Speaker 1: Pushkin. What was your mother's experience in the family. So
Speaker 1: your family is from Bengal.
Speaker 2: Yeah, my mother was about twelve years old and she
Speaker 2: was living in the city. She saw all of this
Speaker 2: starvation on the pavements, all of the people coming into
Speaker 2: the city from the villages because there was absolutely nothing
Speaker 2: left in the villages. And I had this question that
Speaker 2: no one seemed to have answered, which was why is
Speaker 2: it that no relief was sent?
Speaker 1: Motus read Mukiji, a writer and historian whose work I
Speaker 1: came across not long ago. I wanted you to read
Speaker 1: a passage from your book. Can you just read the
Speaker 1: first paragraph? I thought it was as a way of
Speaker 1: communicating to people what a famine is.
Speaker 2: In Shahpurabuda, village of the seventeenth Union of Pashkuratana, a
Speaker 2: Muslim weaver was unable to support his family and crazed
Speaker 2: with hunger, wandered away. His wife believed that he had
Speaker 2: drowned himself in the flooded Kashai River. Being unable to
Speaker 2: feed her two young sons for several days, she could
Speaker 2: no longer endure their suffering. She dropped the smaller boy,
Speaker 2: torn from her womb. The sparkle of her eye into
Speaker 2: the Kashai's frothing waters.
Speaker 1: My name is Malcolm Glabo. You're listening to Revisionist History,
Speaker 1: my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is
Speaker 1: about a famine that took place in India in nineteen
Speaker 1: forty three. Famines are the immediate result of things like
Speaker 1: droughts and crop failures, packs of nature, but their cause
Speaker 1: is invariably human wars misguided policies. Right now as I'm
Speaker 1: recording this, Venezuela is facing a malnutrition crisis. A country
Speaker 1: with vast oil wealth in one of the most fertile
Speaker 1: corners of the world doesn't have enough food. Humans cause that,
Speaker 1: not nature. So what was the human cause of the
Speaker 1: Bengal famine of nineteen forty three. I think it was
Speaker 1: a friendship, but that's a much more complicated story that
Speaker 1: begins on the other side of the world.
Speaker 3: It is my great privilege to welcome Sir Charles back
Speaker 3: to our community to present him to the audience in
Speaker 3: Cambridge tonight, mister President bean Price, ladies and gentlemen. I'm
Speaker 3: very pleased, I'm very honored to be here this evening.
Speaker 1: It's nineteen sixty Harvard University. One of England's great post
Speaker 1: war intellectuals, a scientist named C. P. Snow, is giving
Speaker 1: the Godkin Lecture at the Sanders Theater.
Speaker 3: Coming to Harvard, I felt as I felt before, that
Speaker 3: in many ways this is the most splendid university I
Speaker 3: ever set foot in, and I don't feel the faintly
Speaker 3: apologetic quiver that I get at some American institutions, which
Speaker 3: I can only admire as a distant spectator, and one
Speaker 3: for which I feel, sometimes happily that I have no responsibility.
Speaker 1: Snow was a physicist by training, a high ranking scientist
Speaker 1: in the British government during the Second World War, then
Speaker 1: a best selling novelist. Back when the Nazis thought they
Speaker 1: were going to win the war, they made a list
Speaker 1: of twenty eight hundred people they were going to hand
Speaker 1: over to the Gestapo. The minute they invaded, England was
Speaker 1: on the list. In the intervening years, Snow's reputation has grown.
Speaker 1: The Sanders Theater was packed, his lecture was so long
Speaker 1: it had to be broken up over three days and
Speaker 1: was broadcast live on television. But he does something unexpected.
Speaker 1: He devotes fully half of his speech to one person,
Speaker 1: someone whom I'm guessing few Americans had ever heard of.
Speaker 1: Frederick A. Linderman born April fifth, eighteen eighty six died
Speaker 1: July third, nineteen fifty seven, otherwise known as Lord Churwell.
Speaker 3: Lindermann was by ennions a very remarkable and a very
Speaker 3: strange man. He was a real heavyweight of personality.
Speaker 1: Remember Snow's a novelist, a student of character.
