Correlation is not causation. It is a fact that Indira Gandhi was Prime Minister of India at exactly the time when Margaret Thatcher jumped out of the TV screen and subjected me to aggravated acts of fellatio & tittywanking. This does not mean Indira Gandhi caused Mrs. Thatcher to behave in this reprehensible manner. Still, one mighs say that there is an element of Granger Causality in what may appear to be mere coincidence. My point is everything may be correlated in an opaque manner.
Did you know, both Thatcher & Gandhi attended Somerville College, Oxford? What's the opposite of Oxford? Cambridge. Guess who was the youngest black Professor there? Jason Arday. Connect the fucking dots, sheeple!
It in the spirit of Ardayan epistemology that I turn back to Madhushree Mukherjee's 'Churchill's secret wank' which proves that the Bengal famine was caused by Winston having a crafty wank and jizzing over 3.2 million tons of wheat which should have gone to Calcutta. Needless to say, the ships were diverted so as to conceal the British Prime Minister's dirty little secret.
Scott Horton, of Harper's magazine, put the following 6 questions to Madhushree Mukherjee
1. You write that Hitler never fully embraced the Indian nationalist cause
because he expected Britain to reach some accommodation with Germany that allowed it to retain most of its empire, and specifically India.
But, once it became clear that Britain would fight, Hitler's focus changed to some sort of partition of India with the Japanese. He expected to keep the MENA & both Iraq & Iran had leaders who were pro-Axis. It was in this context that the Indian revolutionaries in Germany were expected to earn their keep. Unfortunately, the man who helped Bose to escape was a Communist and thus became a British double agent after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.
What is it about Churchill and Britain that Hitler misunderstood in this regard?
Hitler lived in a fantasy world. He may have thought that Oswald Moseley could take power in the UK. When Hess flew to England, he may have hoped to do some sort of deal with people whom Berlin considered pro-German.
Hitler believed that the so-called Nordic race, which in his view included Germans and Britons, was destined to rule the world.
He thought Germany would be top dog.
He sought to emulate, not supplant, the British Empire: the German empire would comprise the Slavic countries to the east. As he saw it, the United Kingdom would retain its colonies but assume the role of Germany’s junior partner in world domination.
In other words, the Brits would be turnkeys in a world which is just a large, open air, Nazi prison.
Hitler underestimated the depth of Churchill’s reverence for England’s imperial traditions.
That was irrelevant. Britian was determined to fight & Churchill was appropriately bellicose. Maybe Lloyd George would have been offered the job had he been in better health.
To Churchill, the British would be second to none.
No. Churchill's mother was American. He understood that Britain would play second fiddle in a 'Union of the English speaking people.'
Moreover, Churchill’s reading of history told him that Britain had always maintained the balance of power in Europe:
Nonsense! Churchill knew that his father's generation favoured 'splendid isolation'. The first alliance the Brits made after they came to realize that the Royal Navy could not 'go it alone' was with the Japanese.
Britian's policy has always had to do with invasion threats from a foreign Armada. It went to war in 1914 for Belgium. Why? Keeping a great-power out of the Low Countries has always been its strategic objective.
whenever France or Germany had marched, England had marched—against.
The UK stayed out of the wars of German or Italian reunification. Randholph Churchill's pal- Joe Chamberlain- had put out feelers for a pact with Germany a little before the treaty with the Japanese. The problem was the Kaiser's obsession with turning Germany into a naval power.
This time would be no different. Churchill also believed that it was his destiny to lead his country in war against a vile enemy.
Sadly, Britain wasn't strong enough to win any such war. At best, it could keep its independence & hope for a 'Russian steamroller' or American intervention.
Hitler may have evoked particular repugnance because,
he was a fucking gangster as was proved by the night of the long knives. Mussolini was a refined gentleman by comparison.
in addition to persecuting Jews, he was seeking to enslave Europeans.
Whereas the Kaiser had been trying to give them kisses and cuddles.
