Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (40 page)

I fear that the Prime Minister’s treatment of Mr Menzies is somewhat to blame. He has never really understood the Far East problem and has deliberately starved Singapore in favour of home and the Middle East, without paying enough attention to the feelings of Australia. His policy was undoubtedly right, but he should have taken great pains to make Australia understand what was being done, and give them the impression that he was really taking them into his confidence.
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In a New Year message to his people, Curtin declared that Australia refused to ‘accept the dictum that the Pacific struggle must be treated as a subordinate segment of the general conflict’ and that the country now looked ‘to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom’.
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Churchill was ‘deeply shocked’ by Curtin’s ‘insulting’ comments.
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At the point he heard about them, he was paying a triumphant visit to Ottawa. In Washington he had suffered some kind of heart attack, a diagnosis which his doctor kept secret even from him. This did not stop him enjoying ‘meeting the crowds and adopting characteristic poses with cigar in his mouth, hat on end of cane, making the sign “V” with his two fingers, and generally stirring up enthusiasm like a 10-year old’.
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His discussions with Mackenzie King went smoothly, although ‘the P.M. is not really interested in Mackenzie King. He takes him for granted.’
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(Malcolm MacDonald had observed some months earlier that for his part the devout, abstemious King admired Churchill ‘enormously’ but did not ‘like him much’.)
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Churchill addressed the Canadian Parliament, telling of the prediction of defeatist French generals in the summer of 1940: ‘In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.’ ‘Some chicken!’ he observed. ‘Some neck!’
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Asked by journalists the next day if he thought Singapore could hold on, he answered, ‘I sure do.’
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In fact, the island fortress was doomed. Although supposedly impregnable, its defences were in chaos. The British population, still trying to live the imperial high-life, did not seem to take the war seriously, and the local commander was incompetent. As the end neared, Churchill instructed that the battle was to be fought to the bitter end: ‘Commanders and Senior Officers should die with their troops. The honour of the British Empire and of the British Army is at stake.’
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But the position was hopeless, and on 15 February 1942 the British surrendered. Around 130,000 men were taken prisoner, including the Australian Eighth Division.
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In his memoirs, Churchill wrote of it as ‘the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history’.
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German propagandists had a field day, talking of ‘Winston Churchill, the undertaker of the British Empire.’
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The situation in the Far East continued to deteriorate. Japan’s takeover of Burma was complete by the end of May, and a puppet regime was established in Rangoon, initially with the backing of the nationalist Thakin party. A few months earlier a visiting US journalist had detected that ‘the population was so venomously anti-British that it would welcome a Japanese occupation. Winston Churchill’s photograph in the newsreel theatres was hissed; Hitler’s was applauded.’
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A British public opinion survey by Mass-Observation, the sociological research organization, shortly after the fall of Singapore, threw up some interesting findings about attitudes to Empire. It found that many respondents felt a degree of guilt about the Empire and the way it had been administered. The collapse in the Far East, some of them felt, was a case of chickens coming home to roost. According to the report, however, there was a paradoxical consequence: ‘This feeling, in some cases, seems to mitigate any apprehension or regret people may feel at the present precarious position of parts of the Empire.’
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In other words, the catastrophe did not do as much damage to British morale as it might have done, because it helped assuage uneasy consciences. By contrast, Singapore’s fall left the Australians feeling exposed and even betrayed. (‘Australia in greatest possible flap’, wrote Oliver Harvey.)
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Their fears were heightened when, a few days later, the Japanese launched a major air attack on Darwin. Relations between Curtin and Churchill became increasingly fractious; some of their ‘acid and embarrassing’ exchanges of cables were made public at Curtin’s behest.
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H. V. Evatt, the Australian Minister for External Affairs, eager to bring about conciliation, complained, ‘The continuous rowing over unfortunate things and attempt to hector over more important things gravely impair Empire solidarity.’
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Churchill reacted badly to Australian pleas for a stronger commitment to her defence. He subjected High Commissioner Bruce to a ‘tirade’ in which he denounced the Curtin government as ‘impossible and quite unhelpful’. (As an example of unhelpfulness he cited the insistence on withdrawing Australian troops from besieged Tobruk in 1941, which in fact had been initiated by Menzies’s government.) He claimed that ‘they had pinned their hopes on the U.S.A., but now having found in Washington that those hopes were not likely to be realised they were falling back on the old country’.
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Curtin later told journalists ‘that Australia was Churchill’s “forgotten land” ’, but Churchill’s failure to do more for its defence can be justified.
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Japanese attacks on the country continued until November 1943 – yet, as even the Australian historian most critical of Churchill appears to concede, the country was too big and too far away from Japan to make a full-scale invasion practical.
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The concentration on the Middle East and Europe was sound war-winning strategy. If Australia’s worst fears proved exaggerated, however, the British did not handle them well. They were good at providing generalized assurances that, if a full-scale invasion occurred, they would drop everything they were doing and head off to help right away. This was an effective method of fobbing off requests for more immediate and concrete defence assistance, but it was bound to create bad feeling in the longer run. Churchill, who was under astonishing stress and physically unwell, can of course be forgiven for his dismissive approach to what must have seemed like remote problems. He shared, however, British officialdom’s patronizing attitude to the Australians, fulminating privately that – as the descendants of convicts – they ‘came of bad stock’.
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In spite of everything, Churchill remained an icon to be admired for many in Australia, although he was to be a more politically divisive figure there than he was in Canada and New Zealand.
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VI

