Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (42 page)

According to Amery, Churchill’s statement ‘evoked ringing cheers’ from Conservatives but ‘greatly upset many of the Labour people, including a good many moderates’.
²⁰⁵
The reaction of the Indian nationalist press was predictably angry. It pointed out that, having negotiated with Congress for so long, not least during the Cripps mission, it was a bit rich for the British government to start denouncing it as unrepresentative. The
Hindu
claimed that Churchill had packed more half-truths and venom into a few hundred words than he had given to the Commons during the passage of the India Bill.
²⁰⁶
The Calcutta
Sunday Statesman
’s ‘Indian Observer’ – a columnist billed as holding ‘a representative Indian central point of view’ – remarked more thoughtfully that ‘such anger, such fury, such desperation have many times preluded the sullen but inevitable reversal of an unworkable policy’.
²⁰⁷
For its part, the Congress-supporting India League, based in London, produced a pamphlet designed as a point-by-point answer to what Churchill had said.
²⁰⁸
Jinnah criticized the speech too. He, of course, agreed with Churchill that Congress was unrepresentative but argued that the British government attached insufficient value to Muslim cooperation. Churchill had referred to the 90 million Muslims opposed to Congress and had said that they had a right of self-expression. But, Jinnah asked rhetorically, ‘Is this the only value you attach to the Mussalmans and the Muslim League, that they are opposed to the Congress, which is a fact, and they have the right to self-expression, which is a self-evident truth? Is that all he has to say?’
²⁰⁹

The impact in America was also negative. ‘Winston’s statement on India will not have done us much good here’, Halifax complained to Eden. ‘Why must he talk about
white
troops, when “the British army in India” would have served his purpose just as well?’
²¹⁰
Cripps, who felt that he was being sidelined from the running of the war, was at this time pondering resignation. He realized, though, that he could not resign over India. ‘Churchill’s speech harmful and foolish; but it contains the specific pledge in words that the Cripps offer holds.’
²¹¹
This, perhaps, is the correct way to read Churchill’s statement. Although he used it as opportunity to encourage his Tory supporters and to vent some of his longstanding prejudices, he also ensured that he protected his political flank. Indeed, his reiteration of the Cripps offer was highly significant, not because there was any chance that it would now be accepted, but because he now associated himself personally with the promise of independence after the war. It was evidence that his political weakness during 1942 had dragged him from his entrenched position, although he drew attention away from this with his verbal pot-shots at Congress.

VII

In October 1942 Smuts arrived in London for consultations, at Churchill’s pressing invitation. Invited to address both Houses of Parliament, he was introduced by the doddering Lloyd George who, if not actually on his last legs, was certainly on his penultimate ones. Afterwards, Chips Channon saw all three men sitting together in the Smoking Room. ‘Winston and Smuts, who had once fought each other in the Boer War, were having a drink together, and there were glasses before them. Of the three only the bronzed South African looked fit.’
²¹²
According to taste, Smuts’s speech was either a) full of ‘every commonplace that we have all been trying to avoid for years’ (Harold Nicolson), or b) ‘finely phrased and inspired by a lofty conception of what the British Commonwealth means today’ (Leo Amery).
²¹³
It did contain at least some substance, in the form of a clear hint that an offensive against Hitler was coming.
²¹⁴
Two days later, on 23 October, the British Eighth Army under General Montgomery attacked Axis forces at El Alamein. (Over half of Monty’s 195,000 men were British, and most of the rest came from India, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.) Eleven days of fierce fighting followed, at the end of which Rommel began to retreat – and carried on for 1,500 miles. On 7 November British and US troops landed in Morocco and Algeria.
²¹⁵
‘Now this is not the end’, Churchill said in a speech at the Mansion House in London on 10 November. ‘It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’
²¹⁶

A later passage in the same speech is equally famous:

We mean to hold our own. I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. For that task, if ever it were prescribed, someone else would have to be found and, under democracy, I suppose the nation would have to be consulted.
²¹⁷

According to
The Times
, his comments were greeted with loud cheers.
²¹⁸
The context for the remarks deserves some consideration. In general, they can be seen as a rejection of the contemporary (and particularly American) demand that in future colonies should be subjected to some form of international control or ‘trusteeship’.
²¹⁹
More specifically, they may well have been intended as a rebuttal of Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate defeated by Roosevelt in 1940, who had called for the ‘orderly but scheduled abolition of the colonial system’.
²²⁰
It is also worth noting that they came immediately after a passage in which Churchill emphasized that Britain would not exploit its military triumphs to gain territory at the expense of France – she had no ‘acquisitive appetites or ambitions’ in North Africa or anywhere else, he said.
²²¹
Thus his insistence that Britain retain existing possessions was modulated by the assurance that she was not engaged upon a war of conquest. On the other hand, his observations about democracy were not merely benign musings about the workings of the system.
²²²
Churchill was well aware of the prestige he could now command and was implicitly threatening colleagues that, if they opposed him on imperial issues, he would be prepared to force a general election, even during wartime. In any such election, he may well have thought, they, not he, would be swept away.

