Placing the Great Bengal in the Global Context

Madhusree Mukerjee

The has generally been regarded as an unfortunate outcome of local factors. It was also, however, a wartime famine, and setting it in the context of World War II reveals the pressures exerted upon Indian grain markets by the British War Cabinet. A series of War Cabinet decisions in 1943 regarding the allocation of shipping precipitated and exacerbated the famine. The War Cabinet was stockpiling wheat for future use—which activity combined with Churchill‟s hostility toward Indians to preclude the possibility of sending adequate wheat to India.

The 1943 Bengal famine has been extensively studied, mainly with the help of the report of a famine inquiry commission that began its secret hearings in 1944. To understand the framework within which the famine has traditionally been comprehended, it is important to look at the mandate of this commission. In October of 1943, Field Marshal Wavell arrived in India to assume up the post of viceroy, and took the first steps to ease the famine. Soon after, however, he faced a vociferous demand from Indian politicians for an inquiry into the famine. Amery, the Secretary of State for India, advised against yielding to such a demand, and when it turned out that these voices would not be quieted, he suggested deflecting the inquiry into a broader study of Indian agriculture. Eventually, however, Amery and Wavell had to agree to an inquiry. To minimize the damage, they chose the members of the inquiry committee carefully, and limited its field of study to personnel and events within India. In particular, Amery advised Wavell that the famine commission should avoid looking into “strategical and other circumstances as may have contributed to internal transportation difficulties or affected H.M.G.‟s decisions in regard to shipping of imports.” In other words, the commission would not look into the question of railways—almost all the trains were employed in the war effort, and few had been made available to take wheat from the Punjab to Bengal. More importantly, the commission would ignore the entire issue of shipping. Only massive imports of rice or wheat from outside India would have broken the famine, and the implicit assumption the commission made was that ships were not available.i As a result, the commission looked into local factors in a lot of detail, and ultimately blamed the failure of the local rice crop, the Government of India, the Bengal administration, and corrupt brokers for the famine. It did not interview military officers or anyone who had since left India

(such as the former viceroy, Lord Linlithgow). It did not look into the role of the War Cabinet, or raise the question of whether relief could have been set from outside India. The commission did, however, leave the impression that only imports of rice, rather than wheat, would have relieved the famine. Rice having been scarce worldwide that year, that let the War Cabinet off the hook for not having sent relief. Also, the commission did not discuss the inflationary financing of the war effort, a major driver of famine.ii All these omissions led to conclude that the Government of India‟s officials did not have a sophisticated comprehension of famine, and saw it simply in terms of food shortage. Sen further asserted that the crop shortage was in itself too small to cause famine. In fact the government‟s estimates for the rice shortage were far larger than Sen quoted. In addition, the government understood perfectly well the extent to which wartime inflation drove the famine, and appears to have anticipated the calamity. Sen‟s observation that famine arises from failure of entitlement is nevertheless perfectly valid; this analysis extends it to the global context.iii The report of the inquiry commission became the standard text for students of the famine, and has determined the way the famine has since been regarded: as an unfortunate compendium of local factors. Some researchers have supplemented the report of the famine commission with the Nanavati Papers, which are transcripts of the secret hearings of the commission. These were supposed to have been destroyed, but one member of the commission, Justice Nanavati, who was evidently not as reliable as Wavell and Amery had hoped, kept his copies. They are now to be found at the National Archives of India in New Delhi. These papers provide deep insight into what happened at the local level, and some information into New Delhi‟s interactions with London. They show, for instance, that about 80,000 tons of Indian-registered shipping was under the control of the War Cabinet, and was not released to send grain to India. And they show that India was exporting rice until July of 1943. To place the famine in the context of the world war, however, one needs to examine in detail those decisions made by the War Cabinet that impacted India. That requires fresh sources. These include War Office documents, available at the United Kingdom‟s National Archives at Kew; they show that scorched earth orders for coastal Bengal came directly from the War Cabinet. Most important are the Ministry of War Transport documents, which detail shipping priorities and allocations and contain quite a number of papers dealing directly with the famine. These papers provide estimates of India‟s food shortage that are far higher than normally supposed: for instance, one document lists a rice shortage of 2 million tons in Bengal alone, and 3.5 million tons in India as a whole. The Cherwell Papers, available at Nuffield College at Oxford, show the

advice that Churchill was receiving from Lord Cherwell, his close friend and advisor on logistical and even some financial matters, such as shipping and India‟s sterling balance. Generally useful are the official histories of British wartime shipping, food supply, and economics.