Churchill had condoned the Japanese invasion of Manchuria,
because the old fool saw Japan as an ally.
explaining that the aggressor was “an ancient State, with the highest sense of national honour and patriotism and with a teeming population and a remarkable energy.” And he had advised against intervention when Italy attacked Abyssinia, on the grounds that
Mussolini was seen as a potential ally against Hilter- particularly in terms of opposing Anshluss in 1934. Let him help himself to Ethiopia. I suppose, at the time, the Brits thought they would hang on to the 'White Highlands' in Kenya- if only so as to have a place where they could send the more degenerate specimens of the Aristocracy.
the victim was not “a fit, worthy, and equal member” of the League of Nations. Hitler trusted that British leaders would likewise comprehend his desire to induct Slavs, whom he saw simply as slaves, into the Third Reich.
The Sudetens had a genuine grievance. Moreover, Poland and Hungary were happy to take a bite out of Czechoslovakia. If the Poles had agreed to let Soviet troops through, then Stalin would have stuck with a 'United Front' policy and allied with France (and Britain).
2. Yet you do write that Churchill harbored a deep racism or at least ethnocentrism when it came to the Indians and that he toyed with the idea of building a British alliance with Untouchables, Sikhs, and Muslims to hold India and keep Hindu nationalists at bay.
He said, in 1931, that Nehru, a Brahmin, was plotting to take over India and suppress the Muslims and Dalits etc. Oddly, this view has been adopted by many on the Left in India. Strangely, they have no problem with Nehru's Brahmin dynasty- probably because it is now half Italian.
Did this reflect a reasonable appreciation of the forces then at work in India?
No. The old boy was off his head on brandy. The fact is Churchill, in his wilderness years, had to take his friends where he found them. He was also a supporter of King Edward & his American, ex-prostitute of a wife.
Churchill’s divide-and-rule policies found fertile ground among India’s Muslims.
He took those policies from Muslim intellectuals like Waris Ameer Ali. The question then was how to prevent the Hindu majority gaining power in India just as the question now is how to keep the BJP, which is Hindu Nationalist, from coming to power in more State and ruling India for another fifteen years.
For decades, British conservatives had sought to deepen India’s inherent fissures in order to weaken the nascent independence movement.
Just as, after Independence, the Indian Left has sought to deepen caste divisions to prevent Hindu consolidation
For instance, in 1905 Viceroy Curzon planned to partition Bengal province along religious lines, so as to enhance rivalries between Muslim landowners in its east and Hindu nationalists in its west.
It would reduce them because they would be in separate states. The Hindus thought they could dominate the whole Province and thus insisted on cancelling the partition. They changed their minds in 1946 after having experienced Muslim rule.
He also encouraged the formation of the Muslim League as a counterweight to the dominant nationalist party, the Indian National Congress.
The INC was split between the moderates and extremists.
A prolonged agitation led to Bengal being partitioned instead along linguistic lines.
i.e. creation of Bihar, Odisha & Assam.
But then the colonial government introduced separate electorates for Muslims—that is, every Muslim in British India was required to vote for a Muslim.
This was the Morley-Minto reform of 1909. Montague-Chelmsford, in 1919, created separate electorates for Sikhs, Europeans, Indian Christians, & Anglo-Indians.
The measure favored separatists,
because Muslims don't like kaffirs
who could get elected by appealing to narrow sectarian sentiments. The British subsequently introduced separate electorates for other groups as well, but the effort was partially repulsed.
India has reserved seats for Scheduled Tribes & Castes.
So although Churchill was interested in exploiting diverse social fault lines,
he was against the Round Table Conferences and the Tory 1935 GoI act. But he was ignored. People thought he wasn't quite sane on the topic of India.
he concentrated on widening the Hindu-Muslim rift—which he regarded as “the bulwark of British rule in India.”
Where there are any sizable number of Muslims, there is a rift. God alone knows what the bulwark of British rule in Britain is. My guess is Sharia Law.
When Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, called for a separate nation of Pakistan, Churchill hailed “the awakening of a new spirit of self-reliance and self-assertiveness” among India’s minorities.
Jinnah supported the war effort. Gandhi & Co did not.
During the war, the British government encouraged the demand for Pakistan and propagandized along Islamist lines against Hindus.
Niradh Chaudhuri says most Hindus were for Hitler. The Japanese, however, committed atrocities against Muslims and thus there was some possibility that Islamic sentiment could be stirred up against them.
3. At several points you suggest that Churchill was inspired by the remembrance of the 1857 uprising to take steps that disregarded the value of civilian lives in India.
Churchill was constrained by the GoI act. There was a chain of command and a doctrine of collective responsibility. If Churchill did evil shit, Atlee too was complicit.
