Editor's Note: Winston Churchill remains perhaps the most admired statesman of modern times. Yet the politician who spearheaded the Allies' fight against the Nazis demonstrated a profound disdain for the well-being of denizens of Britain's largest colony, and his government's policy of neglect led directly to a famine in South Asia in the 1940s that killed millions.

Former Scientific American editor Madhusree Mukerjee has just published a historical investigation of Churchill's policies in India, Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and Ravaging of India During World War II . Mukerjee, a native of Kolkota and a former nuclear physicist, writes in the following edited excerpt about another physicist, one of Churchill's closest advisers, who was entrusted with devising a technocratic justification for the British prime minister's policies, including some of the decisions that led to widespread famine on the sub-continent.

To watch over the care and feeding of Britons, Winston Churchill recruited a trusted old friend, the physicist Frederick Alexander Lindemann. Known as the Prof to admirers (because of his academic credentials and his brilliance) and as Baron Berlin to detractors (thanks to his German accent and aristocratic tastes), Lindeman was responsible for the government's scientific decisions. He also headed a Statistics Division, or S branch, with whose help he scrutinized the performance of the regular ministries and prioritized the logistical machinery of warfare. Lindemann attended meetings of the War Cabinet, accompanied the prime minister on conferences abroad, and sent him an average of one missive a day. He saw Churchill almost daily for the duration of the war and wielded more influence than any other civilian adviser.

On most matters Lindemann's and Churchill's opinions converged; and when they did not, the scientist worked ceaselessly to change his friend's mind. "He spoke sotto voce , but with complete self-assurance, as though stating facts that must be obvious to every schoolboy," related Roy Harrod, an S branch employee who later became one of Britain's premier economists. All those who disagreed with his views Lindemann dismissed as "perfect fools." To create the ten lines of text for the prime minister's benefit that summarized weeks of S branch research, he wielded the final scalpel, taking out "redundant words, unnecessary sentences, inessential parts of the argument and many qualifications," according to Donald MacDougall, Lindemann's right-hand man at the S branch. "At first this last type of shortening worried me—and my colleagues—quite a bit," MacDougall confessed in a memoir. Soon, however, the S branch staff realized that the Prof was merely anticipating the prime minister's wishes. "The normal machinery of government churned up certain proposals, which finally came to the Prime Minister; it was our duty to counter-brief him on what we knew to be the lines of his own thinking," wrote Harrod. In other words, the mission of the S branch was to provide rationales for whichever course the prime minister, as interpreted by the Prof, wished to follow.

Other department heads were at first furious that the Prof had access to their figures and used these to criticize their performances and overrule their decisions even as they were prohibited from seeing the S branch's calculations and so could not defend themselves. But soon they "began to realize that, like it or not, the Prof was the man whom Churchill trusted most, and that not all their refutations, aspersions, innuendos or attempts at exposure would shift Churchill from his undeviating loyalty to the Prof by one hair's breadth," wrote Harrod. So it was that the Prof would pronounce judgment on the best use of shipping space, the profligacy of the army, the inadequacy of British supplies, the optimal size of the mustard gas stockpile, the necessity of bombing German houses—and, when the time came, the pointlessness of sending famine relief to Bengal.

Theirs was an unlikely friendship. Churchill was a self-described "Beefeater" who relished multicourse meals washed down with whisky, whereas Lindemann was a vegetarian, teetotaler, and nonsmoker who lived on salads, egg whites, olive oil, and a specific variety of cheese. Churchill cared, if fitfully, about the troubles of the poor, but Lindemann made no secret of his contempt for social and intellectual inferiors and, according to an acquaintance, "looked upon poverty as a fault." His accent tended to arouse suspicion in wartime Britain. Yet the mutual loyalty of the two friends was total. "Love me, love my dog, and if you don't love my dog you damn well can't love me," muttered a furious Churchill in 1941, after a member of the House of Commons had raised questions about the Prof's influence.

