Churchill's Secret War (37 page)

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s the longest year that Bengalis could remember gave way to 1944, the winter fields were golden with grain—but the villages looked deserted. When the sun rose each morning, survivors emerged from their huts to crouch on their doorsteps with vacant expressions; by afternoon many of them had gotten malarial shivers, wrapped rags around their shoulders, and gone in to lie down. The malaria virus thrives on the enfeebled frames of famine sufferers, and an epidemic began, accompanied by outbreaks of smallpox and cholera. The people had barely the strength, let alone the will, to harvest the crop. A few hunted obsessively for loved ones from whom they had become separated during their wanderings in search of food. One resident of Kalikakundu, Bhuvan Samonto, made it through the famine but lost his mind.

“The villager is undoubtedly in an extremely nervous state, probably amounting almost to panic,” Lord Wavell observed. Despite a bumper crop, prices remained high—and any attempt by the government to requisition the harvest would cause it to go underground, raise prices further, and give speculators an opening. In a bid to restore confidence, the viceroy had undertaken to feed Calcutta using resources outside of Bengal, an effort that would require 650,000 tons of rice and wheat per year. On top of that, the colony was about to have to shelter and provision 20 divisions and 184 squadrons for a major attack on Burma. The expanded army, along with laborers employed on building roads and aerodromes, would require 1.1 million tons of grain. “I think Cabinet must trust man on the spot,” Wavell informed Amery. “You can
warn them from me that it is my considered judgment that unless we can be assured now of receiving one million (repeat one million) tons of food grains during 1944 we are heading for disaster both as regards famine and inflation.”
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Lord Cherwell challenged Wavell’s warning. “I do not think the figures presented stand up to examination or that the case has been made out for taking anything away from the U.K. import programme,” he responded. If India were to receive wheat imports, it must then certainly export 120,000 tons of rice to Ceylon, he insisted. The new minister of food, Colonel Llewellin, backed him up, arguing that world stocks of wheat would likely fall to a “dangerously low level” in 1945. More immediately, Australian wheat would be needed to feed Italy and the Balkans. Should those supplies instead be used for India, the Mediterranean region would require grain from Argentina, “with a resulting increase in the strain on shipping and foreign exchange.”
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On February 7, 1944, the prime minister refused to sanction further shipments to India, on the grounds that imports into Britain “could be further reduced only at the cost of much suffering.” Instead he created a committee, comprising Cherwell, Leathers, Llewellin, and Richard A. Butler (in place of Amery, who was sick), to study the Indian food problem. Wavell was not happy: “I warn His Majesty’s Government with all seriousness that if they refuse our demands they are risking a catastrophe of far greater dimensions than Bengal famine.” In response, the India foodgrains committee sanctioned 50,000 tons of barley from Iraq.
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“I regard this as a matter of life or death for hundreds of thousands of Indians,” Wavell responded. The War Cabinet should either ask the Americans for shipping or “allow India to appeal to U.N.R.R.A.” He spoke to Auchinlek, the commander-in-chief in India, and to Lord Louis Mountbatten, the supreme commander of the South East Asia Command—who warned the Chiefs of Staff of “a worse famine than last year” with obvious impacts on operations. They, too, urged an approach to the Americans, while Amery, who was suffering from a kidney stone, offered to fly to Washington and ask the president for shipping, if that was the only place where it might be found. The India foodgrains
committee reiterated that the British Empire stood outside the sphere of UNRRA activities, but the 50,000 tons of barley were changed to wheat.
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THE ARMY DISTRIBUTED quinine to civilians in Bengal to combat the threat of malaria, but it was a drop in the ocean. Exposure to the elements exacerbated the suffering from malarial fevers. The poorest villagers never could afford wool for the cold weather, and during the past year the single cotton garment that a man or woman wore, day in and day out, had fallen to pieces. “It is difficult to say whether there is more hunger or more nakedness in these parts,” one traveler had written. “Obviously, both these monsters were competing with each other, with the result that the corpses in the streets were often utterly naked. I saw a mother savagely resisting her child trying to protect its naked body from the chill wind with a part of the rag she was wearing.” Women could not go about nude, he added, “but the torn and dirty rags with which they tried to hide their sex made them look many times more horrible than even utter nakedness.”
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“My mother and sister stayed inside or close to the house—only we two brothers would go places,” Chitto Samonto confirmed. Ashamed of appearing unclothed before a father, brother, father-in-law, or son, many a village woman took to staying inside a room all day long, emerging only when it was her turn to wear the single fragment of cloth shared with female relatives. Some had to wait for nightfall to bathe or wash dishes, so that villages came alive after dark with shadows that looked more like ghostly skeletons than like women. A woman named Janoki Bera of Kalikakundu lost her husband to the famine but retained a small piece of land. A pair of local brothers, who were subsequently entrusted with distributing garments as a form of relief, got the field from her in exchange of a single sari and later sold off the plot.