But, as you note, in 1920, following the Amritsar massacre, Churchill denounced precisely that logic when it was used by Brigadier Reginald Dyer and his supporters to justify the tragedy that had occurred. Churchill decried what happened as “frightfulness” and called for accountability for Dyer. Doesn’t this suggest a different attitude towards the Indians?
Churchill mollified the crazy Ulstermen in Parliament before making a very simple point- was any General anywhere in the Empire willing to give Dyer a command? No. The guy was a nutter. Suppose he is made the Colonel of a Territorial Regiment. He might order the shooting of strikers. What would follow would be a Revolution. If even the Black & Tans didn't want Dyer, what was the point of sticking up for him?
Incidentally, the Mutiny was very costly. Britain was broke. Geddes axe meant big cuts for the Army and Navy. Military commanders needed to be diplomatic. There was no money for an expensive campaign. As things were Churchill was being blamed for the vast expense of the Mesopotamian campaign.
In 1920 Churchill was not hostile to Indians. The independence movement had yet to develop to its full strength; and the Indian Army, which was largely loyal to the British, had just sacrificed 60,000 lives in World War I.
Brits had sacrificed more than ten times that figure
The British Empire was threatened mainly by actions such as Dyer’s. By killing more than a thousand Sikh civilians—at least by the Indian account—Dyer had undermined the loyalty of Sikh soldiers in the Indian Army.
No. Dyer went on to lead Indian soldiers in the third Afghan war.
The army had accordingly dismissed Dyer;
He was put on the retired list. But so were thousands of others.
and, as secretary of state for war, Churchill was called upon to defend the army’s action. Hence his speech denouncing “frightfulness,” or terror tactics.
Make a hero of Dyer and some young Captain in the Territorial might open fire on a bunch of picketers outside his Daddy's factory. That's how Revolutions happen.
Incidentally, in these years Churchill was calling for gas attacks on rebellious Iraqis, in order to “spread a lively terror.”
In order to save money. Under the new arrangement, the British government had to pay for Indian troops used outside India.
By the 1940s, the Indian situation had changed dramatically. The freedom movement, led by Gandhi, posed a potent challenge to the Empire and caused Churchill’s animosity toward Indians to escalate.
It had peaked at the time of the Round Table Conference & never really subsided (though Churchill got on well enough with Birla).
And the Indian Army had acquired many native officers,
about 400, all told, in 1939- i.e. about ten percent
whose loyalty could not be taken for granted. So Churchill ensured that if rebellion broke out in India, the colony’s best-equipped and -trained battalions would be fighting the Axis—on another continent.
That decision was made before he became PM. Though Congress resigned Ministries at the outbreak of war, no rebellion was apprehened till Feb 1942 & the fall of Singapore. Even then, it looked as though a deal would be done with Congress. Sadly, Gandhi overplayed his hand.
India was bereft of defenses, so that when Japanese forces reached the colony’s borders, the War Cabinet ordered scorched-earth measures to deter their advance.
Burma had been separated out in 1937. A lot of materiel in South East had been abandoned during the British reteaat and thus fell into Japanese hands.
The resulting destruction of rice and boats contributed to famine.
Whereas, if the Japs had gotten their hands on that rice and those boats, Bengalis could have enjoyed being raped and enslaved by their new conquerors.
4. The central thesis in your book is that Churchill and the War Cabinet took a series of decisions which led inexorably to the starvation of between 1.5 and 3 million persons in 1943.
Lose Burma & food deficit states in India are going to take a hit. However, what sealed Bengal's fate was the 1937 election. Once Bengalis were running things, famine & ethnic cleansing became inevitable.
You do not, however, charge that it was their conscious intention to starve these people to death—unlike what the Nazis did in
Holland?
east central Europe about this same time, when starvation was a conscious policy objective.
Slaves have to be fed. Nazis relied on slave labour. Still, I suppose, food requistioning is bound to impact food availability.
But do you believe that they knew or should have known that this catastrophe would follow from their decisions?
If the Bengalis didn't want to impose rationing on themselves so as to feed the hungry, what could Churchill do about it? Tear up the GoI Act of 1935? But that would require a Parliamentary vote. The problem is that everybody thought Churchill's ideas about India were crazy. Nobody could put back the clock.
