would not be used to feed the military or be exported from India. Naturally enough, the cabinet found the first of these demands unacceptable and no deal was done. Bose himself would be killed in a plane crash in Taiwan – on the way to Japan – in the last days of the war in 1945.
By then, 3 to 5 million Bengali deaths from famine had occurred.
Linlithgow’s successor as viceroy, Field Marshal Archibald Wavell, was a cultivated soldier and held, as well as hisviceregal post, the military role of commander-in-chief for India. Unlike most generals, Archibald Wavell had published his own anthology of poems, entitled Other Men’s Flowers , and a biography of the World War I commander Sir Edmund Allenby, a work that showed sensitivity for colonised people, the Egyptians and the Arabs in particular. He had himself lost an eye in that conflict. Married to a rather distracted woman named Eugenie, he may have been a non-practising homosexual. He enjoyed the company of his homosexual aide, Major Peter Coates, and in London stayed at the house of one of Coates’s boyfriends, the politician Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, a residence archly described by the British diplomat Harold Nicolson as a mixture of ‘baroque and rococo and what-ho and oh-no-no’.
Wavell knew from experience a military emergency when he saw one – he had been involved in a number of them. At the beginning of the war he had led a small and highly successful force in North Africa and conquered an Italian army that outnumbered it many times over. He had angered Churchill by reminding him that a huge death toll was not a sign of military success. But then he had been ordered to halt his advance into Libya and send troops to Greece. With his forces strung out between Greece and North Africa, those remaining in North Africa were surprised by the German General Rommel’s Afrika Korps’ counter attack of April 1941. Greece was a debacle, and the withdrawal to Crete no better. Then, as commander-in-chief in south-east Asia, he presided over the collapse of Singapore, Burma and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia).
Churchill did not blame Wavell for any of these disasters,which were due sometimes to the folly and incompetence of generals under his command and often to the overwhelming numbers of the Japanese army. The prime minister still thought him one of the best generals of his era, though he also irascibly once said of him that he should be running a country golf course.
Wavell had come close to being appointed governor-general of Australia, a post that would have sidelined him for the rest of this historic phase. He seized the posting to India with some gratitude. In the months leading up to Lord Linlithgow’s retirement, he waited in London and spent each morning reading documents at the India office, developing a plan. He intended to tell Gandhi and Nehru, as well as others, including Mohammad Jinnah, that the British wanted self-government for India as early as possible. Then he proposed to leave them in a room with access to a secretariat of experts on matters such as constitutional and international law, so they could reach a constitutional answer to India’s problems, which he would then do his best to implement. Wavell’s argument was that though this was unorthodox, orthodox methods had already failed. Churchill and his cabinet were appalled at his plans. One leading bureaucrat said that Wavell gave no impression of being the strong ruler that a great soldier might be expected to be.
While Wavell was sitting in deliberations with the prime minister, India Secretary Leopold Amery pushed a note across the table that said that Churchill knew as much about India as George III did about the American colonies. From this and other signs, Wavell decided that the cabinet was ‘not honest in its expressed desire to make progress in India’. It would beleft for peacetime, another prime minister and another viceroy to negotiate Indian independence.
On the
By then, 3 to 5 million Bengali deaths from famine had occurred.
Linlithgow’s successor as viceroy, Field Marshal Archibald Wavell, was a cultivated soldier and held, as well as hisviceregal post, the military role of commander-in-chief for India. Unlike most generals, Archibald Wavell had published his own anthology of poems, entitled Other Men’s Flowers , and a biography of the World War I commander Sir Edmund Allenby, a work that showed sensitivity for colonised people, the Egyptians and the Arabs in particular. He had himself lost an eye in that conflict. Married to a rather distracted woman named Eugenie, he may have been a non-practising homosexual. He enjoyed the company of his homosexual aide, Major Peter Coates, and in London stayed at the house of one of Coates’s boyfriends, the politician Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, a residence archly described by the British diplomat Harold Nicolson as a mixture of ‘baroque and rococo and what-ho and oh-no-no’.
Wavell knew from experience a military emergency when he saw one – he had been involved in a number of them. At the beginning of the war he had led a small and highly successful force in North Africa and conquered an Italian army that outnumbered it many times over. He had angered Churchill by reminding him that a huge death toll was not a sign of military success. But then he had been ordered to halt his advance into Libya and send troops to Greece. With his forces strung out between Greece and North Africa, those remaining in North Africa were surprised by the German General Rommel’s Afrika Korps’ counter attack of April 1941. Greece was a debacle, and the withdrawal to Crete no better. Then, as commander-in-chief in south-east Asia, he presided over the collapse of Singapore, Burma and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia).
Churchill did not blame Wavell for any of these disasters,which were due sometimes to the folly and incompetence of generals under his command and often to the overwhelming numbers of the Japanese army. The prime minister still thought him one of the best generals of his era, though he also irascibly once said of him that he should be running a country golf course.
Wavell had come close to being appointed governor-general of Australia, a post that would have sidelined him for the rest of this historic phase. He seized the posting to India with some gratitude. In the months leading up to Lord Linlithgow’s retirement, he waited in London and spent each morning reading documents at the India office, developing a plan. He intended to tell Gandhi and Nehru, as well as others, including Mohammad Jinnah, that the British wanted self-government for India as early as possible. Then he proposed to leave them in a room with access to a secretariat of experts on matters such as constitutional and international law, so they could reach a constitutional answer to India’s problems, which he would then do his best to implement. Wavell’s argument was that though this was unorthodox, orthodox methods had already failed. Churchill and his cabinet were appalled at his plans. One leading bureaucrat said that Wavell gave no impression of being the strong ruler that a great soldier might be expected to be.
While Wavell was sitting in deliberations with the prime minister, India Secretary Leopold Amery pushed a note across the table that said that Churchill knew as much about India as George III did about the American colonies. From this and other signs, Wavell decided that the cabinet was ‘not honest in its expressed desire to make progress in India’. It would beleft for peacetime, another prime minister and another viceroy to negotiate Indian independence.
On the
Similar Books