During the war years, India produced 600,000 miles of cotton fabric—enough to girdle the earth twenty-four times. Out of this material its workshops manufactured 415 million items of military uniform and 2 million parachutes used to drop supplies. Very little cloth was
being released for civilian use, and most of that in turn was ending up in the hands of speculators. The armed forces also consumed India’s entire wartime production of silk (used for man-dropping parachutes), wool (used for 17 million uniforms and more than 5 million blankets), and leather (out of which was made 372,000 leather jackets, 16 million pairs of boots, and 5 million pairs of shoes). Whereas in the United Kingdom civilian needs generally had priority over military ones, in India civilians came last.
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In November 1943, Lord Mountbatten, the supreme commander of SEAC, asked Viceroy Wavell if the production of cotton parachutes could be doubled to 200,000 per month—“a mere trifle for India,” he said, “as it only meant giving up 2% of total cloth.” Wavell pointed out that 2 percent of India’s population came to 8 million, “which was quite a large number to go short of clothes.” Nevertheless, India did produce 200,000 parachutes per month by August 1944. By enabling vital supplies to be dropped into the jungles of the eastern Himalayas, these parachutes would make all the difference in the last battle for the British Raj.
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IN DECEMBER 1943, the empire’s forces under Field Marshal William Slim began to hack their way through virtually impassable jungles into southern Burma. After a year of rest and training the Indian Army was in good form. Slim had built up the morale of his troops by ensuring that they were well nourished, well protected—including by daily doses of quinine—and adequately bolstered in their fighting spirit by reports of Axis atrocities. Propaganda pamphlets depicted the Indian National Army of Subhas Chandra Bose as dupes of the Japanese, or Jifs (Japanese-inspired fascists). Engineers, explosives, and teams of laborers transformed precarious mountain passes into paved roads capable of carrying tanks, so that Slim’s 14th Army broke through to a valley in the Arakan peninsula.
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In February 1944 the Japanese commander in Burma began a counterattack in the Arakan—to draw attention away from the main thrust, which was to come in via Imphal valley in India, north of the
Arakan. After Axis forces broke through to India, the forces of Subhas Bose were supposed to enter their homeland, fight guerrilla battles, and inspire a national uprising. By that time the Indian National Army boasted roughly 20,000 former soldiers and an equal number of civilian recruits, including 500 women of the Rani of Jhansi regiment. But their Japanese allies had issued them no real weapons, which required the INA to make do with rifles and ammunition that had been surrendered by the British two years earlier. The Japanese had, however, committed to hand over all the Indian territories they would conquer to a free government of India that Bose had set up. To that end, Bose had drawn up detailed administrative plans and printed currency and stamps. The INA’s bard had composed a marching song in Urdu, which began:
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“It is nearing zero hour,” Clive Branson wrote to his wife on December 4, 1943, from Chittagong. He was finally leaving for the front. “Always remember that one is given by fate only one lifetime in which to work and live for humanity. There is no greater crime in my opinion than to renounce the world, no matter for what excuse. If anything should happen to either of us, never say, ‘It is finished.’ . . . What we miss we can only find in knowing humanity more deeply and not in the ever narrowing circumference of private memories. . . . And above all, whatever happens, let us never for one instant, on the slightest excuse, forget we are human beings and belong to the brotherhood of man.”