The War Cabinet received repeated warnings that famine could result from its exhaustive use of Indian resources for the war effort—and ignored them.
They also received repeated warnings, from Hitler, that they should surrender before some really evil shit came down upon their heads. Sadly, they ignored these warnings.
The Japanese occupation of Burma in March 1942 cut off rice imports, of between one and two million tons per year, to India. Instead of protecting the Indian public from the resultant food shortage,
as opposed to Japanese invaders
the War Cabinet insisted that India absorb this loss
i.e. grow more food. Tell you what- why don't eat some of your sacred cows? Incidentally, even American people were having to 'absorb losses' by tightening their belt. Thus, an American family in 1942 had a ration book with coupons for Sugar, coffee, meat, butter, cheese, and processed canned foods. In Bengal, if you had the money, you could eat as much as you liked.
and, further, export rice to countries that could no longer get it from South East Asia. As a result, after war arrived at India’s borders, the colony exported 260,000 tons of rice in the fiscal year 1942-43.
The strange thing was that Indians preferred to get paid for the rice they produced rather than give it away to starving people.
Meanwhile India’s war expenditures increased ten fold, and the government printed paper money to pay for them. In August 1942 a representative of India’s viceroy told the War Cabinet that runaway inflation could lead to “famines and riots.”
And a Japanese invasion could lead to a thousand years of slavery. The plain fact is, Indians didn't greatly care about the famine. Nobody is writing books about the corrupt politicians and businessmen who minted money during the famine.
In December 1942, Viceroy Linlithgow warned that India’s grain supply was seriously short and he urgently needed 600,000 tons of wheat to feed soldiers and the most essential industrial workers.
Everybody was demanding more. Failure to do so meant more would be demanded of you.
The War Cabinet stated that ships were not available. In January 1943, Churchill moved most of the merchant ships operating in the Indian Ocean over to the Atlantic, in order to build up the United Kingdom’s stockpile of food and raw materials.
After all, Gandhi was telling him to 'Quit India'. It wasn't till March 1944 that that Brits stopped retreating from the Japanese.
The Ministry of War Transport cautioned him that the shift would result in “violent changes and perhaps cataclysms” in trade around the Indian Ocean. (In addition to India, the colonies of Kenya, Tanganyika, and British Somaliland all suffered famine in 1943.) Although refusing to meet India’s need for wheat, Churchill insisted that India continue to export rice.
He also insisted Singapore not surrender. Much good it did him.
With famine raging, in July 1943 Viceroy Linlithgow halted rice exports and again asked the War Cabinet for wheat imports, this time of 500,000 tons. That was the minimum required to feed the army and otherwise maintain the war effort. The news of impending shipments would indirectly ease the famine, he noted: any hoarders would anticipate a fall in prices and release grain, causing prices to fall in reality. But at a meeting on August 4, the War Cabinet failed to schedule even a single shipment of wheat for India. Instead, it ordered the buildup of a stockpile of wheat for feeding European civilians after they had been liberated. So 170,000 tons of Australian wheat bypassed starving India—destined not for consumption but for storage.
This made Bengali politicians & their business partners very rich.
Meanwhile, the United Kingdom’s stockpile of food and raw materials, intended for shoring up the postwar British economy, reached 18.5 million tons, the highest ever.
Britain's contribution to the war effort was ten times that of India despite its much smaller population. Why? It was much richer and its people were far more productive. But Britain could not prevail on its own. Russian manpower & American airpower did the heavy lifting. Over the course of 1943, the Brits learned to accept their second class military status. The last Nazi victory of the war was against Churchill's campaing in the Dodecanese (which the Germans took over from the Italians).
Sugar and oilseeds overflowed warehouses and had to be stored outdoors, under tarpaulins.
Churchill thought a second front in Greece & the Balkans could be opened up. Feed the Greeks and they will be better able to fight for you. But without American airpower, the UK could do nothing in that theater.
Of course Churchill knew that his priorities would result in mass death.
Nobody knew this for a fact save those who were familiar with the corruption and callousness of the Bengali people. Why didn't their Premier impose the same draconian type of rationing that Churchill had implemented in England?
In one of his tirades against Indians, he said they were “breeding like rabbits” anyway.
An argument frequently made by Indians who opposed higher taxes to pay for the public food distribution system.