Speaker 3: Linderman was quite un English. I almost thought if you
Speaker 3: met him in middle Age, would have thought he was
Speaker 3: the kind of Central European business man that when you
Speaker 3: used to meet in the more expensive hotels in Italy.
Speaker 3: He was heavy featured, pallid all, was very correctly dressed.
Speaker 3: He spoke German at least as well as he did English,
Speaker 3: and indeed under his English there was a tone of
Speaker 3: German if you could hear him at all, because he
Speaker 3: always mumbled in an extraordinarily constricted fashion.
Speaker 1: Snow is obsessed with Linderman. That's the first thing that
Speaker 1: comes across in the lecture. Frederick Lindeman was the kind
Speaker 1: of man who obsessed people. People talked about Linderman, gossiped
Speaker 1: about him, gave speeches about him. I got obsessed with him.
Speaker 1: Last summer, and by the time my Lindomania was over,
Speaker 1: I'd read six books about him, six and I think
Speaker 1: I just scratched the surface about him.
Speaker 3: There hung a kind of atmosphere of indefinable malaise. You
Speaker 3: felt that he didn't understand his own life well, and
Speaker 3: he wasn't very good at coping with the major thing.
Speaker 3: His family was ven a mercy wish, harsh tongue. They
Speaker 3: had a malicious, sadistic sense of humor. But nevertheless you
Speaker 3: felt that somehow he was lost. And I said he
Speaker 3: was a figure and made a novelist.
Speaker 1: Fingers Ith Lindermann was born in Germany. His father was
Speaker 1: a wealthy German engineer. His mother was an American heiress
Speaker 1: like C. P. Snow. He was also a physicist and
Speaker 1: got his PhD in Berlin just before the First World War,
Speaker 1: at a time when Germany was the center of the
Speaker 1: world in physics. His thesis adviser compared his mind to
Speaker 1: that of Isaac Newton. He was a captivating conversationalist, a
Speaker 1: champion tennis player. He dressed like a nineteenth century count.
Speaker 1: He was a generalist who knew more than most specialists.
Speaker 1: He could demolish anyone in an argument. Once, after Lindermann
Speaker 1: had taken a post at Oxford, Albert Einstein came to
Speaker 1: a faculty dinner and afterwards all the young physicists gathered
Speaker 1: around Einstein as you would expect them to, and their
Speaker 1: first question was what do you think of Lindermann. That
Speaker 1: was what they wanted to know. Another night, at dinner,
Speaker 1: Einstein talked about some mathematical proposition for which he'd never
Speaker 1: been able to come up with a proof. The next
Speaker 1: day Lindermann casually mentioned that he had the answer. He
Speaker 1: figured it out in his bathtub. You can see why
Speaker 1: everyone was so obsessed with him.
Speaker 4: He impressed us immensely because he was very much the
Speaker 4: man of the world.
Speaker 1: This is a friend of his, George Thompson.
Speaker 4: He was a striking person to look at, tall, slim, dark,
Speaker 4: a young kind. People said he looked like Mephistopheles. I
Speaker 4: think this is that's quite fair to him. I think
Speaker 4: he was the most exciting person to talk physics to
Speaker 4: that I have ever talked to.
Speaker 1: Even Linderman's valet sung his praises when he was interviewed
Speaker 1: by the BBC.
Speaker 5: In thirty two years so closely with him, never once
Speaker 5: seen anything slightly even remotely suggesting impropriety. The one was
Speaker 5: occasion when he was showing some films to a lady
Speaker 5: and he was the spy, and he walked behind the
Speaker 5: curtain to mop his brew.
Speaker 1: But Linderman was also profoundly eccentric. He played tennis with
Speaker 1: a shirt button to the neck, long sleeves fastened to
Speaker 1: the wrist, thick black rib socks, and white boots. People
Speaker 1: who wore shorts disgusted him. Linderman's family was eccentric as well.
Speaker 1: He had a brother named Seppi, who lived in style
Speaker 1: on the Riviera with two Rose royces. One was white
Speaker 1: and driven by a black man, the other was black
Speaker 1: and chauffeured by an albino. I'm not making that up.
