Speaker 1: Pushkin. What was your mother's experience in the family. So
Speaker 1: your family is from Bengal. Yeah, my mother was about
Speaker 1: twelve years old and she was living in the city.
Speaker 1: She saw all of this starvation on the pavements, all
Speaker 1: of the people coming into the city from the villages
Speaker 1: because there was absolutely nothing left in the villages. And
Speaker 1: I had this question that no one seemed to have answered,
Speaker 1: which was why is it that no relief was sent?
Speaker 1: Modusari Mukijie a writer and historian whose work I came
Speaker 1: across not long ago. I wanted you to read a
Speaker 1: passage from your book. Can you just read the first paragraph?
Speaker 1: I thought it was as a way of communicating to
Speaker 1: people what a famine is. In Shahpuraputa, village of the
Speaker 1: seventeenth Union of Pashkuratana, a Muslim weaver was unable to
Speaker 1: support his family and crazed with hunger, wandered away. His
Speaker 1: wife believed that he had drowned himself in the flooded
Speaker 1: Kashai River. Being unable to feed her two young sons
Speaker 1: for several days, she could no longer endure their suffering.
Speaker 1: She dropped the smaller boy, torn from her womb. The
Speaker 1: sparkle of her eye into the Kashai's frothing waters. My
Speaker 1: name is Malcolm Glaba. You're listening to Revisionist History, my
Speaker 1: podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is about
Speaker 1: a famine that took place in India in nineteen forty three.
Speaker 1: Famines are the immediate result of things like droughts and
Speaker 1: crop tailures, hacks of nature, but their cause is invariably
Speaker 1: human wars misguided policies. Right now as I'm recording this,
Speaker 1: Venezuela is facing a malnutrition crisis. A country with vast
Speaker 1: oil wealth in one of the most fertile corners of
Speaker 1: the world doesn't have enough food. Humans cause that, not nature.
Speaker 1: So what was the human cause of the Bengal famine
Speaker 1: of nineteen forty three. I think it was a friendship,
Speaker 1: but that's a much more complicated story that begins on
Speaker 1: the other side of the world. It is my great
Speaker 1: privilege to welcome Sir Charles back to our community and
Speaker 1: to present him to the audience in Cambridge tonight, mister
Speaker 1: President being Price, ladies and gentlemen. I'm very pleased, I'm
Speaker 1: very honored to be here this evening. It's nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: Harvard University, one of England's great post war intellectuals, a
Speaker 1: scientist named Seep Snow, is giving the Godkin Lecture at
Speaker 1: the Sanders Theater. Coming to Harvard, I felt as I
Speaker 1: felt before, that in many ways, this is the most
Speaker 1: splendid university I ever set foot in, and I don't
Speaker 1: feel all the faintly apologetic quiver that I get at
Speaker 1: some American institutions, which I can only admire as a
Speaker 1: distant spectator, and one for which I feel, sometimes happily
Speaker 1: that I have no responsibility. Snow was a physicist by training,
Speaker 1: a high ranking scientist in the British government during the
Speaker 1: Second World War, then a best selling novelist. Back when
Speaker 1: the Nazis thought they were going to win the war,
Speaker 1: they made a list of twenty eight hundred people they
Speaker 1: were going to hand over to the Gestapo. The minute
Speaker 1: they invaded, England was on the list. In the intervening years,
Speaker 1: Snow's reputation has grown. The Sanders Theater was packed, his
Speaker 1: lecture was so long it had to be broken up
Speaker 1: over three days and was broadcast live on television. But
Speaker 1: he does something unexpected. He devotes fully half of his
Speaker 1: speech to one person, someone whom I'm guessing few Americans
Speaker 1: had ever heard of. Frederick A. Lindeman born April fifth,
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty six died July third, nineteen fifty seven, otherwise
Speaker 1: known as Lord Churwell J. Linderman was by anyone's a
Speaker 1: very remarkable and a very strange man. He was a
Speaker 1: real heavyweight of personality. Remember Snow as a novelist, a
Speaker 1: student of character. Linderman was quite Unenglish. I always thought
Speaker 1: if you met him in middle Age would have thought
Speaker 1: he was the kind of Central European business man that
Speaker 1: when he used to meet him the more expensive hotels
Speaker 1: in Italy. He was heavy featured, pallid all, was very
Speaker 1: correctly dressed. He spoke German at least as well as
Speaker 1: he did English, and indeed under his English there was
Speaker 1: a tone of German if you could hear him at all,
Speaker 1: because he all was mumbled and an extraordinary constricted fash.