Ten days later, Branson was in the jungle. The little mountain villages near the camp were deserted, so he got to peek into the huts with their airy walls of woven palm and their carved beams. “Life here glides by like a falling leaf, so that very often I don’t know either day or date—but I always listen to the news,” he wrote. The radio announced the end of the Bengal famine but said nothing about the malaria, he commented,
or about the shortage of able-bodied men that made it hard to reap the crop.
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Once the soldiers went on an outing, and some of them shot a cow for the beef and took it away from a poor farmer without paying him anything. “It made me very angry,” Branson related. At a distance from the camp lay a rice field, which cultivators were permitted to harvest during certain hours of the day. They had to gather a large bundle, deposit it more than a mile away, and jog back for the next load, which wore them out to the point of collapse. If they had not left the field by the military-imposed curfew, they would be shot. “I need not comment on the whole business,” Branson wrote, “but it is the living result of poverty, plus peasant ownership, plus imperial army.”

At other times, Branson the painter would bathe in a stream or lie in the winter sun on its sandy bank, gazing at the creatures with whom he shared the earth. “I have just seen a little fish coloured black and yellow, like a wasp—there are also other fish with horizontal lines for camouflage. Also a number of fish constructed very like a lizard—a very long body which is curled up when they rest on the sand or on a rock. . . . I have come across a common creeper with purple flowers the leaves of which are in pairs. The colour when old is gold-yellow—when fresh a green which goes golden when the sunlight shines through them. This creeper is the hunting ground of a yellow-gold butterfly whose wing shape is exactly the same as that of the leaves.” Some of the men came across five graves of British soldiers, marked only by a beer bottle.
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On January 26, Branson wrote from a position closer to the front: “We are now only a few hundred yards away from glory.” As he maintained the day’s routine, making his bed, chatting, or sleeping, mortars were screaming overhead. “Here we have such complete mastery in armaments of all kinds!” The problem was that the Japanese had dug trenches deep into the sandy hills. “The bombers are just coming over—we climbed up on our tanks to have a grandstand view of 12 Liberators and dozens of Vengeance divebombers exterminating the Jap positions.” One of the men caught a green snake with a salmon-colored patch behind its head, and Branson spotted “what may be the smallest moth
I’ve ever seen, white, with blue-black markings on wings and light brown head.”
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Field Marshal Slim described how after the bombers had flattened the Japanese positions, “artillery took up the task and pumped shells from their accumulated dumps into the smoking, burning, spouting hillsides. Then the guns suddenly paused and the Lee-Grant tanks roared forward, the infantry, bayonets fixed, yelling their Indian war cries, following on their tails.” Branson was a tank commander, and his platoon was soon to go on a dangerous assignment. He enclosed a sonnet, the last lines of which went:
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At some point Branson became ill and was flown to Chittagong to recover. There he met some Bengali communists with whom he had become friends during his previous stay in the city and gave them two street plays that he had written, asking that they be translated into Bengali and performed. Shortly afterward he returned to the front. On February 25, 1944, Troop Sergeant Clive Branson was killed in action at Ngakyedauk Pass in the Arakan.
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IN MARCH 1944 the Japanese began their main offensive, sending forces through the jungle to surround the 7th Indian Division at Imphal valley. The bulk of Allied weaponry traveled to the front on the road that ran through Imphal; after it was taken, the Indian National Army was to trek down the highway in the other direction, into the heart of India. Bose had persuaded the Japanese commanders to accept three INA battalions for the attack. Colonel Shah Nawaz Khan led one battalion on an arduous hike through dense jungles and up to a height of six
thousand feet. The men lacked woolens, medicines, field radios, mortars, machine guns, and other essentials of warfare, and by the time they reached their destination, many were barefoot and a quarter suffered from malaria.