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Churchill’s Indian Army and the Reconquest of Burma

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Churchill on the Far East in The Second World War

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Abstract

If the series of crises in India revealed the discernible tension in wartime Anglo-American relations, the invasion and battle for Burma almost fractured the ‘special relationship’. When it came to his memoirs, Churchill’s contemporary concerns ensured that the mass of raw wartime nerves that Burma had exposed were not played-out again. What further compounded the difficulty he faced when he reached this episode in his narrative, was that the reconquest of Burma had been won by the Indian Army — an army that Churchill had thought to be inept, disloyal and nothing more than an armed ‘Frankenstein’s monster’.1 Little wonder then that as work on the memoirs progressed, Churchill wrote a note to the syndicate stating that he would not ‘spare more than 3,000 words … on the struggles in Burma’.2 This chapter examines Churchill’s portrayal of the Indian Army and gives a fuller explanation (beyond the overly facile reasoning of his inherent racism) as to why he virtually ignored the largest volunteer force ever to exist.3

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Notes

  1. Philip Mason, A Matter of Honour: An Account of the Indian Army, Its Officers and Men (London: Jonathan Cape, 1974; Papermac Macmillan edition, 1986), p. 522; Penderel Moon (ed.), Wavell: The Viceroy’s Journal (Karachi: OUP, 1974), p. 3.

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  2. Winston S. Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War (London: Longman, 1898); My Early Life (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1930); and The World Crisis: Volumes I–V (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1923–31).

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  3. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: Volume 1, The Gathering Storm (London: Cassell, 1948), p. 5. For a detailed analysis see Gordon Corrigan, Sepoys in the Trenches: The Indian Corps on the Western Front, 1914–1915 (Stroud: Spellmount, 2006); Mark Harrison, ‘The Fight Against Disease in the Mesopotamian Campaign’, in Hugh Cecil and Peter H. Liddle (eds), Facing Armageddon: The First World War Experienced (London: Leo Cooper, 1996), pp. 475–89;Lord Hardinge of Penshurst, My Indian Years, 1910–1916: The Reminiscences of Lord Hardinge of Penshurst (London: John Murray, 1948), pp. 98–136;and David E. Omissi, ‘The Indian Army in the First World War, 1914–1918’, in Daniel Marston and Chandar S. Sundaram (eds), A Military History of India and South Asia: From the East India Company to the Nuclear Era (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), pp. 74–87.

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  4. See Stephen P. Cohen, The Indian Army: Its Contribution to the Development of a Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), especially pp. 68–76; Mason, A Matter of Honour, pp. 412–43;Hugh Tinker, ‘India in the First World War and after’, Journal of Contemporary History, 3/4 (October 1968), pp. 89–107;and Charles C. Trench, The Indian Army and the King’s Enemies, 1900–1947 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), pp. 75–90.

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  5. Churchill, The World Crisis: I–V (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1923–31).

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  6. Churchill wrote that Indian troops ‘lost caste’ once they crossed the high seas: Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: Volume IV, The Great Democracies (London: Cassell, 1958), p. 67. The research for these volumes and the bulk of the writing was carried out by a team of researchers in the 1930s, primarily Bill Deakin and George Young. The outbreak of war and Churchill becoming Prime Minister in 1940 meant the work was shelved until a more suitable time allowed for its completion. The implication is that Churchill had the knowledge about the Indian troops but, when it came to his Second World War, he glossed over it.

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  7. See Peter Clarke, Mr Churchill’s Profession: The Statesman as Author and the Book that Defined the ‘Special Relationship’ (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 144.

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  8. The first volume of Churchill’s Second World War memoir, The Second World War: Volume 1, The Gathering Storm (London: Cassell, 1948), sold over 200,000 copies. See Clarke, Mr Churchill’s Profession, p. 280.

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  9. Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain (Oxford: OUP, 2004): in which Porter advocates that the general British public neither thought about, nor cared for, the British Empire unless, or until, it directly affected them.