Speaker 1: In his lecture, Seep Snow spends an unusual amount of
Speaker 1: time just talking about Linderman's diet.
Speaker 3: He was the most cranky of all vegetarians. He wasn't
Speaker 3: only a vegetarian, but he would only eat very minute
Speaker 3: fractions of what you might regard as a vegetarian diet,
Speaker 3: and he lived mainly on cheese, what the whites of eggs,
Speaker 3: the yoaks being apparently two animal olive oil and rites.
Speaker 1: During the Second World War, there was hardly a drop
Speaker 1: of olive oil in England, and Lindenman got his brother, Charles,
Speaker 1: who was serving in the British embassy in Washington, to
Speaker 1: put a case of olive oil in the diplomatic pouch
Speaker 1: at regular intervals to be flown back to London. At
Speaker 1: one point, when the war is getting intense, his brother
Speaker 1: doesn't send him enough oil. Lindenman goes ballistic, tell Charles,
Speaker 1: I can only suppose that he attaches no value to
Speaker 1: what I am trying to do in the war effort,
Speaker 1: that he would as soon have me go to bed,
Speaker 1: and that is what I shall have to do unless
Speaker 1: he sends me more olive oil than Europe is burning.
Speaker 1: That's what's on his mind. Lindaman was thin skinned, defensive.
Speaker 1: He'd never admit when he was wrong. He'd never change
Speaker 1: his mind once it was made up. He thought he
Speaker 1: was an expert on everything, even when he wasn't. His
Speaker 1: friend Roy Harrad once wrote of him, he would not
Speaker 1: shrink from using an argument which he knew to be wrong,
Speaker 1: if by so doing he could tie up one of
Speaker 1: his professional opponents. That was his friend, saying that CP
Speaker 1: snow remembers one New Year's Day with Lindaman in Oxford.
Speaker 1: The British Crown had just published its honors list, people
Speaker 1: who were being recognized with knighthoods and ladyships.
Speaker 3: I remarked innocently enough that the English honors list must
Speaker 3: give much more pain than pleasure, because obvious to the
Speaker 3: people who were left out, a much greater number of
Speaker 3: the people who were in. And Linderman's face lit up.
Speaker 3: He got a very somber, heavy face with very sad
Speaker 3: brown eyes. Well, these brown eyes sparkle with savagely, and
Speaker 3: he said, of course it is. It wouldn't be any
Speaker 3: use getting an award if one didn't think of all
Speaker 3: the people who were miserable because they hadn't managed it.
Speaker 1: Oh, here's what another friend said of him. He was
Speaker 1: lacking in the bond of human sympathy for every chance
Speaker 1: person who was not brought into a personal relationship with him.
Speaker 1: I think that's the crucial fact about Linderman. One time
Speaker 1: he's asked for his definition of morality, and he answers,
Speaker 1: I define a moral action as one that brings advantage
Speaker 1: to my friends. Frederick Linderman was a man who put
Speaker 1: his friends first, to the exclusion of all other moral considerations.
Speaker 1: Now why does that matter? Why would CP snow devote
Speaker 1: three days to this man whom few people in the
Speaker 1: audience had ever heard of? Because of who Frederick Lindemann's
Speaker 1: best friend was. The man who defined a moral action
Speaker 1: as one that brings advantage to my friends was best
Speaker 1: friends with Winston Churchill.
Speaker 4: We are the masters of our fate. That the task
Speaker 4: which han't been set us is not above our strength,
Speaker 4: that it's pangs and toils are.
Speaker 5: Not beyond our endurance.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing you think of Churchill as a hero, the
Speaker 1: man who bravely led the fight against Adolf Hitler. But
Speaker 1: once I learned about his friend, I don't know. Churchill
Speaker 1: will never be the same for me.
Speaker 3: People have often speculated on why this friendship. I mean,
Speaker 3: an extremely cranky, non smoking, non drinking vegetarian doesn't sound
Speaker 3: the obvious soul mate for also, of course, so Winston.
