March 7, 2015

Finest Hour 158, Spring 2013

Page 25

By Raymond A. Callahan

WHILE RECOGNIZING THE TOWERING NATURE OF CHURCHILL’S ACCOMPLISHMENTS, IT IS PAST  TIME TO RETRIEVE FROM THE SHADOWS TO WHICH HE CONSIGNED IT THE FINAL ACT OF THE OLD INDIAN ARMY, WITHOUT WHICH THE BRITISH EMPIRE’S LAST GREAT VICTORY WOULD SIMPLY NOT HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE.

Churchill understood that India and its army were vital components in British world power, and would have to remain at Britain’s disposal if that power were to endure. It was in this spirit that he approached Indian matters during the war. Politics were to be shut down: nothing was to be allowed to interfere with the maximum mobilization of Indian resources to sustain the imperial war effort. Churchill was remarkably successful in sustaining these policies for five years, despite pressure from within his own government, not to mention his American allies….The Indian Army contributed more divisions than Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa combined.

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Churchill and the Raj is a difficult subject—and one that he himself largely evaded in his war memoirs. It has yet to draw from historians the scrutiny it deserves. (Of course, sensationalist writers have made absurd charges in relation to the Bengal Famine, but that is not serious history.*) This brief note is certainly not the in-depth study the subject deserves, but rather an exploration of a topic that will have to figure in that study.

From the late 18th century Britain had two armies. There was the regular British army, relatively small and kept that way by problems of finance, recruitment, and the lingering suspicion of a standing army. Then there was the Indian Army, the creation of the East India Company (EIC), free to the British taxpayer, and capable of almost indefinite expansion. It was this second army that became the Empire’s cost-free strategic reserve. From the time the EIC’s sepoys took Manila in 1762, the potent combination of the Royal Navy and the Indian Army projected British power, cheaply and effectively, everywhere in the eastern world from Egypt to China. It was one of the basic facts about Britain’s global power until India’s independence in 1947. But a fact about the era in which Churchill’s views about India were formed is often overlooked.

In 1857 the Bengal Army, the largest of the EIC’s armies—it had three, known collectively as the Indian Army—exploded in mutiny, triggering other revolts. The causes of the “Great Sepoy Mutiny” are too complex to be considered here. It was, however, the greatest challenge the Raj ever faced, and in Britain its suppression was considered an epic saga of British courage and resolve—the most written-about imperial episode of the Victorian era.

In its aftermath, the Crown replaced the EIC as India’s ruler, but the Indian Army remained. The Raj (and much else) could not be sustained without it. But in many British minds a lingering distrust of Sepoy loyalty remained as well—despite the facts that the other two EIC forces, the Madras and the Bombay Armies, remained loyal, and that most of the troops who put down the mutiny/revolt were Indians. It would become clear from subsequent events that Churchill’s was one of those minds.

Churchill’s personal encounter with India as a subaltern in the 4th Hussars did little to give him a nuanced view of the Indian Army. British cavalry officers in his day tended to look down on most of the rest of the British Army. “Black troops”—and their far-from-socially-elite British officers—were beneath their notice.

Churchill’s war reporting from the Northwest Frontier, and the book spun out of it, The Story of the Malakand Field Force (still one of the best accounts of an Indian frontier campaign) displays little real knowledge of the Indian Army. His remarks on the Sikhs are wrong and no other Indian units (which of course contributed the bulk of the force) are accorded any ink—except the Gurkhas, whom he never actually saw in action, but clearly he shared the British love affair with these formidable soldiers.

Once Churchill left India he had only marginal contact with its affairs until the 1930s. This was unfortunate since he had a remarkable capacity for absorbing quantities of information about anything within his official responsibility—and an equally impressive ability to face the realities with which those responsibilities confronted him. As it was, when he again engaged with the Raj—in his vain five-year campaign to derail what became the 1935 Government of India Act—his observations about the Indian Army proved that the ideas of his youth still shaped his views.

The “warrior races” of India, Churchill insisted—and much more in this vein—would never tolerate the rule of the “Hindu priesthood.” In fact the Indian Army was then grappling with “Indianisation”—giving to Indians the King’s commission and thus equality with British officers. This would ultimately transform the Raj profoundly—signal its end, in fact, since an Indian-officered Indian Army would no longer be usable as the Raj’s praetorian guard.

There are varying interpretations of WSC’s motivations in opposing the 1935 Act but one thing is clear: whatever else he may not have known, or may have misinterpreted about India, he understood that it and its army were absolutely vital components of British world power, and would have to remain at Britain’s disposal if that power were to endure.

It was in this spirit that Churchill approached Indian matters during the war. Politics were to be shut down, and no further political concessions offered. Above all nothing was to be allowed to interfere with the maximum mobilization of Indian resources to sustain the imperial war effort. He was remarkably successful in sustaining these policies for five years, despite pressure from within his own government, not to mention his American allies.

Meanwhile the Indian Army grew from some 180,000 in 1939 to 2.5 million in 1945—history’s largest voluntarily enlisted force. It was vital to the British war effort from the Mediterranean and the Middle East to Burma.

The Indian Army contributed more divisions than Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa combined. At war’s end the British Eighth Army in Italy comprised not only New Zealand and South African divisions but three Indian divisions (and two of Poles). The “British” 14th Army in Burma was nearly 70% Indian and only 13% British (African troops outnumbered British in that “Forgotten Army”). It was 14th Army, under the command of an Indian Army officer, General Sir William Slim, which won in 1944-45 the war’s greatest victory of operational maneuver under the British flag.