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  10. Keith Jeffery, ‘“An English Barrack in the Oriental Seas”? India in the Aftermath of the First World War’, Modern Asian Studies, 15/3 (1981), p. 369. One of the earlier examples of Churchill’s knowledge of India’s importance as atraining ground concerned the practice of sending 10 per cent of British munitions production to India where they were used to train regiments of field artillery. Once the regiments were trained they were then immediately shipped out, along with the guns they had been trained on, to the Middle East. The units and artillery were, as Colonel Jacobs explained to Churchill, ‘thus indirect reinforcements for the Middle East, and pay a good dividend in trained units’. See PREM 3/232/1/31: Col. Jacobs 14 February 1941.

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  11. Randolph S. Churchill (ed.), Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume I: Part 2, 1896–1900 (London: Heinemann, 1967), Churchill to Lady Jennie Churchill, 18 November 1896, p. 703. It should be noted that Churchill was not alone in his refusal to learn Hindi, nor was this situation unusual, especially as his unit contained no Indian ranks. Furthermore, he was stationed in Bangalore where the local language would have been either Kannada or Tamil. Finally, the lingua franca of the colonial Indian Army was Urdu and not Hindi. (I am very grateful to Dr Chandar Sundaram for his corrections and guidance on this matter.)

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  12. Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1930), p. 164.

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  13. See Ian F. W. Beckett, ‘The Singapore Mutiny of February, 1915’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 62/3 (1984), pp. 132–53; and ‘The Mutiny at Singapore’, The Times, 14 April 1915.

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  14. Chandar S. Sundaram quotes the figure of 800,000, yet some estimates put the figure higher: see Chandar S. Sundaram, ‘Grudging Concessions: The Officer Corps and Its Indianization, 1817–1940’, in Marston and Sundaram (eds), A Military History of India and South Asia, p. 94. Also see Budheswar Pati, India and the First World War (New Delhi: Atlantic, 1996), especially pp. 30–64.

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  15. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: Volume II, Their Finest Hour (London: Cassell, 1949), Churchill to Field-Marshal John Dill, 21 September 1940, p. 595.

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  16. Andrew Sharpe, ‘The Indianisation of the Indian Army’, History Today, 36/3 (1986), pp. 47–52; and Sundaram, ‘Grudging Concessions’, pp. 88–101.

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  17. See Ashley Jackson, The British Empire and the Second World War (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2006), pp. 171–268; and David Killingray with Martin Plaut, Fighting for Britain: African Soldiers in the Second World War (Woodbridge: James Currey, 2010).

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  18. Another example of Churchill being disparaging towards so called ‘native’ troops reads: ‘The African Colonial divisions ought not surely to be called divisions at all. No one contemplates them standing in the line against a European army’. See Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: Volume III, The Grand Alliance (London: Cassell, 1950), Churchill to Chief of Staff Committee, 17 February 1941, in Appendix C, p. 653.

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  19. As Secretary of State for India (1885–6), Lord Randolph Churchill had been responsible for the annexation of Upper Burma and Churchill often recalled how his father frequently declared ‘I annexed Burma’. See Winston S. Churchill, Lord Randolph Churchill: Volume II (London: Macmillan, 1906), p. 484. See also Robert F. Foster, Lord Randolph Churchill: A Political Life (Oxford: OUP, 1981), pp. 206–12;and Robert Rhodes James, Lord Randolph Churchill (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1959; Phoenixedition, 1994), pp. 205–06. Churchill, Finest Hour, p. 225.

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  20. A.J.P. Taylor (ed.), Off the Record: W.P. Crozier, Political Interviews, 1933–1943 (London: Hutchinson, 1973), p. 176.

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  21. Brian Bond (ed.), Chief of Staff: The Diaries of Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Pownall, Volume II, 1940–1944 (London: Leo Cooper, 1974), 20 December 1941, p. 66.

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  22. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: Volume IV, The Hinge of Fate (London: Cassell, 1951), p. 135.

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  23. See Chandar S. Sundaram, “Martial’ Indian Aristocrats and the Military System of the Raj: The Imperial Cadet Corps, 1900–1914’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 25/3 (1997).

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  24. David Day, The Great Betrayal: Britain, Australia and the Onset of the Pacific War, 1939–1942 (London: Angus and Robertson, 1988); and ‘Loosening the Bonds: Britain, Australia and the Second World War’, History Today, 38/2 (1988), pp. 11–17.