Factors driving Famine: Wartime Inflation Apart from the United Kingdom itself, India was the largest supplier for the British Empire‟s war effort. Almost its entire industrial production was pressed into supplying the war. During the war, India produced 600,000 miles of cotton cloth—enough to girdle the earth twenty-four times over. Out of this cloth were made 415 million pieces of military uniforms and 2 million parachutes for dropping supplies. Its entire production of silk was used for man-dropping parachutes. Its entire production of wool was used for 17 million uniforms and more than 5 million blankets for the army. Its entire production of leather was used for the war effort, to make 16 million pairs of boots, 5 million pairs of shoes, and 372,000 leather jackets. During the war, India maintained an army of about 2 million soldiers, which meant procuring 600,000 tons of wheat per year. In addition, India exported about 40,000 tons of grain a month, mainly to feed soldiers fighting around the Mediterranean region, as well as railway carriages and even some railway tracks. It also produced ammunition, binoculars, jute for sandbags, and innumerable other necessities of war.iv In total, India provided goods and services worth £2 billion to the war effort. Of that, according to an agreement drawn up in 1940, the United Kingdom would become liable for roughly half. During the war, however, the United Kingdom‟s share was regarded as a debt, called the sterling balance, to be paid after the war. This debt became a source of much frustration to Churchill, because for the first time ever the United Kingdom came to owe money to its colony, instead of the other way around. The debt, coming on top of the debt to the U.S., raised questions as to the U.K.‟s solvency after the war was over. The realization that the end of the war would bring economic hardship led the War Cabinet to stockpile food and raw materials for use after the war. This stockpiling would have a profound impact on India.v Meanwhile, however, the Indian government could not raise enough money by taxes and other means to pay for the war effort. So it printed cash to buy all these goods. For every rupee redeemable from the United Kingdom, it printed 2.5 rupees. The money flowed to industrial and urban centers, so that businessmen of all kinds came to be flush with cash, but they had nothing

to spend it on because all the goods were earmarked for the war effort. They began to invest it in grain. By August 1942, inflation was so bad that a representative of the Government of India, Sir Jeremy Raisman, warned the War Cabinet that the Indian people were losing faith in the currency. If worse came to worst, and farmers chose to store their grain instead of exchanging it for the suspect currency, that “might give rise to and riots.”vi

Rice Exports The second factor behind the famine was the Japanese occupation of Burma in March 1942, which cut off an essential supply of rice for India‟s poor. In most years, India imported between one and two million tons of rice a year from Burma and Thailand, and this source was gone. What is more, instead of seeking to protect India, the War Cabinet insisted that India absorb this loss and at the same time export rice to meet the needs of the war effort elsewhere, especially Ceylon. So in the fiscal year April 1942 to March 1943—after the war had arrived at India‟s borders—the colony exported 260,000 tons of rice and 100,000 tons of wheat. Overall, India‟s grain exports that fiscal year, including lentils, were 465,600 tons.vii So whereas in the United Kingdom, vast stockpiles had been built up in order to protect the public from wartime stringencies, in India the public was left entirely unprotected. In early 1942, Bengal had a substantial rice crop, but hunger marches and food riots became frequent that year. The colonial government, which regarded hunger in India as part of the landscape, dismissed these events as annoyances fomented by political opponents. Churchill personally insisted that India continue to export rice even after bad weather led to the prospect of a short crop at the end of 1942.viii

Scorched Earth The Japanese occupation of Burma led to the possibility that India would be next. India was completely undefended, despite having a 2-million-strong army, because all the divisions with adequate equipment and training were fighting in the Middle East and North Africa. India had not a single modern bomber or fighter plane or tank or armored car. It needed at least 520 anti- aircraft guns but had only 30. As a result, the only way the War Cabinet could think of to defend India from Japanese invasion was a scorched earth policy. This had been ordered in late January, when it became clear that the Japanese advance could not be stopped. By early February, teams of police and military were scouring the coastal areas of Bengal and destroying food and