 By 1942, Lindemann had the title of paymaster-general and had also achieved a peerage; he was now known as Lord Cherwell. His reputation was such that lines of verse inspired by The Pirates of Penzance were passed around ministerial offices:

{PO}My secretariat scrutinizes memoranda topical,

Elucidating fallacies in detail microscopical;

I plumb the depths of strategy, I analyze ballistics;

Reform the whole of industry, or fabricate statistics;

My acumen's infallible, my logic irrefutable,

My slightest proposition axiomatic, indisputable;

And so in matters vegetable, animal and mineral,

I am the very model of a good Paymaster-General. {/PO}

Lord Cherwell repaid his friend's patronage by adopting his causes as his own—and nowhere was this synergy more evident than in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral. One of the prime minister's abiding concerns was that the British people should get enough meat. "Have you done justice to rabbit production?" he asked in one of numerous memos on the topic. Another time he inquired if a ship returning from the Middle East might swing by Argentina to pick up some beef. The Prof did not touch flesh, but when it came to feeding Britain he became "an extreme anti-vegetarian." No one "fought harder to keep up the war-time ration of good red meat for the British people," attested MacDougall.

At the S branch, Lord Cherwell's most trusted assistant, Donald MacDougall, became concerned that imports of food and raw materials were not arriving fast enough. (Roy Harrod, the more experienced economist, had left by that time.) MacDougall was convinced that if the United Kingdom did not get more shipping for civilian needs, stocks of food would "quite possibly fall to dangerously low levels before very long." He figured that stocks could, however, be adequately protected by cutting the number of ships serving the Indian Ocean area down to 60 percent and bringing the rest over to the Atlantic to serve the import program. "I told Prof he would never get away with such a dramatic reduction and had better suggest 80," MacDougall related in his memoir. "He replied that, on the contrary, he would put in 40–50, which would be argued up by the military to my figure of 60, which he believed."

Thus was born one of Churchill's most far-reaching decisions. On January 2, 1943, the Prof informed the prime minister that the United Kingdom's imports would increase by a million tons if the ninety monthly sailings to the east were cut to fifty during January, February, and March; and by 1.25 million tons if the cut were to forty sailings. Moreover, the "gain would be increased to 3½ millions if the cut were prolonged up to the end of June." (A more nuanced calculation, taking into account the delay in transferring ships from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, would find that the last cut actually yielded 2 million tons of imports.) Failing such strong action, "factories will have to close down for lack of materials, with all the political repercussions this involves," Cherwell asserted. Although the first option seemed enough to meet the United Kingdom's needs, the memo did not state that; nor did it mention any negative consequences of such cuts. Accordingly, Churchill circled the most drastic, last option, marked it "A," and wrote on the memo "We must go for A." Thanks to the Prof, MacDougall's suggestion to cut Indian Ocean shipping down to 60 percent ended up as an even deeper cut, to 44 percent—and for twice as long.

Ships that went to the Indian Ocean generally made loops, going from port to port within the region before heading back to the United Kingdom or the United States. Combined with the imperative to supply troops in North Africa, the shipping cut meant that very few vessels would be available on the run between Australia and India. The shipping cut "must portend violent changes and perhaps cataclysms in the seaborne trade of large numbers of countries," the Ministry of War Transport warned the prime minister.

As ships gradually left the Indian Ocean, the cessation of trade deranged the economies of the colonies on its rim. They were already reeling from wartime inflation and scarcity, and the "menace of famine suddenly loomed up like a hydra-headed monster with a hundred clamoring mouths," related C.B.A. Behrens in the official history of wartime British shipping. Desperate appeals began pouring into colonial offices. Several British possessions bordering the Indian Ocean, such as Kenya, Tanganyika, and British Somaliland, suffered famine that year. Historians attribute the calamities to a combination of drought, wartime inflation, acquisition of grain for the armed forces, and hoarding by Indian traders. That all the famines, including the one in Bengal, occurred in 1943 suggests, however, that the shipping cut also played a role. "In the Indian Ocean area the burden of paying for victory, shifted from place to place to ease the weight, finally came to rest," summarized Behrens.

