Gandhi & Churchill (91 page)

Wavell also realized that a political solution for India could not wait until after the war. He was going to have to find a way around the current impasse. In July the Congress stubbornly refused to abandon its stance on Quit India. Without Gandhi’s sanction, they could not move, but unable to move, they could not help to find a solution. Linlithgow had shown Wavell Gandhi’s final bitter letter to him
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and told Wavell there would be no real progress in India as long as Gandhi lived.
³⁵

So Wavell in his soldierlike way decided to take the dilemma by the horns. He asked London to give him the power to summon an all-party coalition government made up of any leaders who were willing to support the war effort and to work under the existing 1935 constitution. His hope was that Congress leaders and Liberals alike, in addition to Jinnah’s Muslim League, would succumb to the temptation of real power and real cooperation. Perhaps even Gandhi himself would relent when faced with a concrete offer.

Wavell had put precisely this proposal before the cabinet’s India Committee on October 7, even before he left for India. Amery supported it, but Churchill exploded. He launched into an extended tirade “against Congress and all its works,” Wavell noted, while Anthony Eden spoke “as if I was proposing to enthrone Gandhi.” Most of the other cabinet members also balked, including its Labour members, who were likewise frightened by the “Gandhi bogey.” (Attlee was an exception.) The whole meeting was “worse than I expected,” Wavell wrote afterward, “not because of opposition, but because of spinelessness, lack of interest, opportunism.”

Wavell’s disgust was complete the next day, when Churchill canceled the India Committee meeting and summoned Wavell to his office alone. Winston was “menacing and unpleasant” and indicated that “only over his dead body would any approach to Gandhi take place.” His instructions to Wavell were succinct. Concentrate on winning the war, make peace between the Hindus and Muslims, and utter some vague hints about political progress after the war but offer nothing concrete.
³⁶

It was General Smuts who explained Churchill’s position best to Wavell: “The [prime minister] is not thinking beyond the end of the war—[not] about India or anything else.” Churchill still hoped that after the final victory the situation might be turned around—and that all the delays and Fabian retreats over India would ultimately prove worthwhile.

But Wavell saw things more clearly. The war had changed India, for better or worse. The problems it would face, and the solutions needed to address them, had moved beyond the two men who still insisted on clutching its destiny to their hearts: Gandhi and Churchill.

Chapter Twenty-eight

TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY

1943–1945

A warrior lives on his wars…And he suffers a collapse if he finds that his warring capacity is no longer wanted.

MOHANDAS K. GANDHI

O
N
A
PRIL
21, 1943,
THE
G
ERMAN
submarine
U-180
broke surface in stormy waters off the tip of Africa. The first officer’s charts told him they were four hundred miles south-southwest of Madagascar, exactly as planned. German sailors in foul-weather gear kept watch on the conning tower, straining to see through their binoculars while squall after squall swept across the
U-180
’s streaming deck.

Then one of the sailors cried out and pointed. There out of the dawn mist another submarine was emerging from the depths: the Japanese
I-29
. Their prearranged rendezvous had to wait another forty-eight hours, until the storms subsided, to take place. As the weather finally cleared, both German and Japanese lookouts anxiously watched the skies for any stray passing Allied aircraft.

On the twenty-third, despite the heavy swell, the
I-29
was able to launch a small motor-powered dinghy toward the German U-boat. The
U-180
’s hatch opened, and a stout young man in glasses and civilian clothes climbed out. The Japanese sailors unloaded their cargo—fifty bars of gold, each weighing forty kilograms—which the German crew stowed below while the civilian and Captain Werner Müsenberg watched. After receiving a farewell salute from Captain Müsenberg, the man descended into the dinghy. He and the two escorting Japanese sailors rode the rough waves back to the
I-29,
becoming soaked to the skin. Within minutes the two submarines disappeared from sight, their mission accomplished.
¹

Ten days later the Japanese submarine reached Sabang, on the coast of Sumatra. There Japanese sailors brought their guest to shore. Waiting for them was Colonel Satoshi Yamamoto of Japan’s Hikari Kikan, the special intelligence agency set up to recruit Indians and other South Asians in Malaya and Singapore for the war effort against the Allies.