Speaker 3: I can only answer that. But to give any sense suggestion,
Speaker 3: and you would have to know both men not only well,
Speaker 3: but as well as they knew each other. One can
Speaker 3: make guesses, But why any.
Speaker 1: Friendship Linderman and Churchill met each other in nineteen twenty
Speaker 1: one at a dinner in London. It was arranged by
Speaker 1: the Duke and Duchess of Westminster. Linderman would always say
Speaker 1: that only two people in the world were smarter than
Speaker 1: he was Einstein, of course, and Churchill and Churchill felt
Speaker 1: the same way. If you read some of the letters
Speaker 1: Churchill writes Linderman, they're almost worshipful. The psychologist Daniel Wegner
Speaker 1: has this beautiful concept called transactive memory, which is the
Speaker 1: observation that we don't just store information in our minds
Speaker 1: or in specific places. We store memories and understanding in
Speaker 1: the minds of the people we love. You don't need
Speaker 1: to remember your child's emotional relationship to her teacher because
Speaker 1: you know your wife will. You don't have to remember
Speaker 1: how to work the remote because you know your daughter will.
Speaker 1: That's transactive memory. Little bits of ourselves reside in other
Speaker 1: people's minds. You know, when one half of a long
Speaker 1: marriage dies and the surviving partner says that some part
Speaker 1: of them has died along with her spouse. Wegner has
Speaker 1: a heartbreaking riff about how that is actually true. When
Speaker 1: your partner dies, everything that you have stored in your
Speaker 1: partner's brain dies along with them. Churchill is in a
Speaker 1: transactive relationship with Lindemann. Think about it. Churchill is a
Speaker 1: man of the big picture, a visionary. He is a
Speaker 1: deep intuitive understanding of human psychology and history. But he
Speaker 1: struggles with depression. He has mood swings. He's impulsive, he's
Speaker 1: a gambler. He has no head for figures. Throughout his
Speaker 1: life he's always losing huge amounts of money on foolish investments.
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty five, Churchill spent the modern equivalent of
Speaker 1: sixty two thousand dollars on on Champagne in one year.
Speaker 1: Within a month of becoming Prime Minister, he was broke,
Speaker 1: literally broke. Here we have a man of volatile temperament
Speaker 1: with no way to bring order to his life. So
Speaker 1: who does he become best friends with? Frederick Lindemann. Someone disciplined,
Speaker 1: almost fanatically consistent, someone who ate the same three things
Speaker 1: every meal of every day. Someone so naturally at home
Speaker 1: in the world of numbers that, even as a child
Speaker 1: he would read newspapers and recite back reams and reams
Speaker 1: of statistics from memory. When Churchill becomes Prime Minister in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty, just after the war breaks out. He takes
Speaker 1: Lindeman with him, first as scientific advisor, then he gets
Speaker 1: him a job in the war cabinet as the Paymaster General,
Speaker 1: and Lindenman becomes a kind of gatekeeper to Churchill's mind.
Speaker 1: Over the course of the war. He writes Churchill two
Speaker 1: thousand memos, basically one a day, double spaced, large print,
Speaker 1: no more than a page or two, reducing some complicated
Speaker 1: question to its essence. Lindenman travels with Churchill to international conferences.
Speaker 1: He dines with him. Lindenman never drinks unless he's eating
Speaker 1: with Churchill, who's a big drinker. Then he drinks. He
Speaker 1: goes to Churchill's country house on the weekends. People spot
Speaker 1: them at three in the morning, sitting by the fire
Speaker 1: reading the newspaper together. One time, in Parliament, another MP
Speaker 1: criticizes Lindermann, and Churchill goes crazy. He says, love me,
Speaker 1: love my dog, and if you don't love my dog,
Speaker 1: you damn well can't love me. And that's high praise,
Speaker 1: because remember, to an Englishman of that generation, the only
Speaker 1: living creature you're allowed to show affection for is your dog.
Speaker 3: Drew occurred in nineteen forty two, and it occurred over
Speaker 3: a strategic bombing.
Speaker 1: The heart of Snow's lecture is about an argument that
Speaker 1: took place at the highest reaches of British government. The
Speaker 1: question was what was the best use of the Royal
Speaker 1: Air Force against the Germans?
