds overflowed warehouses and had to be stored outdoors in England under tarpaulins.
American and Canadian grain traders complained that excessive British demand was distorting the market and worried that, after the war, the United Kingdom would use its vast stocks to manipulate world prices.
...The conference continued its work in Teheran, where the Soviets joined in. At a tête-à-tête with Stalin, Roosevelt cautioned that it was “unwise” to bring up India in the general discussions, and Stalin agreed that this was a “sore spot with the British.” Sometime in the future, the president continued, he would like to discuss India at length: it would, he said, probably require Soviet-style “reform from the bottom.” Stalin opined that the colony was complicated by culture and caste, but that reform from the bottom meant revolution.
...Sometime during the conference, Stalin baited Churchill, accusing him of cowardice because of his foot-dragging on the invasion of northern France. “What happened?” he teased. “Is it advancing age? How many divisions have you got in contact with the enemy? What is happening to all those two million men you have got in India?” At one vodka-soaked banquet, Churchill was needled by Stalin so mercilessly that he stomped out in a fury *.
* Dilks, The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, 582.
...On December 16, at a meeting of the War Cabinet that Churchill did not attend because of illness, Leathers mentioned that Canada was “pressing very hard to allow at any rate one shipload of Canadian wheat to go to India.” News of the offer had leaked in both the Indian and the Canadian media, and “the political now perhaps outweighed the shipping aspects,” said Leathers. To Amery’s relief, the War Cabinet acquiesced to a proposal to load a Canadian ship with wheat for India.
...Winston Churchill’s true love was war, and it took precedence over such dreary matters as colonial economics. The chief of the Imperial General Staff, Alan Brooke, had a full-time job restraining him from headlong pursuit of whatever glittering military prize had caught his eye. “It is a wonderful character-the most marvellous qualities and superhuman genius mixed with an astonishing lack of vision at times, and an impetuosity which if not guided must inevitably bring him into trouble again and again,” Brooke mused in his diary. “Perhaps the most remarkable failing of his is that he can never see a whole strategical problem at once. His gaze always settles on some definite part of the canvas and the rest of the picture is lost. . . . This failing is accentuated by the fact that often he does not want to see the whole picture, especially if this wider vision should in any way interfere with the operation he may have temporarily set his heart on.”
Churchill overflowed with ideas for operations and hated the lull that preceded a major undertaking. In the autumn of 1943, soldiers and supplies were being gathered for Operation Overlord, and precious little was left over for supposedly quick and easy side ventures that could turn into quagmires. Yet one day the prime minister would be pushing for an attack on the Balkans, a few days later on Sumatra or Norway, and in another week he would be back at the Balkans again. “He is in a very dangerous condition, most unbalanced, and God knows how we shall finish this war if this goes on,” Brooke wrote in October.
The previous year, Brooke had turned down the Middle East command so that he could stay in London and prevent the prime minister from precipitating another Gallipoli. Churchill may also have had that disaster in mind when he had appointed Brooke the chief of staff. That is, he may have been aware that he needed containment while recognizing that, of all his generals, Brooke alone had the personality for that task. “When I thump the table and push my face towards him what does he do? Thumps the table harder and glares back at me,” Churchill had said admiringly. After tremendous and exhausting battles to which he brought the full force of his conviction, lungs, vocabulary, and lachrymal glands, Churchill would eventually back down and accept Brooke’s judgment-only to return to the fray the next day.
...One minister was shifted from his post because he intended to say that members of Parliament did much that was asked of them, but refused to shout “Heil Churchill!” As for Cherwell and the S branch, their allegiance was unabashedly to Churchill alone. “Churchill on top of the wave has in him the stuff of which tyrants are made,” Beaverbrook had once warned. Lord Moran, Churchill’s doctor, similarly noted: “when the sun shines his arrogance, intolerance and cocksureness assume alarming proportions.”