The collapse in the Far East also pushed India up Churchill’s agenda. There had been little political progress there since he had entered Downing Street and Amery the India Office. Amery, indeed, had not really wanted the job, believing that Churchill made the offer in order to ‘side track’ him from ‘the real conduct of the war’.
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The appointment had had a somewhat mixed reception in India. Sir Maharaj Singh, who had been at Harrow with Amery, wrote to the Calcutta
Statesman
saying that Amery’s attitude to Indians when Colonial Secretary had been unsympathetic. ‘Latterly, however, his views broadened and he opposed Mr Winston Churchill in parliament on the Government of India Act of 1935. When I last saw him he frankly admitted that he saw no future for India except responsible Government.’
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Writing from India in May 1940, Linlithgow agreed with Amery that it was important to demonstrate that Britain was still committed to its earlier promises. He wrote that ‘there have, not unnaturally, been many suggestions that with Winston in the chair, a movement to the right was to be anticipated: and while your utterances, which have been very well received here, have done a good deal to offset that, the suspicion is still lurking, and the sooner the position is made clear, the better’.
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As his past record and his ‘flapdoodle’ comments on the Atlantic Charter indicated, Amery was no reforming radical, but even his modest efforts in support of change quickly brought him into conflict with the Prime Minister.

Amery believed that France’s capitulation in July 1940 had reawakened Congress sympathies for Britain, and that its leaders would be responsive to a promise of self-government after the war, if this were matched by an increased role for them immediately in the running of Indian affairs. None of this went far beyond what Zetland had proposed earlier in the year. But when Churchill discovered that Amery had been discussing these ideas with Linlithgow – who had acceded to them with a degree of reluctance – he accused him of misleading the Cabinet.
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Amery described in his diary how Churchill ‘said he would sooner give up political life at once, or rather go out into the wilderness and fight, than to admit a revolution which meant the end of the Imperial Crown in India’.
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In the end, Churchill agreed to redraft the statement himself, and although some of the substance was kept the wording became ‘rather woolly and lacking in precision’.
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The 1940 ‘August offer’, as it became known, did promise the expansion of the Viceroy’s Council, the creation of an Advisory War Council, and moves after the war to devise a new constitution.
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But the pledges as to the future seemed vague and – as Congress would only accept full independence – the offer proved a dead letter.

Gandhi then relaunched civil disobedience, although it did not receive much popular success. (Congress did not actively disrupt recruiting and by January 1941 the Indian army reached a strength of 418,000 – 37 per cent Muslim, 55 per cent Hindu.)
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In October 1940 Nehru was imprisoned. ‘I admire Winston Churchill for his ability and courage and determination and I admire the British people for the spirit they have shown in defence of their own freedom’, he wrote to the anti-colonialist MP Josiah Wedgwood. ‘But that admiration does not lead me to accept the British Prime Minister’s dictation in regard to India.’
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Although, by the end of the year, he and other political prisoners had been released and civil disobedience abandoned, British military setbacks further undermined confidence in the established order. By early 1942 even the moderate non-Congress nationalist Sir Tej Sapru was holding forth ‘with unusual bitterness, re. (1) lack of foresight for protection of Burma and Malaya, (2) stupidity of Government in India’.
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These remarks were recorded by Professor Reginald Coupland, the leading imperial historian of the age, who was visiting India to examine the constitutional situation. Coupland also found evidence of the ‘intensification of bitterness v. England, especially since [the] Atlantic Charter fiasco’.
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Nevertheless, there were some signs that Congress was looking for an opportunity to throw its weight behind the war effort.
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Sapru was to play a part in kick-starting the political process once more. In January 1942 he and other liberals sent an open telegram to Churchill, urging him to make ‘some bold stroke [of] far-sighted statesmanship’ in order to enlist India’s wholehearted cooperation in the war.
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Churchill was predictably reluctant to discuss constitutional issues in India ‘at a moment when [the] enemy is at the frontier’. He told Attlee that the Indian liberals would not be able to deliver the goods and that changes which put Congress in charge would not enhance the war effort. ‘The Indian troops are fighting splendidly, but it must be remembered that their allegiance is to the King Emperor, and that the rule of the Congress and Hindoo Priesthood machine would never be tolerated by a fighting race.’
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Linlithgow and Amery were agreed in not wanting any major new step, although the latter at least thought it important that Churchill say something conciliatory to correct the impression that he ‘means to concede nothing and therefore has deliberately avoided speaking about India’.
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Yet there were also other forces at work. Attlee, in line with the views held by others in the Labour Party, demanded something more concrete.
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Roosevelt too made his views clear. When Churchill visited Washington at Christmas 1941, the President raised the topic of India with him. Churchill recalled: ‘I reacted so strongly and at such length that he never raised it verbally again.’
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But this did not stop the President applying pressure in other ways. In a broadcast in February he asserted that the Atlantic Charter applied to ‘the whole world’. When journalists asked if he had been talking about India, he pointedly declined to comment.
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Furthermore, the fall of Singapore forced Churchill to reconstruct his government. Sir Stafford Cripps MP, who had just returned from his posting as Ambassador to the USSR, was appointed to the War Cabinet. Cripps was on the crest of a wave of public popularity and seemed a potential rival to the embattled Prime Minister. He also had distinct sympathies with Congress. Commenting on the origins of the so-called ‘Cripps offer’, Amery noted how ‘the pressure outside, upon Winston from Roosevelt, and upon Attlee & Co. from their own party,
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the admission of Cripps to the War Cabinet, suddenly opened the sluice gates, and the thing moved with a rush’.
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Alexander Cadogan wrote, ‘Poor old Winston, feeling deeply the present situation and the attacks on him, is losing his grip, I fear.’
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