Speaker 3: And it was quite right that the leaders of the
Speaker 3: West should be looking for anything which would play a
Speaker 3: serious part in the war.
Speaker 1: One school of thoughts says, let's use our bombers to
Speaker 1: support military activities, protecting ships against German U boats, destroying
Speaker 1: German factories. The other school of thought argues that bombing
Speaker 1: ought to serve a bigger strategic purpose. In other words,
Speaker 1: let's use bombing to break the will of the German people.
Speaker 1: Let's make their lives so miserable that they give up.
Speaker 1: The UK's military leadership was fanatical about the virtues of
Speaker 1: strategic bombing, but Churchill was on the fence. So what
Speaker 1: did he do? He turned to Lindenman, of course, and
Speaker 1: asked Lindemann to do a formal study of strategic bombing's effectiveness.
Speaker 1: That's the sort of analytical question Churchill had always turned
Speaker 1: over to his best friend and Linnemann says, let's look
Speaker 1: at the English cities of Hull and Birmingham, both of
Speaker 1: which were bombed heavily by the Germans. He analyzes the data,
Speaker 1: then writes one of his famous memos to Churchill. I'm
Speaker 1: quoting now from Lineman's memmo. Investigation seems to show that
Speaker 1: having one's house demolished is most dangerous to morale. People
Speaker 1: seem to mind it more than having their friends or
Speaker 1: even relatives killed. At Hull, signs of strain were evident.
Speaker 1: Though only one tenth of the homes were demolished. On
Speaker 1: the above figures, we could do as much harm to
Speaker 1: each of the fifty eight principal German towns. There seems
Speaker 1: little doubt that this would break the spirit of the
Speaker 1: German people. Strategic bombing is about making an all out
Speaker 1: assault on the homes and the lives of German civilians,
Speaker 1: not soldiers, innocent people. There's a moment in Snow's speech
Speaker 1: when he stops because he can't believe, with the benefit
Speaker 1: of fifteen years hindsight, that he was part of a
Speaker 1: government that thought that this was the right thing to do.
Speaker 3: What our descendants will think of us, I don't know
Speaker 3: Will they think, as Roger Williams said of some Indians,
Speaker 3: that we were wolves with the minds of men? Will
Speaker 3: they think we resigned our humanity?
Speaker 1: Eh? But you won't find any of those kinds of
Speaker 1: considerations in Linenman's memo to Churchill. It's very matter of fact.
Speaker 1: It's all about what the data says, except for one
Speaker 1: thing that's not what the data says. The Birmingham Hall
Speaker 1: study reached the exact opposite conclusion that Linnenmann did. It
Speaker 1: said that, and I'm quoting in neither town. Was there
Speaker 1: any evidence of panic resulting from either a series of
Speaker 1: raids or from a single rate. Lindenman also makes estimates
Speaker 1: on how many German homes the British could destroy. Other
Speaker 1: experts in the government critics of strategic bombing point out
Speaker 1: immediately that Lindemann's numbers are ridiculous, five or six times
Speaker 1: too high, based on obvious errors. Doesn't matter. Remember what
Speaker 1: one of Lindenman's friends said, he would not shrink from
Speaker 1: using an argument which he knew to be wrong, if
Speaker 1: by so doing he could tie up one of his
Speaker 1: professional opponents. Lindenman wanted strategic bombing, so Churchill went ahead
Speaker 1: and ordered the bombing of German cities.
Speaker 3: No one had ever thought how these bomber forces were
Speaker 3: really to be used. It was just an act of faith.
Speaker 3: This was a way to fight a war. And I
Speaker 3: think it's fair to say that Lindermann was with as
Speaker 3: usual extreme intensity, as committed to this faith as any
Speaker 3: men in England.