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  25. See Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire and the War with Japan (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 71–253; and Werner Gruhl, Imperial Japan’s World War Two, 1931–1945 (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 2010), p. 117.

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  26. See Gerard Douds, “Matters of Honour’: Indian Troops in the North African and Italian Theatres’, in Paul Addison and Angus Calder (eds), Time to Kill: The Soldier’s Experience of War in the West, 1939–1945 (London: Pimlico, 1997); Matthew Parker, Monte Cassino: The Story of the Hardest Fought Battle of World War Two (London: Headline, 2004); and Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: Volume V, Closing the Ring (London: Cassell, 1952), pp. 438–55. Pownall drafted the original chapter (which at this point had yet to be checked by the Cabinet Historical Section), and wrote a purely operational’ narrative punctuated by some of Churchill’s original telegrams: CCAC, CHUR 4/328/9: Pownall to Churchill, 1 December 1950.

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  27. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: Volume VI, Triumph and Tragedy (London: Cassell, 1954), pp. 532–59.

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  28. Mary Soames (ed.), Speaking for Themselves: The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill (London: Black Swan, 1999), Churchill to Clementine, 17 August 1944, p. 500.

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  29. See Shelford Bidwell, The Chindit War: Stilwell, Wingate and the Campaign in Burma, 1944 (New York: Macmillan, 1980); Major-General Stephen Woodburn Kirby, The War against Japan: Volume III, The Decisive Battles (London: HMSO, 1961;Uckfield: Naval and Military Press edition, 2004); Peter Mead, ‘Orde Wingate and the Official Historians’, Journal of Contemporary History, 14/1 (1979), pp. 55–82;Peter Mead and Shelford Bidwell, ‘Orde Wingate—Two Views’, Journal of Contemporary History, 15/3 (1979), pp. 401–04; and David Rooney, Wingate and the Chindits: Redressing the Balance (London: Cassell, 1994).

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  30. For the Imphal Battle see: David Rooney, Burma Victory: Imphal, Kohima and the Chindit issue, March 1944 to May 1945 (London: Cassell, 1992); and Frank McLynn, The Burma Campaign (London: Bodley Head, 2010).

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  31. See John Colvin, Not Ordinary Men: The Battle of Kohima re-Assessed (London: Leo Cooper, 1994); Leslie Edwards, Kohima, The Furthest Battle: The Story of the Japanese Invasion of India in 1944 and the ‘British-Indian Thermopylae’ (Stroud: History Press, 2009); Fergal Keane, Road of Bones: The Siege of Kohima 1944, The Epic Story of the Last Great Stand of Empire (London: Harper, 2010); and Michael Lowry, Fighting through to Kohima: A Memoir of War in India and Burma (London: Leo Cooper, 2003).

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  32. S.N. Prasad, K.D. Bhargava and P.N. Khera (eds), The Reconquest of Burma: Volume I (Orient Longmans: Combined Inter-Services Historical Section, India & Pakistan, 1958), p. xxv.

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  33. Warren Kimball (ed.), Churchill and Roosevelt, The Complete Correspondence: Volume II, Alliance Forged (London: Collins, 1984), Roosevelt to Churchill, 24 February 1944, p. 756.

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  34. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941–1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2004), p. xxx.

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  35. The phrase defeat into victory’ has been consistently used when referring to the Burma campaigns of 1941 to 1945, and found its way into common parlance through the title of Slim’s memoirs, Defeat into Victory (London: Cassell, 1956).

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  36. Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman (eds), War Diaries, 1939–1945: Field-Marshal Lord Alanbrooke (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001: Phoenix Press edition, 2002), 2 March 1942, p. 235.

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  37. See Bipan Chandra, India After Independence (New Delhi: Penguin, 2000); Patrick French, Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division (London: Flamingo, 1998); Mushirul Hasan (ed.), India’s Partition: Process, Strategy and Mobilization (New Delhi: OUP, 1993); Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Alex Von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire (London: Pocket Book, 2008); and Stanley Wolpert, Shameful Flight: The Last Years of the British Empire in India (Oxford: OUP, 2006).