transport—destroying rice, so that the Japanese would find nothing to eat, and boats, which were the primary form of transport in rural Bengal, and which the Japanese might commandeer. There are reports of tens of thousands of tons of rice having been dropped into the water at three river ports in east Bengal, but no estimates of the total quantity that was destroyed. In a later stage of this so-called rice denial policy, initiated in April, the Bengal government sent around agents, backed up by police, to buy up grain or requisition it for government use. Officially the agents bought 40,000 tons for government use, some of which rice was exported to Ceylon. But many reports indicate that the agents also bought an unknown quantity on their own account and stored it for speculation. The net effect of the rice denial policy was a dearth of rice on the marketplace and a rise in prices. In August 1942, Fazlul Huq, the Chief Minister of Bengal, predicted famine.ix The military and the police also confiscated or destroyed boats. The famine commission stated that two-thirds of the large boats were destroyed, but according to L.G. Pinnell, an official who aided the project, almost every large boat that could be located was taken out. Since rural Bengal was almost entirely dependent on boats for transport, that meant the livelihoods of fishers and even farmers and potters were destroyed. Farmers could not get to their fields, which might lie across the river, and potters could not get to their clay pits. In addition, some 35,000 families were forced off their villages and fields in order to build military encampments and aerodromes. Although they received compensation, members of these families also figured among the famine victims.x

Cyclone On October 16, 1942, the coastal areas of western Bengal were hit by a massive cyclone and storm surge that killed some 30,000 people and destroyed the standing rice crop in Midnapore, Contai and other coastal districts. The wet weather also appears to have spread crop disease that damaged, by some accounts, 20 percent of Bengal‟s rice crop. The exact extent of the damage to the rice harvest is controversial. Amartya Sen has argued that the crop shortage was relatively insignificant. Others have contested this view, pointing out that the figures he used were for projected harvest, not actual harvest. Papers of the Ministry of War Transport indicate that the Government of India estimated a crop loss in Bengal at 2 million tons, which is significant. Sen further stated that the government had no reason to anticipate famine, but he misquoted the government‟s estimate of the rice shortage by a factor of 10. The evidence shows that Viceroy Linlithgow anticipated famine: in February 1943 he warned of a rice “crisis” later that year

should India not receive adequate imports of wheat. And he told the governor of Bengal that the food stringencies would persist for the duration of the war. (Linlithgow never used the f-word, famine.)xi Repression appears to have worsened the famine, at least in Tamluk subdivision of Midnapore district. In August 1942 the had broken out, and tens of thousands of Congress members, including Gandhi and Nehru, were in prison. In Midnapore, where the anti-colonial insurgency was particularly strong, the police took to burning down homes and rice supplies. This policy continued even after the cyclone. The government suppressed news of the cyclone and did not send any relief for several weeks; and it arrested relief workers sent by private charities, describing them as political agitators.xii In November and December 1942, Viceroy Linlithgow wrote to Amery, the Secretary of State for India, asking for 600,000 tons of wheat by April. The rice crop was short by 1.4 million tons, he said at the time, and although wheat was in excess there was an overall shortage of roughly a million tons of foodgrains. Moreover, since the government was buying vast quantities of wheat to feed the army, prices were high; farmers in the Punjab were refusing to sell their grain because they did not trust the cash; and in Bengal and elsewhere, traders were anticipating a shortage of rice and were hoarding. The imports would feed the army and the most essential war workers, and by taking these consumers off the market would reduce prices overall. In January the Indian government‟s food department sent an urgent missive to the India Office in London, warning that the food supplies of the army would run out within weeks.xiii Churchill‟s friend and technical advisor, Lord Cherwell, contended that India‟s annual production of cereals was so large (a little above 50 million tons) that imports of 600,000 tons of imports could make no difference. He advised against sending any wheat at all.xiv Compared to the analysis of the Government of India, which took into account the psychology of sellers and buyers of grain, Cherwell‟s argument was shallow. Indeed, India‟s harvest was large. The problem lay in distributing it so that everyone got enough—which was more likely to happen if everyone was confident of getting enough. For instance, the people of the United Kingdom knew that their government would take care of them and felt no need to stockpile essentials. The residents of Bengal, in contrast, knew that famine was impending and were equally sure that the government would not take care of them. That awareness had led landowners to store grain for survival, unscrupulous agents to hoard for speculation, and the government itself to stockpile for the war effort. Had the War Cabinet sent significant consignments of grain, it would have demonstrated a resolve to not let the colony starve and

signaled that hoarding would be unprofitable. Those holding stocks in excess of their immediate needs would therefore have released them to the market, reducing prices and saving many lives.

