Brett Warnke's Providence Journal Review of Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II

By Brett Warnke

(Published in Providence Journal Sept. 16, 2010)

CHURCHILL’S SECRET WAR: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II,

by Madhusree Mukerjee.
Basic Books. 319 pages. $29.95.

When Prime Minsiter Clement Attlee was asked what his predecessor Winston Churchill had done to win the war, Attlee coldly said, "Talk about it."

Churchill indeed talked about it in his own version of history. But he was more than talk. He enticed an isolated America ever closer to a European war. He also relished the role of the warrior poet. The enduring image of an undaunted bulldog lording over London's urban rubble -- the eloquent old scrapper enjoying his own tryst with destiny -- caught the heart of a generation.

The best polemic to burn off this mythical fog is "The Medals of His Defeats" by Christopher Hitchens, while perhaps the most interesting book (I haven't read Richard Toye's new "Churchill's Empire") is David Reynolds "In Command of History." These along with Madhusree Mukerjee's new book, "Churchill's Secret War," give the contemporary reader an unvarnished new view of the engineer of America's "special relationship."

Mukerjee has written a book about an appalling, little known famine in Bengal, which unfolded during the final hours of the British Raj. Mukerjee's book is not a polemic but a clearly written and well-researched study. She explores the incompetence and cruelty of the Raj, especially the divide-and-rule strategy (which sliced the subcontinent in two) and the engineered degeneration of India from breadbasket into basketcase.

What the reader learns is that Churchill was not only "irrational" about India (as his closest advisers repeat in their memoirs) but that he used disturbing, racist language when pushed on the subject of Britain's empire. Churchill allowed his nostalgia for a bygone empire, a reactionary quack like his nefarious adviser Lord Cherwell, and his own ego to shape policies that led directly to the starvation of millions of Bengalis.

With precision and detail, Mukerjee takes the reader from the cold numbers -- the millions of tons of grain exported out of India -- to the food-bare villages of 1943 Bengal. What unfolds in chapters like "In the Village" seems less history and more Cormac McCarthy as peasant families, half-wild with hunger, desperately and often hopelessly struggle to survive.

Mukerjee writes with a careful hand, avoiding an easily dismissible rant and smartly allowing Churchill's closest advisors to color in the dark details. What the reader finds is a tale of deadly neglect and, Mukerjee would argue, intentional terror. She details the secret alliances, shady deals, imperial incompetence, and cynicism that led to hoarding and ultimately to catastrophe.

Brett Warnke (brettwarnke@gmail.com) is a freelance writer in Providence.