Speaker 1: So what happened? Most historians agree that strategic bombing was
Speaker 1: a disaster. One hundred and sixty thousand US and English
Speaker 1: airmen and hundreds of thousands of German civilians were killed
Speaker 1: in those bombing campaigns. Many of Europe's most beautiful cities
Speaker 1: were destroyed, and German morale didn't crack. The Germans fought
Speaker 1: to the bitter end. After the war, the Nobel Prize
Speaker 1: winning physicist Patrick Blackett wrote a devastating essay where he
Speaker 1: said that the war could have been won six months
Speaker 1: or even a year earlier, if only the British should
Speaker 1: use their bombers more intelligently. There should have been a
Speaker 1: proper debate about strategic bombing in the British war. Cabinet
Speaker 1: numbers should have been scrutinized, hard questions should have been asked.
Speaker 1: But how can you have a real debate against Churchill's
Speaker 1: best friend. Friendship comes first. That's the thing that makes
Speaker 1: friendship so powerful and beautiful, except when your friend is
Speaker 1: feeding you falsehoods and your loyalty to him means that
Speaker 1: you can't see them.
Speaker 2: Cherwell was a loner. He had no one in his
Speaker 2: life he loved except I think Churchill.
Speaker 1: Motusary Mukiji. She's the voice you heard at the beginning
Speaker 1: of this episode talking about a famine in India. She's
Speaker 1: a historian who wrote a book a few years ago
Speaker 1: called Churchill's Secret War. It's about what happened in the
Speaker 1: Indian province of Bengal during the war. The Cherwell she
Speaker 1: is referring to is Frederick Lindeman. In nineteen forty one,
Speaker 1: Churchill gave him a peerage, Lord Cherwell. Mukuji prefers to
Speaker 1: call him by his formal name. When I got obsessed
Speaker 1: with Lindenman, Mukujie's book was the last one I read
Speaker 1: and maybe the most important. If you think of C. P.
Speaker 1: Snow's lecture as chapter one in the Frederick Lindeman Winston
Speaker 1: Churchill Love Story, Mukerjee's book is the final pressing chapter
Speaker 1: It was.
Speaker 2: Clearly the only person he ever loved in his life.
Speaker 2: There was no one else.
Speaker 1: India was still a British colony during the war, governed
Speaker 1: by a viceroy sent from England. Like all British colonial possessions,
Speaker 1: India was a major part of the war effort. They
Speaker 1: exported food for the Allies. They sent hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: of soldiers to fight the Germans.
Speaker 2: At the entire industrial production, the entire cloth production, wool, silk, timber,
Speaker 2: you name it, it was being used for the war.
Speaker 1: In wartime, countries operate right at the brink, and in
Speaker 1: late nineteen forty two, there's a kind of perfect storm
Speaker 1: in India's northeastern corner that pushes the region over the edge.
Speaker 1: First of all, the Japanese capture Burma, which sits on
Speaker 1: India's northeastern border. India used to import rice from Burma.
Speaker 1: Now they can't. The British are terrified that japan will
Speaker 1: invade India until they order a score earth policy. All
Speaker 1: along the northeastern border and coast, they destroy stocks of rice, boats, bicycles,
Speaker 1: anything they think that might help the Japanese if they invade.
Speaker 1: Then there's a cyclone twenty foot storm surge kills thirty
Speaker 1: thousand people. The new rice crop is devastated. The government panics.
Speaker 1: They don't know how they're going to feed their troops,
Speaker 1: so they go into all the towns and start buying
Speaker 1: up rice. The price sores. Speculators step in and start
Speaker 1: hoarding rice. That's exactly how famines start.
Speaker 2: What you have is by the end of nineteen forty
Speaker 2: two you have the Vicero of India making fervent pleas
Speaker 2: to the wark Eminet in London for imports of wheat.
Speaker 1: The police go to Lindeman he's Paymaster General in the
Speaker 1: War Cabinet, which means he's basically the government's logistics man,
Speaker 1: the one responsible for making sure there are enough food
Speaker 1: and supplies for England and its allies. Lindemann says, no,
Speaker 1: we're in the middle of a war. We can't spare
Speaker 1: the food, and even if we could, we have no
Speaker 1: way of getting the food to India were tapped out.
Speaker 2: Throughout the spring of nineteen forty three. The Viceroy is saying,
Speaker 2: we absolutely need this, we absolutely need this food, and
Speaker 2: Turwi is saying we can't spare the ships. We can't
Speaker 2: spare the ships.