Speaker 1: Snow is obsessed with Lindeman. 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 Lindeman, gossiped
Speaker 1: about him, gave speeches about him. I got obsessed with
Speaker 1: him last summer, and by the time my Lindemania was over,
Speaker 1: I'd read six books about him, six and I think
Speaker 1: I just scratched the surface. Baltam the Harnger kind of
Speaker 1: atmosphere of indefinable malaise. You felt that he didn't understand
Speaker 1: his own life well, and he wasn't very good at
Speaker 1: coping with The major thing family was venimusy wish, harsh tongued.
Speaker 1: He had a malicious, sadistic sense of human moment. Nevertheless,
Speaker 1: you felt somehow he was lost, and I said he
Speaker 1: was a figure I made a novelist. Fingers H. Lindemann
Speaker 1: was born in Germany. His father was a wealthy German engineer.
Speaker 1: His mother was an American heiress like CP Snow. He
Speaker 1: was also a physicist and got his PhD in Berlin
Speaker 1: just before the First World War, at a time when
Speaker 1: Germany was the center of the world in physics. His
Speaker 1: thesis adviser compared his mind to that of Isaac Newton.
Speaker 1: He was a captivating conversationalist, a champion tennis player. He
Speaker 1: dressed like a nineteenth century count. He was a generalist
Speaker 1: who knew more than most specialists. He could demolish anyone
Speaker 1: in an argument. Once, after Lindeman had taken a post
Speaker 1: at Ox, Albert Einstein came to a faculty dinner and
Speaker 1: afterwards all the young physicists gathered around Einstein as you
Speaker 1: would expect them to, and their first question was what
Speaker 1: do you think of Lindeman? That was what they wanted
Speaker 1: to know. Another night, at dinner, Einstein talked about some
Speaker 1: mathematical proposition for which he'd never been able to come
Speaker 1: up with a proof. The next day Lindeman casually mentioned
Speaker 1: that he had the answer. He figured it out in
Speaker 1: his bathtub. You can see why everyone was so obsessed
Speaker 1: with him. He impressed us immensely, but because he was
Speaker 1: very much the man of the world. This is a
Speaker 1: friend of his. George Thompson was a striking person to
Speaker 1: look at, tall, slim, dark, young kind. People said he
Speaker 1: looked like Mephistopheles. I think this is not quite fair
Speaker 1: to him. I think he was the most exciting person
Speaker 1: to talk physics too, that I have ever talked to.
Speaker 1: Even Lindeman's Valet sung his praises when he was interviewed
Speaker 1: by the BBC thirty two years, so close to him
Speaker 1: with him never once seemed anything slightly even remotely suggesting impropriety.
Speaker 1: Who on this occasion, when he was showing some films
Speaker 1: to a lady and heaps perspied, he walked behind the
Speaker 1: curtain to Moppy's brewo. But Lindeman was also profoundly eccentric.
Speaker 1: He played tennis with a shirt buttoned to the neck,
Speaker 1: long sleeves fastened to the wrist, thick black rib socks,
Speaker 1: and white boots. People who wore shorts disgusted him. Lindeman's
Speaker 1: family was eccentric as well. He had a brother named Seppi,
Speaker 1: who lived in style on the Riviera with two Rose roycees.
Speaker 1: One was white and driven by a black man, the
Speaker 1: other was black and chauffeured by an albino. I'm not
Speaker 1: making that up. In his lecture, Sepe Snow spends an
Speaker 1: unusual amount of time just talking about Lindiman's diet. He
Speaker 1: was the most cranky of all vegetarians. He wasn't only
Speaker 1: a vegetarian, but he would only eat very minute fractions
Speaker 1: of what you might regard as a vegetarian diet, and
Speaker 1: he lived mainly on cheese, what the whites of eggs
Speaker 1: yolks being apparently to animal olive oil and rice. During
Speaker 1: the Second World War, there was hardly a drop of
Speaker 1: olive oil in England, and Lindiman 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. Lindiman goes ballistic, tell Charles,
Speaker 1: I can only suppose that he attaches no value to
Speaker 1: what I'm trying to do in the war effort, that
Speaker 1: he would as soon have me go to bed, and
Speaker 1: that is what I shall have to do unless he
Speaker 1: sends me more olive oil. Europe is burning. That's what's
Speaker 1: on his mind. Lindemann was thin skinned, defensive. He'd never
Speaker 1: admit when he was wrong. He'd never change his mind
Speaker 1: once it was made up. He thought he was an
Speaker 1: expert on everything, even when he wasn't. His friend Roy
Speaker 1: Harrod once wrote of him, 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. That was his friend, saying that seepee snow
Speaker 1: remembers one New Year's Day with Lindeman in Oxford. The
Speaker 1: British Crown had just published its honors list, people who
Speaker 1: were being recognized with knighthoods and ladyships. I remarked innocently
Speaker 1: enough that the English honors list must give much more
Speaker 1: pain than pleasure, because obvious are the people who were
Speaker 1: left out a much greater number than the people who
Speaker 1: were in. And Lindeman's face lit up. He got a
Speaker 1: very somber, heavy face with very sad brown eyes. Well,
Speaker 1: these brown eyes sparkled with savagely, and he said, of
Speaker 1: course it is. It wouldn't be any use getting an
Speaker 1: award if one didn't think of all the people who
Speaker 1: were miserable because they hadn't managed it. Here's what another
Speaker 1: friend said of him. He was lacking in the bond
Speaker 1: of human sympathy for every chance person who was not
Speaker 1: brought into a personal relationship with him. I think that's
Speaker 1: the crucial fact about Lindeman. One time he's asked for
Speaker 1: his definition and morality, and he answers, I define a
Speaker 1: moral action as one that brings advantage to my friends.