The Indian Army’s war was fought in an equipment-poor environment (in contrast to the lavish support enjoyed by Montgomery in North Africa and Europe). It also never enjoyed any of the esteem that the Prime Minister bestowed on Monty, Alexander and the armies they commanded. In 1941 General Sir Claude Auchinleck, an Indian Army officer who had just moved from Commander-in-Chief, India to command the Middle East theater, pressed Churchill for more equipment for the expanding Indian Army (which was at that point raising armored divisions without having a single modern tank). Churchill’s response was to ask whether, if given modern weaponry, Indian soldiers would point their guns in the right direction.

In May 1943, the PM berated Auchinleck’s successor in India, Sir Archibald Wavell, about the Indian Army’s failure in loyalty—in 1857. He constantly brushed aside the efforts of Leo Amery, his Secretary of State for India and Burma, to inform him about the realities of the Indian Army’s war. He picked up a phrase from Orde Wingate (a controversial British regular officer who caught WSC’s imagination in 1943 and was, consequently, advanced well beyond his professional merits): the Indian Army was merely a system of “outdoor relief”—i.e., a method of distributing welfare payments. He was still hurling the phrase at Amery in the spring of 1945 as Bill Slim’s great—and overwhelmingly Indian—14th Army was winding up a campaign that led a recent conference at Britain’s National Army Museum to rank Slim with Marlborough and Wellington as one of Britain’s greatest generals. (Incidentally, Montgomery failed to make the cut.)

This is a sad story of unshakeable mistrust and disdain, and what makes it even stranger is that the Prime Minister clung to his prejudices in the face of striking evidence to the contrary. With British prestige battered by six months of catastrophic defeat, in August, 1942, Gandhi launched his “Quit India” movement, which quickly turned into an insurrection, the “Congress Revolt”—the greatest challenge the Raj had faced since 1857. At that moment there was one complete British field force division in all of India. The revolt was put down largely by Indian troops, including new recruits, many commanded by newly commissioned Indian junior officers. It is hard to imagine a greater testimonial to the Indian Army’s institutional strength—or a more definitive refutation of Churchill’s doubts about its loyalty. Yet it seems to have made no difference to his views.

Churchill left office in July 1945. Twenty-five months later, the British Raj came to an end. One of the factors that hastened that end was the transformation of the Indian Army. The only way to provide officers for a 2.5 million man army was to commission Indians—lots of them. In 1939, only about 400 of the Indian Army’s 5000 officers were Indians (all of them subalterns or captains). In 1945 the figure stood at 14,000—a third of the officer corps, many of them field grade, combat-experienced and decorated. Already in 1942, Indian Army headquarters had recognized that the expectations of its Indian officers were for postwar independence. The rapid termination of the Raj had multiple causes, but one of the most important—and least studied—was the momentous change in the Indian Army, an ironic consequence of Churchill’s (and Britain’s) commitment to total victory.

In an astonishing burst of energy and creativity, Churchill produced most of his six volumes of war memoirs between his defeat at the polls in 1945 and his October 1951 return to Downing Street. In those volumes he shaped a vision of the war that dominated its discussion for a generation and remains very influential to this day. The Indian Army is largely absent. There is no recognition of the scale of the Indian military contribution or its critical role in the Middle East, North Africa and Italy. Britain’s war against Japan, largely sustained by the Indian Army, is particularly slighted. The chapters dealing with Burma were drafted by the author’s military assistant, Lieutenant General Sir Henry Pownall, and were notable for the absence of the Indian Army, as such. It took protests from British veterans of the 14th Army, conveyed personally to Churchill by Slim (by then Chief of the Imperial General Staff) to get coverage in the final volume of the great 1944-45 campaign that reconquered Burma. Churchill spent more time on America’s Pacific campaign than he did on the army that made it possible for Britain to wage global war.

Why? Racism has been suggested as an explanation, but that is much too simple. Churchill certainly, as Geoffrey Best has observed, believed that white Europeans (and their offspring about the globe) had reached a higher level of development than others; but that was the dominant view of his generation (and remains alive today, albeit disguised, often quite thinly). Only by retrospectively and anachronistically applying our standards to him can we call him a racist (although he could say some quite unpleasant things).

The explanation of Churchill’s attitude toward the Indian Army lies, I believe, elsewhere: in faulty historical memories, class attitudes and his vision of empire. In his youth he absorbed the prevalent (and inaccurate) beliefs, born of the 1857 Mutiny, about the questionable reliability of Indian soldiers and their absolute dependence on British leadership. As a young man he also acquired the social and professional disdain that officers of the regular British Army (especially its “good” regiments) felt for the non-elite British officers of the Indian Army and the soldiers they commanded. Nothing thereafter was allowed to disturb these convictions. Then there was his absolutely correct belief that the Raj was essential to British global power and his anguish at the possibility of losing India. It was all too painful to contemplate beforehand—or write about afterwards.

Even the finest leaders have blind spots. India and its army were perhaps the greatest of Churchill’s. While recognizing the towering nature of his accomplishments, it is past time to retrieve from the shadows to which he consigned it the astonishing final act of the old Indian Army, without which the British Empire’s last great victory would simply not have been possible.

*See Arthur Herman, “Absent Churchill, India’s 1943 Famine Would Have Been Worse” (review of Churchill’s Secret War), FH 149: 50-51.

Dr. Callahan is Professor of History Emeritus, University of Delaware. His last article in these pages was “The Strange Case of the Prime Minister and the Fighting Prophet” (Orde Wingate), FH 139: 36-39. This essay is a condensed version of his chapter, “Did Winston Matter? Churchill and the Indian Army, 1940-1945,” in Alan Jeffrey and Patrick Rose (eds.), The Indian Army 1939-1947: Experience and Development (London: Ashgate, 2012).