Shipping Cut By late January, 1943, however, senior government officials in India knew that no relief was in sight. The reason was that Churchill, acting on the advice of Lord Cherwell, had cut the shipping in the Indian Ocean area by 60 percent. The War Cabinet controlled the disposition of not only the merchant ships owned by the United Kingdom, but also that of most ships owned by the colonies and dominions (including India). Churchill brought most of the ships over to the Atlantic in order to bolster the United Kingdom‟s stocks of food and raw materials. Cherwell had warned that the United Kingdom‟s stocks were dangerously low because of the loss of shipping to German U-boats in the Atlantic. He had created a sense of panic that in retrospect turns out to have been exaggerated. In December 1942, for instance, the United Kingdom held stocks of wheat enough to feed the population for more than six months (after which time a record harvest was expected, and in any case the U.S. would be producing ships in such large quantities that bringing supplies across from North America would be no problem). Total stocks of food and raw materials in December 1942 was 15.8 million tons—4.5 million tons more than the quantity consumed in the next six months. Stocks in June 1943 were 15.5 million tons. Even so, Cherwell insisted that the UK must import 27 million tons of food and raw materials in 1943.xv One motivation for building up U.K. stocks was the prospect of post-war shortages, as is clear from transcripts of a War Cabinet meeting on January 5, 1943. By transferring the ships from the Indian Ocean and using them to build up U.K. stockpiles, the War Cabinet transferred all the risk of shortages, both present and future, to the colonies. Of the 600,000 tons of wheat that it had requested in order to avert disaster, the Indian government would eventually receive 30,000 tons—that is, 5 percent.xvi Churchill wrote in March 1943: “I am glad to learn from the Minister of War Transport that a strict line is being taken in dealing with requests for cereals from the Indian Ocean area… They must learn to look after themselves as we have done.” Just a few days earlier, a member of the viceroy‟s council, Sir Ramaswami Mudaliar, had warned the War Cabinet‟s shipping committee of “some danger of famine conditions.”xvii

Panic purchases In February 1943, officials in India, and especially in Bengal, realized that they had food enough to feed the army only for two weeks and no relief was coming. They panicked. Around February 13, officials of the Bengal administration “instructed their agents to go to any place and purchase at any price” and store the rice on behalf of the government. Until then, price controls had been in place. Now, the civil supplies department, the army, the railways, the Bengal Chamber of Commerce, and other large agencies and bureaus began to vie with one another to buy up the rice in the market. Within days the price of rice doubled. The high prices in Calcutta vacuumed rice out of the rural marketplace and into storehouses where it awaited transport to the city. By early March, starvation death became widespread in rural Bengal.xviii The famine started because the vanishing purchasing power of the rural poor came to be pitted directly against the unlimited purchasing power of the government. To recall Amartya Sen‟s description of the famine, soldiers, war workers and other privileged groups in Bengal had greater entitlement than villagers. In the larger analysis, however, the famine started because of the greater claim of the United Kingdom‟s citizens to food—not just grain but also tea, coffee, cocoa and other imported items that were regarded as necessities. Sen‟s term “entitlement” is just as applicable to the global scale. To what extent the War Cabinet anticipated that famine would result from the shipping cut is not clear. The Ministry of War Transport had submitted a study to the War Cabinet predicting that such a cut “must portend violent changes and perhaps cataclysms in the seaborne trade of large numbers of countries.” Whether it had predicted famine per se is not known: the original document could not be located. In the official history of British wartime shipping, C.B. A. Behrens linked with the shipping cut. She wrote that “In the Indian Ocean area the burden of paying from victory, shifted from place to place to ease the weight, finally came to rest.”xix

Decision of August 4, 1943 In late July, the viceroy of India, Linlithgow, warned that famine had shown up in eastern India and asked the War Cabinet to send 500,000 tons of wheat by year-end. The grain would feed the army and the war-related industries until the next harvest; if any happened to be left over, it would relieve starvation. The mere news of the arrival of substantial supplies should ease famine, because speculators would anticipate a fall in prices and release any hoarded cereal, thereby causing prices to fall in reality. Although ships were by then available, Churchill and his War Cabinet refused. The