Speaker 1: But Mukuji wonders is that true. Was Lindaman telling another lie.
Speaker 1: She then does something no historian had ever done before.
Speaker 1: She digs into the British shipping archive from the war,
Speaker 1: which had just been declassified, files that literally hadn't been
Speaker 1: opened in sixty years, and she finds out that the
Speaker 1: British had lots of food in nineteen forty three, huge stockpiles,
Speaker 1: so much that the Americans, who were the source of
Speaker 1: a lot of that food, got suspicious that the British
Speaker 1: were hoarding surplus weak to sell when the war was over.
Speaker 1: And what about the UK's supposed shortage of boats. Mukuji says,
Speaker 1: there was one at the beginning of nineteen forty three,
Speaker 1: when German and submarines were still wreaking havoc in the Atlantic,
Speaker 1: but not by the end of that year, the US
Speaker 1: starts sending over so many ships that by late nineteen
Speaker 1: forty three, when the faminin Bengal is at its height,
Speaker 1: there's actually a surplus of boats on the Allied side.
Speaker 1: In fact, in nineteen forty three, the British actually starts
Speaker 1: shipping wheat from Australia up through the Indian Ocean, just
Speaker 1: not to India.
Speaker 2: There'd be eighteen ships loading with wheat and wheat flour
Speaker 2: over in September and October, and not one of them
Speaker 2: were going to India, and some of them were actually
Speaker 2: going to a stockpile that was being built up in
Speaker 2: the Middle East for feeding Europe after liberation.
Speaker 1: British ships full of grain are sailing right past India
Speaker 1: on the way to the Middle East to be stored
Speaker 1: for some future hypothetical need. They might even stop and
Speaker 1: refuel the Mumbai but nothing leaves the ship.
Speaker 2: So you have a situation in which India is starving.
Speaker 2: There are corpses on the streets of Calcutta.
Speaker 1: So why why is Lindenmann refusing to help? It doesn't
Speaker 1: even make logical sense. Indian soldiers, hundreds of thousands of them,
Speaker 1: are fighting the Germans in the Middle East and Africa.
Speaker 1: When other countries like Canada and the United States offer
Speaker 1: to send food to India, the British say, we don't
Speaker 1: want it. They turn down help. Lindenmann seems completely unmoved
Speaker 1: by India's plight. In my view, the Indians have got
Speaker 1: themselves into a mess, very largely through their own fault.
Speaker 1: He writes in the middle of the famine, their own fault.
Speaker 1: Then he goes on, this shortage of food is likely
Speaker 1: to be endemic in a country where the population is
Speaker 1: always increased until only bare subsistence is possible. Basically, they
Speaker 1: have too many babies. Now, remember Lindaman's a physicists by
Speaker 1: training who rides around in a chauffeur driven limousine and
Speaker 1: plays tennis in full dress. If he's thought about India
Speaker 1: once in his life before the war, I'd be stunned.
Speaker 1: Yet here he is, with a fully worked out ideology
Speaker 1: about Britain's moral obligations to one of its most important allies.
Speaker 1: It's tempting to put this down to another of his
Speaker 1: idiosyncratic prejudices. He also didn't like Jews all that much,
Speaker 1: and black people, according to a friend, filled him with
Speaker 1: a physical revulsion which he was unable to control. But
Speaker 1: I'm not sure that we're seeing lind him in here.
Speaker 1: I think we're seeing Churchill. Churchill is the one with
Speaker 1: an issue about India. He's obsessed with India. In the
Speaker 1: years leading up to the war. Gandhi is building his
Speaker 1: independence movement within India, and Churchill hates Gandhy. Churchill is
Speaker 1: furious about the fact that Britain has to buy raw
Speaker 1: materials from India, meaning that the Master is running up
Speaker 1: a debt with its supposed subject. The British cabinet minister
Speaker 1: in London who's responsible for India is a man named
Speaker 1: Leopold Amory. He's the one begging for food for India.
Speaker 1: Amory keeps a diary of his interactions with Churchill. At
Speaker 1: one point he says, Churchill goes on a rant about
Speaker 1: Indians in India, and Amory tells him, you sound like Hitler.