In London on July 30, 1943, the War Cabinet's shipping committee considered a request for grain from the Viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow. An India Office representative stated that "famine conditions" were appearing in Bengal and in parts of the south, and relayed the opinion of General Claude Auchinlek, Commander-in-Chief in India, that the country might not be usable as a base until the food problem was solved. [But the Prof] questioned the role that "the import of cereals should or could play," as evident from a memo he prepared for the prime minister the day before the War Cabinet took up the problem. Despite India's urgent demands during the previous winter, he wrote, "the emergency vanished." (The India Office was now reporting the outbreak of famine, but Cherwell perceived no link between current events and the earlier crisis.) On top of that, the Indian harvest was massive. "Yet we are told that failure to provide half a million tons of cereals will result in a reduction of national output, refusal to export food [to Ceylon], famine conditions, civil disturbance and subversive activity among the troops in the Indian army." Imports were being regarded as a means of extracting stocks from hoarders, Cherwell complained. "This seems a roundabout way of tackling the problem. In any event, it is a little hard that the U.K., which has already suffered a greater drop in the standard of life than India, should be mulcted because the Government of India cannot arrange its affairs in an orderly manner."

One draft of this memo ended with the sentiment that, since shipping would be needed to feed Italian civilians if the Allied invasion caused Italy's fascist government to collapse, expending it on famine relief in India "scarcely seems justified unless the Ministry of War Transport cannot find any other use for it." The sentence was eventually changed to a straightforward recommendation against sending grain.

On November 10, 1943 the Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery, used a report on Bengal by Field Marshal Wavell, appointed as Viceroy of India to replace Linlithgow, to schedule a third War Cabinet discussion on relief. Bengal's winter harvest of rice would not reach the market until January 1944, Amery advised. For the Government of India to have a "fighting chance" of procuring all the grain it needed from nervous cultivators, it would require another 50,000 tons of wheat by the end of December and a promise of the same quantity for each of the following twelve months. Leathers having already asserted that providing such quantities were out of the question, Amery concentrated on getting at least 50,000 tons for each of December, January, and February.

The day before the meeting, the Prof wrote to the prime minister. "The quantities suggested are very small as compared with India's total consumption of over 4 million tons a month," he began as usual. (Given Wilson's September memo, he had to know that the argument was specious.) Such imports might have the effect of thwarting hoarders, but surely enough had been done toward that end. "Strong propaganda designed to discourage hoarding can be based upon the shipments we have already decided to make." He continued: "This shortage of food is likely to be endemic in a country where the population is always increased until only bare subsistence is possible. In such circumstances small local shortages or crop failures must cause acute distress. After the war India can spend her huge hoards of sterling on buying food and thus increase the population still more, but so long as the war lasts her high birth-rate may impose a heavy strain on this country which does not view with Asiatic detachment the pressure of a growing population on limited supplies of food."

Cherwell's argument was based on the famous proposition by the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, who in 1798 postulated that humans multiply faster than their means of sustenance, which meant that "premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race." Those peoples whose lack of sexual restraint caused them to reproduce recklessly were especially prone to what he called "positive checks" on their population. These unhappy constraints included war, disease, vice, and "the last, the most dreadful resource of nature"—famine. Malthus's doctrine inspired no less than Charles Darwin, whose magnum opus On the Origins of Species is subtitled The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life . Because "more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence," Darwin wrote. "It is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms."

The entwined worldview of Malthus and Darwin provided an explanation, beguiling to Victorian elites, not only for the evolution of species but also for the ordering of society. The "evolutionist will not hesitate to affirm that the nation with the highest ideals would succeed," mused Savrola, a romantic hero that Churchill had created in the late 1890s, during his sojourn in India. Conversely, an excess of compassion could perpetuate the debilitating characteristics of defeated peoples, imperiling the greater good. An 1881 report by the Government of India on preceding famines concluded that the poorest Indians were the worst affected by such calamities, and if relief measures were to prevent their deaths they would continue to breed, making the survivors even more penurious. Death might even come as deliverance to those that nature had chosen to discard. Churchill had corroborated Malthus's perspective, writing of an 1898 Indian plague: "[A] philosopher may watch unmoved the destruction of some of those superfluous millions, whose life must of necessity be destitute of pleasure."