War Cabinet ordered only a “token” shipment of 50,000 tons of wheat to Ceylon, there to await instructions as to final destination, and 100,000 tons of Iraqi barley—which was of little help because barley had a negligible effect on food prices. The Ministry of War Transport noted, however, that Indian needs did not have priority and made no move to act on even these meager allocations.xx Churchill decided to instead stockpile wheat for the feeding of southeastern Europe, which he hoped to liberate from the Nazis. He and his associates determined that around 75,000 tons of Australian wheat would be transported to Ceylon and the Middle East each month for the rest of 1943, to supply the war effort—and a further 170,000 tons would pass by famine-stricken India en- route to a supply center in the Mediterranean region, there to be stored for future consumption in Europe. Such quantities of wheat, which could only be delivered after the Nazis were defeated, were of no relevance to the war effort.xxi After the meeting on August 4, the shipping committee disbursed the shipping for the rest of 1943. In September and October, eighteen ships would load in Australia with wheat or wheat flour; not one would be destined for India.xxii The Indian famine situation was discussed by the War Cabinet two more times that year, on September 24 and November 10. Both times, Churchill and his close associates expressed strong reluctance to relieve the famine. Churchill said that it was more important to feed the stalwart Greeks. Bengalis were of no use to the war effort and were “breeding like rabbits.” (Greece had suffered famine in late 1941 and early 1942, but that calamity had since passed.) Churchill was also opposed to Canada using its own ships to send India wheat, on the grounds that this was a wasteful use of scarce shipping. And the War Cabinet turned down U.S. offers of rice and wheat for India, as well as an offer by Subhas Chandra Bose to send 100,000 tons of rice from Burma.xxiii By year-end, India did receive 80,000 tons of wheat—but it was far from enough to feed the army, which continued to consume local grain that might otherwise have fed the people. In contrast, the United Kingdom imported in 1943 four million tons of wheat, 1.4 million tons of sugar, 1.6 million tons of meat, 409,000 tons of live cattle, 325,000 tons of fish, 131,000 tons of rice, 206,000 tons of tea, 172,000 tons of cocoa, and 1.1 million gallons of wine for its 48 million people—a population 14 million fewer than that of Bengal. By the end of 1943, the UK stockpile of food and raw materials was 18.5 million tons—the highest ever. Sugar and oilseeds overflowed warehouses and had to be stored outdoors under tarpaulins.xxiv The famine came to an end that winter, when Bengal harvested its own rice crop; the death toll is estimated at about 3 million.

Conclusions To summarize, the Bengal famine arose from a number of war-related causes, but its death toll was so high because India‟s grain supply was under the control of the War Cabinet, which was not just apathetic but often hostile to its needs. During 1943, Churchill was furious with Indians for two reasons. He was passionately attached to the empire, but he could see that India could not be held for long after the war. Moreover, the sterling debt would add to the U.K.‟s postwar economic woes. Churchill wanted to present a bill to India for defending it during the war—although the colony was paying for its own defense, including the entire cost of British soldiers stationed in India. It is conceivable that by denying famine relief, Churchill was punishing Indians for their temerity in claiming freedom and for having become a creditor. This was a wartime famine in a colony, and drawing lessons from it that apply to the present day is not straightforward. Nevertheless, the events leading up to the famine demonstrate one thing quite clearly: if the market believes there is going to be a famine, there will be a famine. The market weighs several factors in gauging the likelihood of famine. It reaches a consensus as to whether or not the crop is short; and if it decides in the affirmative, the market judges the likelihood of the government‟s releasing grain to the market, or of being able to import grain. That is, the market takes into account the commitment and the ability of the government to relieve famine. If the market judges that a famine is in the offing and that the government cannot or will not do much about it, the market will precipitate a famine by withholding grain. That is because the merchants will anticipate a rise in grain prices and surmise they can make profits by selling the grain at a later stage. Grain will disappear from the market and famine will start long before it should have started, even given a short crop. Famine is one situation in which free markets that are confident of being left to their own devices clearly precipitate disaster. When it came to the Bengal famine, there may or may not have been a significantly short crop. There probably was. More importantly, the rice merchants and other observers judged quite correctly that imports were not about to arrive, because the British government was not interested in saving Indian lives. So the merchants hoarded grain. In fact the government itself hoarded grain for the war effort, leaving the people in the villages to starve. Behind all this stockpiling was the clear expectation of traders and government officials alike that the War Cabinet would choose to not relieve famine. The United Kingdom was stockpiling wheat for future civilian use, and did not release grain for even the most vital war needs such as feeding the Indian Army. As an aside, note the different connotations of the words stockpiling and hoarding. Stockpiling, which His Majesty‟s Government did, is sagacious, a marker of foresight; hoarding, as