Speaker 1: Frederick Lindemann was a man who put his friends first
Speaker 1: to the exclusion of all other moral considerations. Now why
Speaker 1: does that matter? Why would SPI Snow devote three days
Speaker 1: to this man whom few people in the audience had
Speaker 1: ever heard of? Because of who Frederick Lindemann's best friend was.
Speaker 1: The man who defined a moral action as one that
Speaker 1: brings advantage to my friends was best friends with Winston Churchill.
Speaker 1: We are the masters of our fate. That the task
Speaker 1: which han't been set us it's not above our strength,
Speaker 1: that its pangs and toils are 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 Adolph Hitler. But
Speaker 1: once I learned about his friend, I don't know. Churchill
Speaker 1: will never be the same for me. People have often
Speaker 1: speculated on why this Frenchshire I'm an extremely cranky, non smoking,
Speaker 1: non drinking vegetarian, doesn't sound the obvious soul mate for
Speaker 1: for so Winston. I can only answer that. But to
Speaker 1: give any send suggestion, you would have to know both
Speaker 1: men not only well, but as well as they knew
Speaker 1: each other. One can make guesses, But why any frendship
Speaker 1: Lindiman and Churchill met each other in nineteen twenty one
Speaker 1: at a dinner in London. It was arranged by the
Speaker 1: Duke and Duchess of Westminster. Lindiman would always say that
Speaker 1: only two people in the world were smarter than he
Speaker 1: was Einstein, of course, and Churchill and Churchill felt the
Speaker 1: same way. If you read some of the letters Churchill
Speaker 1: writes Lindeman, they're almost worshipful. The psychologist Daniel Wegner has
Speaker 1: this beautiful concept called transactive memory, which is the observation
Speaker 1: that we don't just store information in our minds or
Speaker 1: in specific places. We store memories and understanding in the
Speaker 1: minds of the people we love. You don't need to
Speaker 1: remember your child's emotional relationship to her teacher because you
Speaker 1: know your wife will. You don't have to remember how
Speaker 1: 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 their 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 Champagne in one year. Within
Speaker 1: a month of becoming Prime Minister, he was broke, literally broke.
Speaker 1: Here we have a manner of volatile temperament, with no
Speaker 1: way to bring order to his life. So who does
Speaker 1: he become best friends with Frederick Lindeman. Somewhat disciplined, almost
Speaker 1: fanatically consistent, someone who ate the same three things every
Speaker 1: meal of every day, someone so naturally at home in
Speaker 1: the world of numbers that even as a child he
Speaker 1: would read newspapers and recite back reams and reams of
Speaker 1: statistics from memory. When Churchill becomes Prime Minister in nineteen forty,
Speaker 1: just after the war breaks out. He takes Lindeman with him,
Speaker 1: first as scientific advisor. Then he gets him a job
Speaker 1: in the war cabinet as the Paymaster General, and Lindiman
Speaker 1: becomes a kind of gate keeper to Churchill's mind. Over
Speaker 1: the course of the war. He writes Churchill two thousand memos,
Speaker 1: basically one a day, double spaced, large print, no more
Speaker 1: than a page or two, reducing some complicated question to
Speaker 1: its essence. Lindiman travels with Churchill to international conferences. He
Speaker 1: dines with him. Lindiman never drinks unless he's eating with Churchill,
Speaker 1: who's a big drinker. Then he drinks. He goes to
Speaker 1: Churchill's country house on the weekends. People spot them at
Speaker 1: three in the morning sitting by the fire reading the
Speaker 1: newspaper together. One time, in Parliament, another MP criticizes Lindiman,
Speaker 1: and Churchill goes crazy. He says, love me, love my dog,
Speaker 1: and if you don't love my dog, you damn well
Speaker 1: can't love me. And that's high praise, because remember, to
Speaker 1: an Englishman of that generation, the only living creature you're
Speaker 1: allowed to show affection for is your dog. Laurel occurred
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty two, and in a curdo of a
Speaker 1: strategic bombing. The heart of Snow's lecture is about an
Speaker 1: argument that took place at the highest reaches of British government.
