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Churchill’s India, 1942 to 1943

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Churchill on the Far East in The Second World War

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Abstract

Writing in November 1942, an exasperated Lord Linlithgow (the longest-serving Viceroy of India), lamented how he had been unable to implement short cuts and easy solutions to the problems of the Cripps Mission, ‘Quit India’, and the search for a new Viceroy. The ‘hard fact’ which confronted Churchill was that the issue of Indian self-government was back on the table in 1942, for the allied war effort and American sentiment ensured that it could no longer be ignored. As the Japanese Army advanced towards India, the British Empire’s wartime struggle for power in the Far East was not just against the encroaching Imperial Army — it was a struggle against the left in Britain, against Indian nationalism, and against American anti-imperialism. Since Churchill’s pre-war views on the issue of Indian self-government were notorious — his views had ‘chained him to the back benches’ for much of the 1930s — when it came to his memoirs, the question was not whether his ‘curious complex about India’ would taint his portrayal, but rather how could he narrate this part of his tale without it having a detrimental effect upon his present or future?2

We have got to the point … in the Indian situation in which shortcuts are no good and … we have to face the hard facts.1

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Notes

  1. Nicholas Mansergh and E.W.R. Lumby (eds), Transfer of Power: Volume III, Reassertion of Authority, Gandhi’s fast, and the succession to the Viceroyalty, 21 September 1942–12 June 1943 (London: HMSO, 1971), Linlithgow to Amery, 1 November 1942, p. 183.

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  2. Robin James Moore, Churchill, Cripps, and India: 1939–1945 (Oxford: OUP, 1979), p. 1; Penderel Moon (ed.), Wavell: The Viceroy’s Journal (Karachi: OUP, 1974), p. 3.

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  3. For nuanced accounts of Cripps in Moscow see: Peter Clarke, The Cripps Version: The Life of Sir Stafford Cripps 1889–1952 (London: Allen Lane, 2002), pp. 183–241; and Gabriel Gorodetsky, Stafford Cripps’ Mission to Moscow, 1940–1942 (Cambridge: CUP, 1984).

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  4. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: Volume III, The Grand Alliance (London: Cassell, 1950), pp. 315–52. Churchill’s account was inaccurate in that Cripps replied to him explaining why he delayed delivery of the telegramon the 5 April and not, as Churchill maintained, on 12 April 1941. Clearly not everyone thought of Cripps as a failure in Moscow: ‘We ally ourselves with the USSR at last! Cripps must have been doing excellent work’. Mass-Observation contributor, Maggie Joy Blunt (writer), in Sandra Koa Wing (ed.), Mass-Observation: Britain in the Second World War (London: Folio Society, 2007), entry dated 22 July 1941, p. 100.

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  5. See H. Hanak, ‘Sir Stafford Cripps as Ambassador to Moscow, May 1940–June 1941’, English Historical Review, 94/370 (January 1979), pp. 48–70; ‘Sir Stafford Cripps as Ambassador to Moscow, June 1941–January 1942’, English Historical Review, 97/383 (April 1982), pp. 332–44; and Gabriel Gorodetsky, ‘Churchill’s Warning to Stalin: A Reappraisal’, Historical Journal, 29/4 (1986), pp. 979–90.

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  6. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: Volume IV, Hinge of Fate (London: Cassell, 1951). The chapter is in Book I, ‘The Onslaught of Japan’, pp. 181–96.

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  7. Philip Mason, A Matter of Honour: An Account of the Indian Army, Its Officers and Men (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 471.

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  8. Sarvepalli Gopal, ‘Churchill and India’, in Robert Blake and Wm. Roger Louis (eds), Churchill: A Major New Assessment of his Life in Peace and War (Oxford: OUP, 1993), p. 457; see also Raymond Callahan, ‘The Leader as Imperialist: Churchill and the King’s Other Army’, Finest Hour, 158/25 (2013), p. 25.

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  9. Raymond Callahan, ‘The Prime Minister and the Indian Army’s Last War’, Kaushik Roy (ed.), The Indian Army in the Two World Wars (Leiden: Brill, 2012), p. 321.

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  11. Roosevelt was not the only American who attempted to persuade Churchill to approach the situation in India differently. American liberal intellectuals had been agitating during the inter-war years with the same aim in mind. Although not entirely successful in their remit, ‘if they did not hearten the struggle in India, they at least provided it with a voice in the West that nationalist leaders welcomed’. Alan Raucher, ‘American Anti-Imperialists and the Pro-India Movement, 1900–1932’, Pacific Historical Review, 43/1 (1974), p. 110.

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  14. Lord Charles Moran, Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1945–1960 (London: Constable, 1966), p. 74.