Bengali brokers did, is cruel and criminal. But when you look at the actual activity, stockpiling and hoarding are much the same thing. To put it crudely, the United Kingdom was hoarding wheat. So much wheat was being shipped from the Americas to the U.K. in 1943 that U.S. and Canadian grain traders feared that H.M.G. would use its stockpile to manipulate world prices after the war. The U.K. did make a considerable profit on selling its stockpile of food and raw materials after the war. So it was both a hoarder and a speculator. Seen from this perspective, the Bengal famine arose from the War Cabinet having exercised its absolute control over the British Empire‟s shipping and grain trade to stockpile on a massive scale. In late 1943, the Minister of Food demanded that the British Empire hold a wheat stock of 12 million tons, described as “100% of the volume of trade to the „Free World.‟”xxv Given that the world‟s food supply is being controlled by ever fewer actors, that climate change is making the world‟s harvests increasingly unpredictable, that stockpiling is the normal reaction of grain traders who expect scarcity, and that stockpiling in the face of rising prices can itself precipitate famine, the outlook for the world‟s hungry is grim.

i Nicholas Mansergh, ed., The Transfer of Power, Vol. IV, 461, 468, 725. ii Sir John Woodhead, Famine Inquiry Commission: Report on Bengal, 103-107. iii Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines, 80; Mansergh, The Transfer of Power, Vol. IV, 394, 474. iv N.C. Sinha and P.N. Khera, Indian War Economy, 286, 288, 290, 420-21. v A. R. Prest, War Economics of Primary Producing Countries, 31. vi Nicholas Mansergh, ed., The Transfer of Power, Vol. II, 590. vii N.C. Sinha and P.N. Khera, Indian War Economy, 4; MT 59/631, “Exports from India by Sea”. viii Cabinet Papers CAB 195/1, W.M. (42) 153rd Meeting, November 16, 1942, 181-182; Ministry of Transport Papers MT 59/621, “Area Outside Jurisdiction of M.E.S.C.,” April 22, 1943. ix Fazlul Huq, Bengal Today, 12. xx Nanavati Papers, Vol. II, 543-546; Sengupta, Bangosonghar Ebong, 35; Sir John Woodhead, Famine Inquiry Commission, 26. xi Amery Papers AMEL 1/6/14 File 1, Viceroy to Secretary of State for India, February 21, 1943; Parthasarathy Gupta, ed., Towards Freedom, Vol. II, 1843. xii An unpublished survey by Mahalanobis, provided to the author by Paul Greenough, shows the mortality rate in Tamluk to have been remarkably high: 13.2 percent of the population perished in 1943 alone. xiii Nicholas Mansergh, ed., The Transfer of Power, Vol. III, 358-362, 437. xiv Kevin Smith, Conflict over Convoys, 159. xv W.K. Hancock and M.M. Gowing, British War Economy, 357; C.B.A. Behrens, Merchant Shipping and the Demands of War, 325. Also see Note No. 54 in Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War, 307. xvi MT 59/621, “Brief for Shipping Committee”: MT 59/694, “Brief for the Shipping Committee.” In total 80,000 tons were received, of which 30,000 tons had been previously promised to the army and 20,000 tons were re-exported by India. xvii Churchill Papers CHAR 23/11, W.P. (43) 106, “Demands on Shipping Resulting from Overseas Cereal Requirements.” xviii Nanavati Papers, Vol. II, 441, 447. xix C.B.A. Behrens, Merchant Shipping and the Demands of War, 320, 340-42.

xx Nicholas Mansergh, Transfer of Power, Vol. IV, 76-79, 155-157; MT 59/631, “Wheat for India.” xxi Ministry of Transport Papers MT 59/631, “Wheat for India.” xxii Ministry of Transport Papers MT 59/631, “Note of a Meeting held to discuss Cross Trade Programme Requirements,” August 11, 1943. xxiii John Barnes and David Nicholson, eds., The Empire at Bay, 950; Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, Vol. II, 1496; War Office Papers WO 208/809 “Indian Famine: Bose Offers 100,000 Tons of Rice.” xxiv W.K. Hancock, Statistical Digest of the War, 167; W.K. Hancock and M.M. Gowing, British War Economy, 436. xxv Cherwell Papers, H307/1.