Speaker 1: The question was what was the best use of the
Speaker 1: Royal Air Force against the Germans? And it was quite
Speaker 1: rough that the leaders of the West should be looking
Speaker 1: for anything which would play a serious part in the war.
Speaker 1: One school of thought 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 a Lindeman, of course, and
Speaker 1: asked Lindeman 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 Lindeman 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
Speaker 1: data then writes one of his famous memos to Churchill.
Speaker 1: I'm quoting now from Lindeman's memmo. Investigation seems to show
Speaker 1: that having one's house demolished is most dangerous to morrale.
Speaker 1: People seem to mind it more than having their friends
Speaker 1: or 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 1: What our descendants will think of us, I don't know
Speaker 1: will they think, As Roger Williams said, of some Indians
Speaker 1: that we were wolves with the minds of men. Well,
Speaker 1: they think we resigned our humanity. But you won't find
Speaker 1: any of those kinds of considerations in Lineman's memo to Churchill.
Speaker 1: It's very matter of fact. It's all about what the
Speaker 1: data says, except for one thing that's not what the
Speaker 1: data says. The Birmingham Hall study reached the exact opposite
Speaker 1: conclusion that Lineman did. It said that, and I'm quoting
Speaker 1: in neither town was there any evidence of panic resulting
Speaker 1: from either a series of raids or from a single rate.
Speaker 1: Lindeman also makes estimates on how many German homes the
Speaker 1: British could destroy. Other experts in the government critics of
Speaker 1: strategic bombing point out immediately that Lindeman's numbers are ridiculous,
Speaker 1: five or six times too high, based on obvious errors.
Speaker 1: Doesn't matter. Remember what one of Lindemann's friends said, he
Speaker 1: would not shrink from using an argument which he knew
Speaker 1: to be wrong, if by so doing he could tie
Speaker 1: up one of his professional opponents. Lindeman wanted strategic bombing,
Speaker 1: so Churchill went ahead and ordered the bombing of German
Speaker 1: cities no one had ever thought how these bomber forces
Speaker 1: were really to be used. It was just an act
Speaker 1: of faith. This was a way to fight a war.
Speaker 1: And I think it's fair to say that Lindemann was
Speaker 1: with as usual extreme intensity, as committed to this faith
Speaker 1: as any man in England. So what happened? Most historians
Speaker 1: agree that strategic bombing was a disaster. A hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty thousand US and English airmen and hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: of German civilians were killed in those bombing campaigns. Many
Speaker 1: of Europe's most beautiful cities were destroyed, and German morale
Speaker 1: didn't crack. The Germans fought to the bitter end. After
Speaker 1: the war. The Nobel Prize winning physicist Patrick Blackett wrote
Speaker 1: a devastating essay where he said that the war could
Speaker 1: have been won six months or even a year earlier,
Speaker 1: if only the British had used their bombers more intelligently.
Speaker 1: There should have been a proper debate about strategic bombing
Speaker 1: in the British war. Cabinet numbers should have been scrutinized,
Speaker 1: hard questions should have been asked. But how can you
Speaker 1: have a real debate against Churchill's best friend? Friendship comes first.
Speaker 1: That's the thing that makes friendship so powerful and beautiful,
Speaker 1: except when your friend is feeding you falsehoods, and your
Speaker 1: loyalty to him means that you can't see them. Churwell
Speaker 1: was a loner. He had no one in his life
Speaker 1: he loved except I think Churchill. Modusrie Mukiji. She's the
Speaker 1: voice you heard at the beginning of this episode talking
Speaker 1: about a famine in India. She's a historian who wrote
Speaker 1: a book a few years ago called Churchill's Secret War.
Speaker 1: It's about what happened in the Indian province of Bengal
Speaker 1: during the war. The Churwell she's referring to is Frederick Lindemann.
Speaker 1: In nineteen forty one, Churchill gave him a peerage, Lord Churwell.