In his memo to Churchill, Lord Cherwell suggested that the Bengal famine arose from crop failure and high birthrate. He omitted to mention that the calamity also derived from India's role of supplier to the Allied war effort; that the colony was not being permitted to spend its sterling reserves or to employ its own ships in importing sufficient food; and that by his Malthusian logic Britain should have been the first to starve—but was being sustained by food imports that were six times larger than the one-and-a-half-million tons that the Government of India had requested for the coming year. The memo did raise the prospect that harm would be inflicted on long-suffering Britons if help were extended to over-fecund Indians.

In a 1960 lecture at Harvard on Cherwell's wartime influence, physicist and writer C. P. Snow would say of Churchill's chief adviser: "He was formidable, he was savage." Snow complained that Cherwell's advocacy of area bombing of German civilian houses had prevailed over the objections of other physicists. The Prof's close relationship with Churchill had given him "more direct power than any scientist in history," Snow argued, and power so unchecked was harmful.

Cherwell believed that a small circle of the intelligent and the aristocratic should run the world. "Those who succeed in getting what everyone wants must be the ablest," he asserted. The Prof regarded the masses as "very stupid," considered Australians to be inferior to Britons, advocated "harshness" toward homosexuals, and thought criminals should be treated cruelly because "the amount of pleasure derived by other people from the knowledge that a malefactor is being punished far exceeds in sum total the amount of pain inflicted on a malefactor by his punishment."

Inferior as the British working class was in Cherwell's view, he nonetheless ranked it far above the black and brown subjects in the colonies. A measure of his racism can be found in his assertion that "20 percent of white people and 80 percent of coloured were immune" to mustard gas. The figures are clearly incorrect, because biology admits of no such chasm between the races, but they are in keeping with early-twentieth-century notions of eugenics.

Eugenic ideas also feature in a lecture that Lord Cherwell (then known as Professor Lindemann) had delivered more than once, probably in the early 1930s. He had detailed a science-based solution to a challenge that occupied many an intellect of the time: preserving for eternity the hegemony of the superior classes. Any attempt "to force upon Nature an equality she has never admitted" was bound to lead to bloody strife, the scientist asserted in a draft of this talk. Instead of subscribing to what he called "the fetish of equality," he recommended that human differences be accepted and indeed enhanced by means of science. It was no longer necessary, he wrote, to wait for "the haphazard process of natural selection to ensure that the slow and heavy mind gravitates to the lowest form of activity." New technologies such as surgery, mind control, and drug and hormone manipulations would one day allow humans to be fine-tuned for specific tasks. Society could create "gladiators or philosophers, athletes or artists, satyrs or monks" at will—indeed, it could manufacture "men with a passion and perhaps even aptitude for any desired vocation." At the lower end of the race and class spectrum, one could remove from "helots" (the Greek word for slaves) the ability to suffer or to feel ambition.

"Somebody must perform dull, dreary tasks, tend machines, count units in repetition work; is it not incumbent on us, if we have the means, to produce individuals without a distaste for such work, types that are as happy in their monotonous occupation as a cow chewing the cud?" Lindemann asked. Science could yield a race of humans blessed with "the mental make-up of the worker bee." This subclass would do all the unpleasant work and not once think of revolution or of voting rights: "Placid content rules in the bee-hive or ant-heap." The outcome would be a perfectly peaceable and stable society, "led by supermen and served by helots."

7 Comments

1. 1. obviousstatement 01:55 PM 8/6/10

   It is an interesting phenomenon to watch as writers from "Eastern" nations increasingly join discussions in "western" forums to note the different points of views & in some cases agendas represented.
   
   Certainly in Vancouver where the demographic has changed rapidly, the history of this city has been erased & re-written to suit the new money. Our new citizens have been educated in the "East" & carry with them the anti western message of their homelands government teachings. This is particularly true for some of our professors from mainland China now Canadian citizens teaching in our universities and it has been fascinating to watch the accepted norm change with the property values.
   
   I cannot help but wonder if I detect some of the same sentiment here. There seems to be patterns of deliberately seeking to find the dark aspects of Western, aka British society and its icons often without a balanced look at their own nor within the context of time and place in history.
   