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  15. Churchill was not the only man to think this of Cripps. Lord Beaverbrook, William Maxwell Aitken (1879–1964), the press baron and MP for Ashton-under-Lyne, said that Cripps had ‘the genius of the untried’. By which he meant that Cripps was ‘a very able man indeed but, you know, he has his defects; he is in some ways difficult’. Beaverbrook to Crozier, 16 March 1942, in A.J.P. Taylor (ed.), Off the Record: W.P. Crozier, Political Interviews, 1933–1943 (London: Hutchinson, 1973), p. 306. Cripps was disparagingly described as a man who had to make an appointment to get the joke.

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  17. Amery to Linlithgow, 13 January 1942, Transfer of Power: III, doc. 10. Ian St John wrote that, in India, in the early 1930s, Churchill’s voice was ‘taken to be the authentic expression of the British imperial viewpoint’ which frightened the majority of Indians about the influence he exerted. A decade later, in 1942, and not only was Churchill’s voice still perceived as such in India but he was Prime Minister and directing the war; Amery was right to call Churchill a hindrance rather than a help. Ian St. John, ‘Churchill’s Press Campaign against Constitutional Reform in India’, in Chandrika Kaul (ed.), Media and the British Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 114.

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  18. Attempts to reconcile Congress with Jinnah’s Moslem League had been made by non-parliamentary and non-governmental bodies. One such example, in early 1942, was Mr Horace Alexander, of the Friends Service Council of London and Dublin, who had sent a letter to Amery ‘congratulating him on the release of Congress prisoners and forwarding information on the efforts made by the All-India Conference of Indian Christians to bring about a reconciliation between the leaders of the various parties’. See Transfer of Power: I, fn. 9, p. 18. Unsurprisingly, Churchill’s account of the era leading up to the Cripps Mission ignores such British-led attempts as it would question his portrayal. For Indian approaches as mediation, especially Sapru’s, see David A. Low, ‘The Mediator’s Moment: Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru and the Antecedents to the Cripps Mission to India, 1940–42’, in R.F. Holland and G. Rizvi (eds), Perspectives on Imperialism and Decolonization: Essays in Honour of A.F. Madden (London: Cass, 1984), pp. 146–64.

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  19. Nigel Nicolson (ed.), The Harold Nicolson Diaries, 1907–1963 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004), 30 March 1942, p. 260.

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  21. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: Volume V, Closing the Ring (London: Cassell, 1952), p. 112.

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  22. For concise accounts of the campaign itself see: Patrick French, Liberty or Death, India’s Journey to Independence and Division (London: Flamingo, 1998), pp. 149–69; Arthur Herman, Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age (New York: Bantam Dell, 2008), pp. 488–503;Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947 (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 388–405; and Auriol Weigold, Churchill, Roosevelt and India: Propaganda During World War II (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 140–60. See ‘The “Quit India” Resolution’, 8 August 1942, Transfer of Power: II, doc. 470.

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  23. Churchill, Hinge of Fate, p. 457. See ‘Table A: Evidence of the regional incidence of the “Quit India movement” and its suppression, for the period ending 31 December 1943’, in Judith M. Brown, Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy (Oxford: OUP, 1985), pp. 312–13.

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  25. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (London: Meridian, 1946), p. 389.

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  29. John Barnes and David Nicolson (eds), The Empire At Bay: The Leo Amery Diaries, 1929–1945 (London: Hutchinson, 1988), 14 August 1941, p. 710.

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  30. John Barnes and David Nicolson (eds), The Empire At Bay: The Leo Amery Diaries, 1929–1945 (London: Hutchinson, 1988), 9 June 1940, p. 621.

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  31. David Faber, Speaking for England: Leo, Julian and John Amery, The Tragedy of a Political Family (London: Pocket Books, 2007), p. 1.

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  32. For the close working relationship between Linlithgow and Churchill see Gowher Rizvi, Linlithgow and India: A Study of British Policy and the Political Impasse in India, 1936–1943 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978); and Nicholas Owen, ‘The Cripps Mission of 1942: A reinterpretation’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 30/1 (2002).

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  44. Churchill may have wanted to keep India ‘quiet’ for the duration of the war but there were elements which claimed that wartime was ‘not the time for constitutional changes’ and that ‘compromise proposals’ were to be made instead. William L. Holland, ‘Breaking the Indian Deadlock’, Far Eastern Survey, 12/7 (1943), p.65.

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    Cat Wilson

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© 2014 Catherine A.V. Wilson

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Wilson, C. (2014). Churchill’s India, 1942 to 1943. In: Churchill on the Far East in The Second World War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137363954_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137363954_6

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-47316-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-36395-4

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