Speaker 1: At another point he writes of Churchill, I am by
Speaker 1: no means sure that whether on this subject of India,
Speaker 1: he is really quite sane. So why was Lindenman so
Speaker 1: adamant that England could not help India? Because Churchill was
Speaker 1: adamant that England could not help India, and Lindaman was
Speaker 1: a loyal.
Speaker 2: Friend, Churwell would send Churchill these minutes. They had to
Speaker 2: be no longer than ten lines long, and they would
Speaker 2: recommend a course of action. And to design these minutes
Speaker 2: he actually left out a lot of qualifications, the bad
Speaker 2: things that could happen if you did such and such.
Speaker 2: For instance, in the shipping cut the Ministry of War
Speaker 2: Transport had warned that they'd be violent cataclysms in the
Speaker 2: economies of the Indian Ocean area. None of these concerns
Speaker 2: ever made it into a terrible memo. He actually simply
Speaker 2: laid out the rationale for doing whatever he and Churchill
Speaker 2: wanted to be done.
Speaker 1: Why don't we spend more time thinking about friends at politicians?
Speaker 1: I'll never understand it. We go through lengthy election seasons
Speaker 1: where we endlessly scrutinize all the people running for public office.
Speaker 1: We look at the candidates, their beliefs, their background, the
Speaker 1: clothes they wear. We look at them. But then after
Speaker 1: the election is over, we realize we didn't just elect
Speaker 1: that candidate. Because no one governs alone. Eventually, leaders get overwhelmed.
Speaker 1: At a certain point. They're going to call their closest
Speaker 1: friend at two in the morning and say, what do
Speaker 1: I do? So when you're voting for someone, you're also
Speaker 1: voting for that friend who gets called at two in
Speaker 1: the morning. That's what's strange about elections. Friends should be scrutinized,
Speaker 1: the friends should all have to debate each other, but
Speaker 1: they don't. Friends get a pass. In his lecture, CP
Speaker 1: Snow called this court politics.
Speaker 3: The Linderman Churchill relation is the most fascinating example of
Speaker 3: court politics that we're likely to see.
Speaker 1: People called Linderman the prof. Sometimes that was said with affection,
Speaker 1: sometimes with bewilderment.
Speaker 3: I still can hear friend of mine, man who's normally
Speaker 3: very tough and very intelligent, on a black London wartime night,
Speaker 3: as we talked about the bombing policy, saying the Prime
Speaker 3: Minister and prof have decided. Who are we to say them?
Speaker 1: May the best guest of how many died in the
Speaker 1: Bengal famine of nineteen forty three is three million people.
Speaker 1: Three million. After the war, the British government held a
Speaker 1: formal inquiry into what happened, but the investigation was forbidden
Speaker 1: to consider and I'm quoting Her Majesty's Government's decision in
Speaker 1: regard to shipping of imports. In other words, they were
Speaker 1: asked to investigate the cause of the famine without investigating
Speaker 1: the cause of the famine.
Speaker 2: Churchill's sixth volume History of the War was kind of
Speaker 2: a primary reference for historians of at least a generation.
Speaker 2: He made no mention of the famine. It just sort
Speaker 2: of got one mention in an appendix.
Speaker 1: In six volumes. There is one mentioned in an appendix of.
Speaker 2: The in a document that makes it into the appendix. Yes,
Speaker 2: there's no mention of it. In fact, what he says
Speaker 2: instead is that India was carried through the struggle on
Speaker 2: the shoulders of our small island.
Speaker 1: No one in London was interested in telling the real
Speaker 1: story of what happened, and Churchill and Lindemann had no
Speaker 1: interest in talking about it either. They decided to keep
Speaker 1: it all between friends. Revision's History is produced by Miel
Speaker 1: LaBelle and Jacob Smith, with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel and
Speaker 1: Siomara Martinez White. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flon Williams
Speaker 1: is our engineer. Original music by Luis Sciarra. Special thanks
Speaker 1: to Andy Bauers and Jacob Weisberger Panople. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.