On behalf of Indians, the War Cabinet ignored an offer of 100,000 tons of Burmese rice from freedom fighter Subhas Chandra Bose
who couldn't deliver shit to anybody
(who was allied with the Japanese), discouraged a gift of wheat from Canada, and turned down rice and wheat volunteered by the United States.
But it wasn't Churchill & his chums who benefitted by high black market food prices in Bengal. It was the Muslim League & their crony capitalists.
The War Cabinet eventually ordered for India 80,000 tons of wheat and 130,000 tons of barley. (Barley was useless for famine relief because it had no impact on prices.) The first of these meager shipments reached India in November. All the while, the Indian Army consumed local rice and wheat that might otherwise have fed the starving.
No. The starving wouldn't have got anything. The food would be diverted to tbe black market by elected Bengali politicians.
The famine came to an end in December 1943, when Bengal harvested its own rice crop—at which point Churchill and his friend Cherwell renewed their demand for rice exports.
Churchill could demand things just as Hitler and Stalin could demand things. The difference was that Churchill could be safely ignored. Defying Hitler or Stalin was fatal.
5. Another figure who comes in for a shellacking in your book is Frederick Alexander Lindemann, later Lord Cherwell, an Anglo-German known as “the Prof,” who exercised a powerful influence over Churchill. You describe Cherwell as an impressive scientist but also someone who harbored some rather sinister Malthusian ideas with a latent racist component. What were these ideas and how did they contribute to the famine?
Sadly, Cherwell was right. The Viceroy was wrong. Famine didn't matter to Indians. Suhrawardy became Premier in 1946. Similarly, Mujib would have been re-elected despite the 1974 famine if he hadn't been assassinated (and had bothered to hold elections).
All the evidence points to the prime minister and his closest adviser having believed that Indians were ordained to reside at the bottom of the social pyramid, such that their financial ascendancy as creditors during the war became a source of frustration and fury.
Churchill didn't get that if you owe the bank a billion, then you own the bank. Sterling balances meant that India & Pakistan had to play nice with the UK when he returned to power.
Long after India had obtained independence, the Prof would describe the “abdication of the white man” as the worst calamity of the twentieth century—more deplorable than two world wars and the Holocaust.
Five years after he died (in 1957) so many dark skinned people had signalled their agreement with him by emigratint to the UK, that the country was forced to introduce curbs on immigration from the Commonwealth.
Niradh Chaudhuri's first book- demanding the return of White colonizers to Bengal- had been met with fury in India. By the mid-Sixties he was considered a prophet. His articles found a ready market within India. Then he settled in the UK where his health improved. It wasn't just Indians who were shitty. The country itself was hostile to human life.
Judging by a lecture that Cherwell gave in the 1930s, he regarded colonial subjects as “helots,” or slaves,
Gandhi & Nehru & Bose kept saying Indians were slaves.
whose only reason for existence was the service of racial superiors. In drafts of this talk, he outlined how science could help entrench the hegemony of the higher races. By means of hormones, drugs, mind control, and surgery, one could remove from slaves the ability to suffer or to feel ambition—yielding humans with “the mental make-up of the worker bee.” Such a lobotomized race would have no thought of rebellion or votes, so that one would end up with a perfectly peaceable and permanent society, “led by supermen and served by helots.”
These were drafts, not the published article. The truth is, Cherwell was a pal of Churchill. He stuck by him in his wilderness years and was rewarded for it. Don't forget, most Tories didn't like Churchill.
In November 1943, Cherwell urged Churchill to hold firm against demands for famine relief.
Churchill's job was to win the war. If the autonomous government of Bengal didn't want to introduce British style rationing, Churchill had no locus standi to force them to do so. After all, they knew their own country best.
Some did warn that famine would help the Communists which in turn would threaten the 'Permanent Settlement'. But, Fazl had become Premier in 1937 promising to get rid of the thing. In other words, Britian had no business meddling in the fiscal arrangements of a distant, autonomous, Province of an Indian Empire which might, at any moment, gain a Federal Government of its own.
Else, he warned, “so long as the war lasts [India’s] high birthrate may impose a heavy strain on this country which does not view with Asiatic detachment the pressure of a growing population on limited supplies of food.” That is, he blamed the famine on the irresponsible fecundity of natives—and ignored the devastation of the Indian economy by the war effort. He also elided the fact that the War Cabinet was preventing India from using its ample sterling balance or even its own ships to import sufficient wheat.
