Gandhi & Churchill (99 page)

Winston Churchill and Viscount Halifax, 1940. As foreign secretary, former Viceroy of India Halifax used his experience of dealing with Gandhi to justify his course of appeasing Hitler and opposing Churchill. (Getty Images)

Churchill visits the bombed ruins of Coventry Cathedral, 1940. Churchill’s skill in rallying the British people against Nazi tyranny deeply impressed Gandhi. (Broadwater/Churchill Archives)

Gandhi hoped to stir the hearts of his own countrymen when he announced his Quit India movement at the Bombay Congress in August 1942 (Gandhi, shown here with his longtime secretary, Mahadev Desai). (V. Jhaveri/Peter Rühe)

Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt at Sunday services on the HMS
Prince of Wales
, August 1941. Disagreement over India and Gandhi became the major source of tension in their otherwise close wartime alliance. After one exchange, Churchill even threatened to quit as prime minister. (Imperial War Museum)

Just four months later, Japanese planes would sink the
Prince of Wales
off Singapore, as Britain’s empire in Asia tottered and Japanese troops drove to the borders of India. (Imperial War Museum)

Insurgent India: Quit India riot in Bombay, October 1942. The woman in the man’s arms has just been overcome by tear gas. (Kanu Gandhi/Peter Rühe)

Loyalist India in World War II: Sikh soldiers in Cairo present a gift to Winston Churchill on his 69th birthday, November 1943. (Imperial War Museum)

Churchill with jubilant crowd on V-E Day, May 8, 1945. He assumed victory in World War II would save British rule in India. The British voters had other ideas. (Imperial War Museum)

General Archibald Wavell, viceroy of India 1943–1946. As he tried to find a solution to India’s political stalemate during the war and after, he found Gandhi and Churchill equally frustrating to deal with. (Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Aftermath of massacres in Calcutta, 1946. British withdrawal and the partition into Moslem Pakistan and Hindu India triggered violence on a scale not seen since the Mutiny of 1857—much as Churchill had predicted. (photo by Margaret Bourke White; Hulton/Getty Archives)

Gandhi arriving with his grandniece Manubehn (with glasses, left) at Delhi train station, March 1947. The Mahatma traveled across India to try to stop the violence, without success. Yet a year earlier he had told Viceroy Wavell: “If India is to have her bloodbath, let her have it.” Ironically, the last victim would be Gandhi himself. (V. Jhaveri/P. Rühe)

Gandhi’s funeral, January 31, 1948. (V. Jhaveri/Peter Rühe)