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The Prime Minister and the Indian Army's Last War

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The Prime Minister and the Indian Army's Last War CHAPTER TEN THE PRIME MINISTER AND THE INDIAN ARMY’S LAST WAR Raymond Callahan Winston Churchill and India. The subject presents problems for his admirers. His obstinate rearguard action against the 1935 GOI Act, his sniping at M.K. Gandhi, and the disdain, captured in remarks that range from colorful to unpleasant, for much of ‘Hindu India’, now seem a bit embarrassing at best. Perhaps for that reason, relatively little attention has focused on this dimension of his long career.1 This lack of attention, in turn, has meant that his impact on the Indian war effort during 1939–45 has not received the critical analysis it deserves.2 India’s war effort was enormous and played a vital role in Britain’s victory—a fact that went unacknowledged in Churchill’s war memoirs and, largely as a result of his omission, is inadequately understood to this day by most students of the Second World War. This essay attempts to sketch out to the degree to which Churchill as the Prime Minister and Minister of Defense shaped—and at times distorted—the last great martial effort of the Raj. What were the attitudes to empire in general and India in particular that Churchill carried with him into 10 Downing Street? Churchill is popularly remembered as a tenacious defender of the empire, a tenacity summed up in his oft-quoted remark that he had not become prime minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire (although it is often forgotten that the remark was aimed at his American allies, who he correctly took to be more dangerous foes of 1 Arthur Herman’s Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age (New York: 2008) is an interesting popular account. Geof- frey Best, Churchill: A Study in Greatness (London: 2001), the best analytical study of Churchill to date, has a perceptive chapter on Churchill and India. 2 The Indian war effort is another subject in need of full treatment.The Oxford History of the British Empire did little on this subject, but Ashley Jackson’s The British Empire and the Second World War (London: 2006), 351–404 provides an excellent introduction. 312 raymond callahan empire than any colonial nationalists). His real views were however rather more nuanced. Much of his early career was certainly passed in imperial settings—India, Egypt, and South Africa—and at a time when “popular imperialism” was reaching its climax in Britain itself. A true young man in a hurry he saw India and Egypt only as a cavalry officer and war correspondent, while his time in South Africa was exclusively as a journalist, temporary officer—(and POW). He never returned to either India or South Africa. He began his long ministerial career as Under Secretary of State for the Colonies and certainly was exposed to a wide range of colonial issues there (as well as taking a very modern fact finding trip through East Africa that yielded a profitable travel book). When he left the Colonial Office—to sighs of relief from many officials—he also left behind direct concern for imperial affairs for some fifteen years.3 When he returned to the Colonial Office in 1921, it was primarily to sort out, at Lloyd George’s behest, the post-1918 chaos in the Middle East, which he did very effectively, his settlement lasting until the British era in the Middle East came to an end in the mid 1950s. Looking at Churchill’s record on imperial matters upto 1922, it is clear that his knowledge of the empire, although broader than that of many politicians who managed its affairs from London, was not only very different, and shallower, than that of imperial enthu- siasts like his one time Harrow schoolmate Leo Amery (for whom it was a religion) but also marked by the sense that the empire was a vital component in Britain’s standing as a great world power. He valued the empire primarily for what it did for Britain and British prestige, and of no part of its sprawling agglomeration of territories was that more true than of the Raj. Churchill understood that India was an important market for British goods; indeed, the impact on Lancashire of Indian self-government was one of the themes of his crusade against the 1935 Act (although in fact the decline of the Indian market for British textiles was already well underway by then). Far more important was the geostrategic impor- tance of India as the empire’s cost free strategic reserve. It was the combination of Indian military manpower (and British troops paid for 3 Ronald Hyam’s Elgin and Churchill at the Colonial Office, 1905–1908: The Water- shed of the Empire-Commonwealth (London: 1968) is a thorough examination of Churchill’s first official encounter with the empire. Hyam has revisited the subject in “Winston Churchill’s first years in ministerial office, 1905–1911”, in his Understanding the British Empire (Cambridge: 2010), 299–318. .
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