   My concern with this article is similar. It talks about the evils of the British Empire, the eugenics practiced & the need to trick the working class into believing they are not slaves to perpetuate the accomplishments of the British Empire (which oh just as an aside laid the foundation for the free societies we and India have enjoyed for the last century), but it skips right past the self applied atrocities of the Indian Caste system which is a very similar dynamic wrapped in a spiritual garb.
   
   Is it that the message here not that the British or Europeans are particularly more harmful to India but rather, keep your eugenics to yourself, we have our own thank you.
   
   I suppose the other alarming omission that the author tactfully avoids is that as the UK was fighting for it's existence to safe guard a free world against a truly eugenic Nazi Germany, a Germany that would have had much less respect for India should have it had come to power. The author accuses the British of neglect causing the death of millions.
   
   I suppose that is easy to say in hindsight isn't it but what if Britain had fallen. What a different world it would have been.
   
   This author is doing what a professor here in Vancouver does to paint a slanted picture of British Canada. He judges the 19th century British by holding them against the modern values of human rights... a concept developed in the west (UK, US) that only took hold in the last 50 years while the east has still to embrace it.
   
   
   

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2. 2. Aks in reply to obviousstatement 03:44 PM 8/6/10

   Reports like this emerge and so do the cacophonia of apologia that then appear justifying the brutality of the empire..like the statement above. India sent a huge number of troops to the Allied war effort and was rewarded with famine, as the brown Hindus were not worthy of anything less. Sadly, such racism as exhibited by the British and Churchill has oft been covered up.

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3. 3. Aks 04:15 PM 8/6/10

   The worst part is how the author drags in a useless reference to the caste system to justify British brutality. Such apologists would no doubt have justified the final solution as applied on jews as having been ok, as after all jews did similar things amongst themselves or similar claptrap. It does seem that shining the light on the reality of the british empire does not go down well, with those who whitewash the everyday brutality that was its leit motif and caused crimes no less than those committed by many other brutal empires, including fostering an entirely avoidable famine. For those unaware, this has an overview:
   http://www.samarthbharat.com/bengalholocaust.htm
   
   2.5-3 million deaths and the above commentator "obvious statement" tried to disguise this, using cockanamie logic of attacking the article writers ethnicity. That such racism is to be found today amongst the admirers of empire is shameful.

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4. 4. photainam 07:45 PM 8/6/10

   Such insightful article cannot be overlooked. We must expose all ghastly deeds whether it is done by a white, brown, red, black or yellow skinned person... Thank you.

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5. 5. photainam 07:47 PM 8/6/10

   This is such an insightful article. We must explore and learn from the past as not to repeat wrong-doings in the future. Such ghastly deeds must be exposed and criticized whether it is done by a white, black, brown or yellow person. Thank you.

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6. 6. choppam 05:03 PM 8/7/10

   Nazi Germany had "detached and objective" scientists, too. The US had and still does (weapons development, interrogation and punishment techniques, etc). And the British often led the way in cruelty and horror - there's too much to mention, but we (I'm British) invented concentration camps, "scientific" interrogation (no marks left) and perfected it in Ireland, and we've been brutal, lying slave-drivers from the moment we had the military means. In the name of progress and civilization we wiped out the whole population of Tasmania when we arrived there. Leaves the US treatment of Native Americans and black slaves in the dust. And the Nazis didn't wipe out every Jew.
   Madhusree M does the public a great service by bringing this suppressed aspect of British science and civilization to its attention.
   People like Churchill, Lindemann and our own commentator Obviousstatement should be locked up in a black hole somewhere - Calcutta for example. For their own good, of course. And their tribulations should be subject to a policy of benevolent neglect.
   Maybe I should remind readers that the second the war was over, the returning soldiers and the civilians alike turfed Churchill out of office and voted in the Welfare State.

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7. 7. Marina 02:58 AM 8/29/10

   Apologists for the British Empire assume quite correctly (although without admitting as much) that it was expertise in brutality that made Britain great. Were it not for a number of principled persons in Britain who made their objections heard throughout the period that brought extreme poverty to large swathes of the world, there would be nothing to spare present day Britain the wrath of all nations.

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