As protesters in Britain dishonor George Floyd’s memory by attacking statues of various imperialist figures from British history, Winston Churchill has become a target.
At least, Churchill’s Parliament Square statue has been scrawled with graffiti calling him a racist. Although most Britons see this slander of the World War II leader as absurd, others are more circumspect. At CNN, for example, Jack Guy frames the attack on Churchill alongside the suggestion that the former prime minister was responsible for the 1943-1944 Bengal famine. That famine killed more than 1 million Indians.
The reality?
While Churchill could have done more to mitigate the famine’s suffering, doing so would have sacrificed exigent war interests. Churchill made the right decision to prioritize the latter interests.
The famine occurred following floods that had gutted public health and transportation infrastructure. This was reflected in the fact that malaria was Bengal’s dominant cause of death in both 1943 and 1944. Land management policies were also exceptionally dysfunctional at the time, further complicating efficient food production.
But while the British Raj had some responsibility for these failings, they were predominantly a function of local power struggles and cronyism. At the same time, Bengal’s surging population (partly a consequence of improved famine control standards introduced by the Raj) made demands for food ever greater.
Then, there was the war.
Consumed by needs for the fight against Japanese forces in Burma (just next door), a shortage of skilled labor and materials afflicted Bengal. The British Raj had to grapple with all these concerns and also with Subhas Chandra Bose’s Axis collaborator army.
How did Churchill respond to the famine?
The historian Andrew Roberts offers insight in his 2019 biography, Churchill.
Roberts records how Churchill first responded to the growing catastrophe: “On August 4th 1943, Churchill agreed that 150,000 tons of Iraqi barley and Australian wheat should be sent to Bengal, insisting on 24 September that ‘something must be done;’ he was also ‘very strong on the point that the Indians are not the only people who are starving in this war.'”
Roberts explains that “these words, and others like them recorded by [Leopold] Amery in his diary, sound harsh today but reflected reality, and after uttering them, Churchill agreed to the dispatch of an extra 50,000 tons of food.”
Others suggest that Churchill’s well-documented racially prejudicial humor underlines why he didn’t do more to alleviate Bengali suffering. But though popular with today’s wokeness warriors, such arguments make one of the historian’s greatest errors: judging circumstances by the context of contemporary times. As Lawrence James notes in Churchill and Empire, Churchill’s jokes were “part of the bedrock of contemporary British humor and were regular features of Punch during the interwar years and after.”
Does that justify Churchill’s jokes? No. But neither does it mean that Churchill wanted Bengalis to die.
As Roberts notes, “The awful truth of the famine is that the toll on shipping since the start of the war meant that the Allies were stretched to breaking point in 1943-1944, and the Cabinet placed the Russian and transatlantic convoys, and the military shipping necessities of operations against Germany in Sicily and mainland Italy, and for amphibious attacks such as Salerno and Anzio, above the pressing need to feed the millions of starving Bengalis — assuming that the ships could have negotiated the Bay of Bengal safely.”
Churchill made the right call.
At least 70 million people died in the battles, sieges, and horrors of World War II. We mustn’t lose sight of that point, for it explains why Churchill’s effort (along with U.S. Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin) to bring the war’s expedient end was rightly all-consuming — even if it took a terrible toll.