Colonel Yamamoto smiled at his latest and most distinguished recruit and bowed deeply as he muttered words of greeting. Subhas Chandra Bose smiled back. He was back in Asia and ready to get to work.

Bose had left Germany bitterly disappointed. The Germans had offered money and weapons for his Azad Hind or Free India Legion, created in September 1942. But when it failed to draw more than two thousand volunteers, the Germans lost interest.
²
It played no significant role in the war. Bose tried to revive German interest in his cause at a personal meeting with Hitler in March 1942, but he soon realized that the Nazis did not take even a peripheral interest in Indian independence, especially as the tide of war was turning against them.
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He left Europe “with his trust in Germany’s victory substantially shaken.”
³
Now Bose was staking his career on the Japanese.

“Japan has done great things for herself and for Asia,” he had proclaimed back in 1937. “Japan has shattered the White Man’s prestige in the Far East.”
⁴
Now he saw Japan’s war with Britain and America as opening the door to India’s independence—or at least
his
kind of independence, with himself and his followers at the helm. As for the Japanese, they hoped Bose would be able to unite the various anti-British Indian factions headquartered in Tokyo and breathe new life into its moribund puppet, the Indian National Army, which was suffering from a lack of volunteers and morale.

Bose made his formal entry into Singapore on July 2, 1943, with General Hideki Tojo himself at his side. Indians across East Asia were electrified. For the first time some three million overseas Indians heard someone speaking directly to them, an energetic, charismatic figure in a buff uniform who promised a brighter future for India once the British were finally gone. “It was really the first speech…I had heard in my life,” one young Indian confessed after hearing Bose address a rally in Singapore that also drew Chinese and Malay listeners. The speech was “like magnetic power.” When Bose proclaimed, “When I say war I mean WAR—War to the finish—a war that can only end in the freedom of India,” millions of Indians believed him.
⁵

In the end Bose’s INA would draw forty thousand volunteers—a small number compared to the 2.5 million Indians who served in the British Indian Army. Historians of the Second World War, even some historians of the war in Burma, tend to treat Bose and his Free India movement as a minor distraction, even a farce, but its impact on India was incalculable. From mid-1943 onward Bose provided a new model for militant action among young Indians, especially his fellow Bengalis. To them, Gandhi was a revered but also a remote figure, just as ahimsa seemed an outdated formula from the past.

Although Bose was no soldier, he insisted, like Adolf Hitler, on appearing everywhere in uniform. He was India’s first genuine war leader for Indians on
both
sides of the battle line. As one of his INA officers said, “He was like a god to us.” In many ways, he was a dark amalgam of both Gandhi and Churchill, a figure out of their deepest nightmares yet drawing from the same moral resources.

Like Gandhi, Bose spoke the language of Indian manhood and heroic self-sacrifice. His speeches often quoted Gandhi. He stressed to his soldiers and followers that his vision of Azad Hind marked the final stage of the struggle for Indian independence that Gandhi had launched. Gandhi was waging the struggle from inside India, Bose liked to say, but he was conducting it from outside.
⁶

Like Churchill, Bose was committed to waging war to the hilt to win that struggle. “I want total mobilization and nothing less,” he proclaimed. “Total mobilization for total war!”
⁷
Everything else, “however noble, is of secondary value.” His determination and eloquence paralleled the British prime minister’s: even his most famous maxim, “Give me blood and I will give you independence,” contains more than an echo of “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”
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And his ultimate message was also directed at the man in Number 10. “Churchill will soon realize,” he said in a radio broadcast from Germany even as the Cripps mission was falling apart, “that it is no longer possible to keep Indians on their side by a piece of bread they are going to throw to the Indian people.” Indian independence required nothing less than the complete destruction of the empire. “From the ashes of Britain,” Bose proclaimed, “will emerge a unified India.”
⁸

