Madhushree Mukherjee- a physicist & successful Science Journalist- wrote a very readable book blaming Churchill for the Bengal Famine.
I suppose one could say 'Churchill as Chancellor took a shilling off income tax instead of spending it on the navy. This doomed Singapore and thus the British Empire in Asia.' The problem here is that Churchill had been in the wilderness during the Thirties. That's when he earned notoriety for attacking the Tory plan for transferring power to the Indians. When he returned to power, his colleagues found him 'not quite sane' on the topic of India. This did not greatly matter because he had little influence on Indian policy.
To my mind, Mukherjee's best argument has to do with availability of shipping in 1943.
In a letter to the NYR, she writes
in January 1943 (Churchill) acted on Cherwell’s advice to remove 60 percent of the merchant ships from the Indian Ocean, so that these vessels could instead be used to shore up the United Kingdom’s supplies of food and raw materials.
Churchill was the Prime Minister of the UK, not India. Moreover, the UK was vital to the Allies' war effort. Bengal was inconsequential.
By this move, he made it impossible for Australian wheat to be carried to India and triggered the famine in Bengal.
Could Churchill have stopped the Americans or the Australians or any other country transporting food to Bengal? No. He had no such power. He made a decision on the basis of what he thought was best for his country & the Allied War Effort.
On the other hand, it is true that Churchill did not travel to India to prevent a nasty dog from chasing my mother's cat up a tree. This proves Churchill hated Indian cats and secretly killed lots of them.
In ther book 'Churchill's secret war' she writes
In truth, perhaps at no other period during the war than in the summer and fall of 1943 did the number of ships at hand so greatly exceed those already committed to Allied operations.
Quite true. The Allies had supremacy in the Indian littoral by the end of 1943. The Japanese were having to pivot to the Pacific
The war against U-boats was won and American production of ships was increasing steeply; the net gain for the Allies had been 1.5 million tons of shipping in May alone. That month the president had transferred to British control fifteen to twenty cargo vessels for the duration of the war. By the summer of 1943, the British shipping crisis had given way to what historian Kevin Smith calls a ”shipping glut” and the S branch would refer to as ”[w]indfall shipping.” Lord Arthur Salter, who had headed the British shipping mission to Washington, returned to London to find that instead of worrying about the scarcity of ships, his colleagues were now concerned about the impact on postwar trade of too many ships in American hands. So many vessels would present at North American ports that autumn to be loaded with supplies to add to the United Kingdom’s stockpile that not enough cargo could be found to fill them.
In other words, a shipping glut could not magically create surpluses to fill the holds of those ships.
If ever during the war a window had opened for saving lives in Bengal—at no discernible cost to the war effort—this was it.
But releasing food stocks in Bengal would have crashed the price of food leaving the cronies of the ruling party (the Muslim League had taken power in April) out of pocket. Moreover, there was still a Japanese threat. The battle of Imphal began in March 1944. It was by no means a foregone conclusion that Bose & his Indian National Army would be useless. Why bring in food which might enable the Japs to escape starvation?
The prime minister had other uses for the surplus ships, however. He had observed in mid-July that the ”immense saving” in shipping had been ”partly allowed for in our calculations and plans, but if maintained should require a further drastic re-examination of these in a favourable sense.” He urged that some of the extra ships be used to restore white bread to the United Kingdom.
Churchill was a British MP. He wanted his people to have better food. What's wrong with that?
With the remainder, the War Cabinet would continue to bolster the United Kingdom’s stockpile— and it would create a second one in the Mediterranean region, in preparation for a British liberation of the Balkans.
Again, this was a perfectly reasonable war aim. Feed your future allies & they will fight side by side with you so as to completely defeat and occupy Germany.
As First Lord of the Admiralty during World War I, Churchill had pushed through a seaborne attack on the Ottoman Empire.
The invasion of Italy in September 1943 was a 'soft underbelly' strategy. Churchill had met the Turkinst President in January, but an alliance was not feasible. Greeks and Serbs would have scarcely welcomed Turkish troops. The Bulgarians were already with the Axis.