With his position strengthened immeasurably by the first clear signs of victory, Churchill was able to demote Cripps, who had argued with him over military strategy, from the War Cabinet to the Ministry of Aircraft Production. His challenges as Prime Minister were still enormous. At home, the publication of William Beveridge’s famous report, calling for a major post-war expansion of social services, helped trigger a groundswell of radical opinion that would in due course sweep the Conservatives from office; Churchill himself saw such planning for peacetime as a distraction from the current war effort. At the same time, his ‘liquidation’ remarks drew inevitable criticism. ‘The Indians will come to dislike Allied successes if they merely increase British arrogance, as evidenced by Mr Churchill’s speech’, said Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, a prominent Indian politician known for his support for the war.
²²³
Nehru wrote in his prison diary that he was pleased with Churchill’s plain speaking as it at least made the situation obvious: ‘How can any decent Indian submit to this or agree to cooperate with Churchill and his underlings passes my comprehension.’
²²⁴
Wendell Willkie slammed Churchill’s defence of ‘the old imperialistic order’, and there were other signs of a revival in the USA of the picture of Britain ‘as a stronghold of reactionary imperialism’.
²²⁵
Nevertheless, the criticism was not all one way. There was, of course, support from some fairly predictable quarters, such as the
National Review
and the British Empire Union in Australia.
²²⁶
The Liberal MP Jimmy de Rothschild emphasized his friend Churchill’s belief that the Empire must march hand in hand with freedom: ‘Such is the Empire which he does not wish to liquidate.’
²²⁷
Perhaps more surprisingly, the
Washington Post
said Willkie was talking nonsense, as Churchill had not been defending the old order but only ‘the right of the British Empire to exist as an entity’. In many countries the Empire had demonstrated its liberality over the years, and as regards India, ‘about which so much emotional confusion exists in this country’, Churchill and his government were pledged to give it freedom after the war. The
Post
believed Britain would live up to this promise.
²²⁸

Of course, it was the reaction in the White House that was especially crucial. Mackenzie King, visiting Roosevelt there in December, discussed Churchill’s speech with the President. According to Mackenzie King:

He said really the thing that did do harm was the reference to the liquidation of the Empire. I said that was an answer to Willkie. I said it gave him a great internal kick to say certain of these things. We had a laugh over it. He said he [Churchill] is sort of a puck, and spoke of his being a sort of cherub in appearance here after being up late at night.
²²⁹

In other words, Churchill had more or less got away with it, aided by his reputation for mischief and by the fact (or perception) that his wicked words had been intended as a poke in the eye for one of FDR’s adversaries. Roosevelt could easily afford him a little indulgence. But as the balance of power shifted from Britain to America in the final years of the war, it seemed increasingly likely that Churchill would be forced to preside over imperial liquidation after all.

8

HANDS OFF THE BRITISH EMPIRE, 1942–1945

At the end of 1943, a year which had seen a string of Axis defeats, Josef Goebbels wrote an article in the newspaper
Das Reich
under the headline ‘Tottering Colossus’. ‘Britain will lose this war in the political sphere, even if she should succeed in winning it in the military sphere.’ He argued: ‘The British Empire is selling out, and one day its friends and foes will join to swallow it up.’ Although Churchill could have obtained a ‘cheap peace’ in 1940 he had recklessly continued the war: ‘Now Britain, having reached the point when she cannot back out, finds herself forced to give in to the ambitions of her more powerful Allies.’
¹
The idea that the British Empire was ‘dissolving like a lump of sugar in the Roosevelt teacup’ had been a theme of Axis propaganda for some time.
²
More recently, such claims have found an echo at the right-wing end of the historiographical spectrum, in the suggestion that Churchill pursued a false path, ‘mortgaged’ Britain to the United States and failed to preserve the Empire.
³
(The fact of economic dependence on the USA has also been a cause of regret on the left, even if the Empire itself is not missed.) Yet, if Britain emerged from the war hugely weakened and overshadowed by America and the Soviet Union, it is misleading to suggest that Churchill’s grand strategy was to blame for this. German talk of a ‘cheap peace’ was naturally quite empty – and so, although at times he seemed to place excessive faith in the Atlantic Alliance and in his personal relationship with Roosevelt (and also in that with Stalin), there was no alternative course Churchill could have taken that would have preserved the power of the British Empire in the longer run. The final years of the war were to see his dawning but incomplete realization of the unpalatable fact of its decline.

I

Some imperial problems appeared to Churchill as a distraction from the war effort. In January 1943 Gandhi announced his intention to fast for twenty-one days. Although he was not planning to fast to death, it seemed a likely outcome for a frail man of seventy-three. If this were to happen while he was still in custody, calamity threatened. As Cripps told the Cabinet, Gandhi was ‘such a semi-religious figure’ that his death in British hands would be ‘a great blow and embarrassment to us’.
⁴
When the fast began on 10 February, Churchill suspected it was a sham. ‘I have heard that Gandhi usually has glucose in his water when doing his various fasting antics’, he cabled Linlithgow, asking if this could be verified.
⁵
‘This may be the case but those who have been in attendance on him doubt it’, the Viceroy replied; the point was never proved, but Churchill remained sceptical.
⁶
With Gandhi apparently close to death, Hindu India followed the disquieting bulletins with high-pitched anxiety. Towards the end of February, Gandhi agreed to drink a small amount of fruit juice mixed with water and his health thus recovered somewhat; he broke the fast formally on 3 March. Churchill – himself suffering from pneumonia – succeeded in warding off the threat of American intervention in the crisis. ‘Am feeling definitely better now’, he told Harry Hopkins, FDR’s right-hand man, at the end of February. ‘So is Gandhi. [. . .] I am so glad that you did not get drawn in.’
⁷
‘What fools we should have been to flinch before all this bluff and sob-stuff’, he told Smuts exultantly.
⁸
He even prepared some remarks on these lines for a broadcast. He had always been sure, he said, that Gandhi ‘had not the slightest intention of starving himself to death or running any risk of squandering the world’s record nuisance value. [. . .] So the Battle of Gandhi is over, and all parties can rejoice in the victory.’
⁹
He had the good sense, however, not to use this passage when the time came to deliver the speech.