Very true. Premier Nazimuddin would say 'lets ration food'. Cherwell would fly down to Calcutta and brutally sodomize him till he agreed to let the poor starve.
By Cherwell’s Malthusian argument, England should have been the first to starve.
No. Britain's birthrate was 15 per 1000. India's was 48. Moreover, the Brits were welcome to emigrate (indeed, were subsidised to do so) to the vast, empty, settler colonies. Nobody wanted Indians save for coolie work.
It was being kept alive by massive imports.
Which it paid for.
In 1943 the United Kingdom imported 4 million tons of wheat, 1.6 million tons of meat, 1.4 million tons of sugar, 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 an eighth that of India.
Because the Brits were highly productive and hence could afford lots of food. True, wealthy Indians had better rations during the War than wealthy Britishers but that was because they didn't give a fuck about those of their own people who were starving.
To Cherwell and also to Churchill, colonial subjects were worth saving only if they made a direct contribution to the war effort
Churchill couldn't save British subjects (and over 50,000 British soldiers) in Malaya and Burma from the Japanese.
I suppose what Madhushree means is that, during a war, Governments preferentially feed their soldiers and those involved in defence related industries.
It must be said Bengali officials, on orders from elected Bengali politicians, did requisition food at below free-market prices. This why they were able to make so much money.
According to Field Marshal Wavell, Churchill wanted to feed only those Indians who were “actually fighting or making munitions or working some particular railways.” The rest were dispensable.
Wavell had to use great brutality to put down the Quit India revolt. True, British casualties were minimal but the thing was bad for morale more particularly because the Japs continued to press forward till July 1944. Like Allenby in Egypt, 22 years previously, Wavell became defeatist. He wanted to evacuate the White population before utter chaos consumed the country.
6. Arthur Herman argues that you rely too heavily on Leo Amery’s diaries, recording Churchill’s intemperate outbursts, and pass by the fact that Churchill took decisive steps to ameliorate the famine. “Without Churchill,” he says, “the famine would have been worse.” How do you respond to this?
Churchill was irrelevant. He gambled on a 'soft underbelly' strategy in 1943 but it quickly came unstuck. Britain was now revealed to be a second rate power. Australia and Canada would deal directly with the US. What about India? Mountbatten (and Blackett, a little later) befriended Nehru who was suspicious of Yankee domination. But Pakistan gladly allied with Eisenhower's America.
My indictment is based on what Churchill did, not on what he said. The Ministry of War Transport papers, the Cherwell Papers, and the official histories of British wartime food supply, shipping, and economy are my key sources.
They are irrelevant. Why? Bengal was ruled by elected Bengali politicians. Churchill never visited India after his stint there as a soldier ended in 1899. Amery, the Secretary of State, was born in India but only visited in 1948 after he left office. My point is, India was a side show.
They show, for instance, that the War Cabinet scheduled eighteen ships to load with Australian wheat in September and October, 1943. Not one of these ships was destined for famine-stricken India.
The Mayor of Calcutta did appeal to the Americans for food. Interestingly, he chose to remain in Hindu India after Partition. This suggests that he wasn't one of the guys who got rich at that time.
Had anyone else been prime minister,
Lord Halifax? Lloyd George? Clement Atlee?
he would have striven to relieve India’s plight instead of consigning wheat to stockpiles.
No. Churchill was mulish on the Indian question. Others would have contrived some cosmetic sort of self-government. The problem was that India was very poor. It could supply mercenaries but its own force projection capacity was limited by its very low per capita GDP. Thus, though Japan had about 80 per cent of India's GDP, it could have three times as many active combatants.
Churchill’s diatribes, as recorded in Amery’s and others’ diaries, are, however, useful in understanding why he acted as he did.
No. They are useless. To understand his actions during the War, you have to understand his military delusions.
Famine had failed to temper his hostility toward Indians. Churchill would tell his secretary that Hindus were a foul race protected by their rapid breeding from “the doom that is their due.” He wished Arthur Harris, the head of British bomber command, could “send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them.”
He also got drunk and said that the Labour Party might establish a Gestapo. Sadly, he said this on the BBC radio. This cost him a lot of votes. People thought the old boy was off his rocker. Oddly, after a stroke or two, he became a decent enough Prime Minister in his second spell in office.
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