Bose’s appeals to join his side fell largely on deaf ears. Few Indians were convinced that they would be truly better off with a Japanese rather than a British victory. As many disillusioned INA volunteers discovered, Japan’s empire was far more virulently racist than England’s.
⁹
Yet Bose’s offer to send food shipments to an India in the grip of famine, which the British ignored, won popular respect. Even soldiers in the British Indian Army came to admire Bose as a role model for the future, if not necessarily for the present.

Indians would fight the Japanese, even Bose’s INA, with unparalleled courage: they would win twenty of the twenty-seven Victoria Crosses awarded in the Burma campaign.
¹⁰
But they fought with their eyes fixed firmly not on their king-emperor, as Churchill liked to imagine, but on independence. The arrival of Bose could not change the course of the war, but like the Bengal famine, it signaled the severing of India’s last ties of loyalty to Britain. It also signaled the doom of Gandhi’s and Churchill’s plans for India’s future.

In the autumn of 1943 a final Allied victory both in Europe and in the Pacific beckoned, but Churchill was deeply unhappy. Even as his side was winning the war, his hope of preserving or even expanding the British Empire in its wake was vanishing. His own voice mattered less and less in places where he wanted it to count.

In September American and commonwealth troops landed in Italy. The invasion of Italy had been Churchill’s idea. The Americans had at first strenuously opposed it but then relented. Churchill argued that Italy was the “soft underbelly” of the Axis and that toppling Mussolini would turn Hitler’s flank. But this was only one part of Churchill’s grand strategic vision. Knocking Italy out of the war, he hoped, might bring neutral Turkey into it. The Dardanelles would open to convoys of supplies to Russia, and the British Mediterranean fleet would be free to pass through Suez and into the Bay of Bengal in time to launch the liberation of Burma.
¹¹

It was the old Gallipoli plan again, but this time in reverse. If Istanbul declared war on the Axis, the Allies would be able to drive a wedge northward, slicing Hitler’s empire in half and cutting off his armies in Russia. Churchill’s “Mediterranean strategy” also had another purpose: by opening a new war front in Turkey and the eastern Mediterranean, he would make sure the Middle East remained part of the British Empire. It would also interpose British and American forces between the Russians and Eastern Europe.

Above all, it would finally secure the great arc of British influence across the Eastern Hemisphere, from Cape Town to East Africa and Suez, from Iran and Iraq to Burma, Singapore, and Hong Kong, of which India was the mighty keystone. Preserving that arc of empire, and British India, remained a vital part of Churchill’s world strategy. Victory in the Mediterranean was the means to secure it.

At Tehran in December 1943, however, Roosevelt and Stalin refused to go along. Here Churchill discovered that Roosevelt no longer considered the Anglo-American alliance to be vital to victory and the postwar era, as Churchill did. To his mind, Roosevelt was trimming the Big Three down to the Big Two, himself and Stalin. Throughout the meeting “Roosevelt tended to side with Stalin at Churchill’s expense”—including on India.
^*122
12
Churchill wanted to pressure Turkey into declaring war within six weeks, but Roosevelt ignored him. Instead, the Americans and Russians pushed a May or June 1944 date for an Allied landing in northern France, code-named Operation Overlord, as well as a second one in southern France.

Churchill had serious doubts about the former and was passionately opposed to the latter. He saw the invasion of France as potentially a repetition of the fruitless battles on the Western Front in the First World War. He believed (wrongly) that the Allies would get bogged down and never break out. He also believed (rightly) that the operation would leave no resources for his Turkey plan or for a major British-led offensive in Asia. He bargained hard with Roosevelt to leave him sixty-eight troop transports to execute his grand Mediterranean strategy, and not divert them for Overlord, but lost.