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  38. There were, of course, instances of Churchill praising Indian troops. On 24 March 1941, Churchill wrote that ‘His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom gratefully recognise the valiant contribution which Indian troops have made to the Imperial victories in North Africa’. But such instances were few and far between and were more public relation exercises for furthering support, especially in India, rather than genuine offers of praise or thanks: Churchill, The Grand Alliance, Appendix C, Churchill to Maharaja Jam Sahib of Nawanagar, on 24 March 1941, p. 667. Another instance was when Churchill agreed that there ‘must be no discrimination on grounds of race or colour’ in the employment of Indians or other colonial subjects in the Royal Navy. He suggested that ‘each case must be judged on its merits’ and, while he could not see ‘any objection to Indians serving on H.M. Ships where they are qualified and needed, or, if their virtues so deserve, rising to be Admirals of the Fleet’, he did conclude with ‘but not too many of them please.’ Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: Volume 1, The Gathering Storm (London: Cassell, 1948), Appendix II, Churchill to Second Sea Lord and others concerned and Secretary, 14 October 1939, p. 607.

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  39. See Byron Farwell, Armies of the Raj: From the Great Indian Mutiny to Independence, 1885–1947 (London: Viking, 1989), pp. 292–302; Sundaram, ‘Grudging Concessions’, pp. 88–101;Daniel Marston, ‘A Force Transformed: The Indian Army and the Second World War’, in Marston and Sundaram (eds), A Military History of India and South Asia, pp. 102–22; Sharpe, ‘The Indianisation of the Indian Army’; and Tinker, ‘India in the First World War and after’, pp. 89–107.

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  40. See David E. Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860–1940 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994; repr. 1998), pp. 153–91.

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  41. Until mid 1942, the loyalty of the Indian Army was ‘conditional and brittle’. Better material supply, equipment, training, and the increase in concern for their families, however, meant that by 1944 the loyalty of the Jawans to their commissioned officers was not questioned (by their officers or by themselves). It was following demobilisation, and the loss of regular pay, that the loyalty of the majority of Jawans became politically aware, that is to say ‘nationalist’. Kaushik Roy, ‘Military Loyalty in the Colonial Context: A Case Study of the Indian Army during World War II’, Journal of Modern History, 73/2 (2009), pp. 528–9.

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  42. This ability to adapt to various battlefield conditions and terrains, and to learn from previous mistakes, was a point made by Ashley Jackson, Dr C. Mann, Col. G. Dunlop and Alan Jeffreys in their respective papers presented at the Second Joint Imperial War Museum/King’s College London, Military History Conference, The Indian Army, 1939–1947, 9 May 2009. See also Pradeep Barua, ‘Strategies and Doctrines of Imperial Defence: Britain and India, 1919–1945’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 25/2 (1997), pp. 241–66.

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  43. Various ways to isolate the Indian troops from the political unrest in India were undertaken: postal censorship, only British newspapers available within camps, and the dissemination of Allied war-effort propaganda through the use of mobile film units and radio programmes. See Sanjoy Bhattacharya, ‘British Military Information Management Techniques and the South Asian Soldier: Eastern India during the Second World War’, Modern Asian Studies, 34/2 (2000), pp. 483–510.

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  44. Raymond Callahan, ‘The Prime Minister and the Indian Army’s Last War’, in Kaushik Roy (ed.), The Indian Army in the Two World Wars (Leiden: Brill, 2012), p. 317.

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  45. See Government of India publications, The Tiger Strikes: The Story Of Indian Troops In North Africa And East Africa (London: HMSO, 1942); The Tiger Kills: The Story Of British And Indian Troops With The 8th Army In North Africa (London: HMSO, 1944); and The Tiger Triumphs: The Story Of Three Great Divisions in Italy (London: HMSO, 1946).

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    Cat Wilson

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© 2014 Catherine A.V. Wilson

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Wilson, C. (2014). Churchill’s Indian Army and the Reconquest of Burma. In: Churchill on the Far East in The Second World War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137363954_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137363954_7

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-47316-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-36395-4

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