The Gallipoli (or Dardanelles) campaign had ended in dismal failure, with more than 40,000 Allied troops killed, and Churchill’s superiors had forced his resignation. He had retained an interest in the region—and an apparent desire to prove, by means of a successful reprise, that his strategic concept had been sound. Churchill hoped that military successes in the vicinity of Turkey would induce that nation, which remained neutral, to join the war on the Allied side and provide an unconventional route for attacking Germany and supplying the Soviet Union.
Churchill, quite naturally, wanted to end the agony of Greece. It was only in October 1944 that the Allies were able to land there.
Historian A.J.P. Taylor would describe Churchill’s strategy as a ”strange fantasy.” The venture was doomed for several reasons, including mountainous terrain in the Balkans that was easy for the enemy to defend, the Turkish determination to stay out of the war, and American hostility to the plan—which would lead the president and his generals to withhold vital military equipment.[387]
As a prelude to what he envisioned as a full-scale campaign in the region, on August 3, 1943, Churchill had instructed his military chiefs to prepare for an occupation of islands in the Aegean Sea (which lies between Greece and Turkey).
This was the Dodecanese campaign (8 September – 22 November 1943), the last German victory of the War. They defeated the Italian and British garrison. The episode showed the crucial importance of air-support- which is also what enabled the Allies to get the Japs out of Burma (by air-dropping food to their men who then went around the Japs, leaving them to starve)
Australian wheat and the surplus ships would meanwhile be used to build up a substantial stockpile for feeding the civilian population of southeastern Europe—just in case these inadequately supported but prospectively heroic efforts in the eastern Mediterranean led to freedom for Greece, Yugoslavia, and other Balkan countries.
In other words, Churchill hoped to use food to get valourous soldiers with a burning desire for vengeance. Meanwhile Bose, the great Bengali leader, had recruited Indians for the Waffen SS and then gone over to the Japanese.
Premier Fazl ul Haq had demanded food for Bengal in August 1942 & then, in March, asked that controls on transport of food be suspended so Bengal could get grain from Punjab. The problem was that he was close to the Bose brothers and the Muslim League (whose support was vital for the war effort) wanted to bring him down. Thus, his successor, Nazimuddin, insisted that Bengal had enough resources (i.e. his supporters could continue to get rich by diverting food from the public distribution system to the black market).
Of course, to speak of corruption would be damaging to war-time morale (why should White soldiers die so that darkies can line their pockets) and so various officials gave themselves an alibi, one way or another.
”India’s need is absolutely urgent and immediate,” Amery would remonstrate in late October. ”Relief for the Balkans, badly needed as it is, cannot be delivered in any quantities for many months to come for the simple reason that the enemy still control the situation. As for depleting our stocks here to danger point, that is a pretty remote consideration, especially now that we have got so effective a whiphand over the U-boats.'
This may have been true, but it was beside the point. If the Premier of Bengal- who is an actual Bengali- says there is enough food then who is the Secretary of State to claim otherwise? Either provincial autonomy is a sham or the Secretary of State should take the Premier's word for it.
I suppose, all the Brits involved, gave themselves an alibi one way or another.
In March, Governor Herbert had requested permission to use special wartime ordinances to dismiss Bengal’s cabinet,
i.e. get rid of Fazl ul Haq. But the League would only be happy if it formed the Ministry.
which he felt would enable him to deal directly with the food problem. Linlithgow replied that these coercive laws were for containing political subversion, not for solving problems of food supply, which might ”disappear entirely”—after the war was over.
Linlithgow wasn't a fool. He knew lots of people were making vast sums of money on the black market.
Linlithgow did lift provincial barriers so that Bengal could purchase rice in Bihar and Orissa.
But not Punjab.
This time the food minister, Huseyn Suhrawardy, appointed the Ispahani Company the principal buyer of grain, giving it an advance of 30 million rupees and instructions to buy at any price. (An exhausted Leonard George Pinnell had departed for a district posting.) Prices in Bihar and Orissa immediately rose, and starvation deaths were reported there, so the administrators of those provinces defied the Government of India’s orders, arrested the purchasing agents, and held up grain shipments to Bengal. They suspected fraud—and, indeed, a subcontractor of the Ispahanis was later proved to have cheated the government out of millions of rupees.
This is the real story of the 1943 and 1974 famines in Bengal. Churchill caused them by failing to collectivize Indian agriculture and establish a pure Communist state. By failing to ban dicks, he also caused RAPE. Fuck you, Churchill! Fuck you very much!
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