Speaker 1: Mukuji prefers to call him by his formal name. When
Speaker 1: I got obsessed with Lindeman, Mukuji's book was the last
Speaker 1: one I read and maybe the most important. If you
Speaker 1: think of CP. Snow's lecture as chapter one in the
Speaker 1: Frederick Lindeman Winston Churchill love story, Mukuji's book is the
Speaker 1: final pressing chapter. It was clearly the only person he
Speaker 1: ever loved in his life. 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. At the entire industrial production,
Speaker 1: the entire cloth production, wool, silk, timber, you name it, it
Speaker 1: it was being used for the war. In wartime, countries
Speaker 1: operate right at the brink, and in late nineteen forty two,
Speaker 1: there's a kind of perfect storm in India's northeastern corner
Speaker 1: that pushes the region over the edge. First of all,
Speaker 1: the Japanese capture Burma, which sits on India's northeastern border.
Speaker 1: India used to import rice from Burma. Now they can't.
Speaker 1: The British are terrified that japan will invade India, and
Speaker 1: so they order a score earth policy all along the
Speaker 1: 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 soars, speculators step in and start
Speaker 1: hoarding rice. That's exactly how famines start. What you have
Speaker 1: is by the end of nineteen forty two you have
Speaker 1: the Visor of India making fervent please to the War
Speaker 1: Eminent in London for imports wheat. The please go to Lindeman.
Speaker 1: He's Paymaster General in the War Cabinet, which means he's
Speaker 1: basically the government's logistics man, the one responsible for making
Speaker 1: sure there are enough food and supplies for England and
Speaker 1: its allies. Lindeman says, no, we're in the middle of
Speaker 1: a war. We can't spare the food, and even if
Speaker 1: we could, we have no way of getting the food
Speaker 1: to India were tapped out throughout the spring of nineteen
Speaker 1: forty three. The Viceroy is saying, we absolutely need this,
Speaker 1: we absolutely need this food, and Churwollo is saying, we'd
Speaker 1: can't spare the ships. We can't spare the ships. But
Speaker 1: Mukuji wonders, is that true. Was Lindeman 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 week 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 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 famine in 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. Let'd be eighteen ships loading with wheat
Speaker 1: and wheat flour over in September and October, and not
Speaker 1: one of them were going to India, And some of
Speaker 1: them were actually going to a stockpile that was being
Speaker 1: built up in 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. So you
Speaker 1: have a situation in which India is starving. There are
Speaker 1: corpses on the streets of Calcutta. So why why is
Speaker 1: Lindeman refusing to help? It doesn't even make a logical sense.
Speaker 1: Indian soldiers, hundreds of thousands of them, are fighting the
Speaker 1: Germans in the Middle East and Africa. When other countries
Speaker 1: like Canada and the United States offer to send food
Speaker 1: to India, the British say, we don't want it. They
Speaker 1: turn down help. Lindeman seems completely unmoved by India's plight.
Speaker 1: In my view, the Indians have got themselves into a mess,
Speaker 1: very largely through their own fault, he writes, in the
Speaker 1: middle of the famine, their own fault. Then he goes
Speaker 1: on this shortage of food is likely to be endemic
Speaker 1: in a country where the population is always increased until
Speaker 1: only bare subsistence is possible. Basically, they have too many babies. Now, remember,
Speaker 1: Lindeman's a physicist by training who rides around in a
Speaker 1: chauffeur driven limousine and plays tennis in full dress. If
Speaker 1: he's thought about India once in his life before the war,
Speaker 1: I'd be stunned. Yet here he is with a fully
Speaker 1: worked out ideology about Britain's moral obligations to one of
Speaker 1: its most important allies. It's tempting to put this down
Speaker 1: to another of his idiosyncratic prejudices. He also didn't like
Speaker 1: Jews all that much, and black people, according to a friend,
Speaker 1: filled him with a physical revulsion which he was unable
Speaker 1: to control. But I'm not sure that we're seeing Lindiman 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 Gandhi. 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 Lindeman so
Speaker 1: adamant that England could not help India? Because Churchill was
Speaker 1: adamant that England could not help India, and Lindeman was
Speaker 1: a loyal friend, Churwell would send Churchill these minutes. They
Speaker 1: had to be no longer than ten lines long, and
Speaker 1: they would recommend a course of action. And to design
Speaker 1: these minutes he actually left out a lot of qualifications,
Speaker 1: the bad things that could happen if you did such
Speaker 1: and such. For instance, in the shipping cut, the Ministry
Speaker 1: of War Transport had warned that there'd be violent cataclysms
Speaker 1: in the economies of the Indian Ocean area. None of
Speaker 1: these concerns ever made it into a terrible memo. He
Speaker 1: actually simply laid out the rationale for doing whatever he
Speaker 1: and Churchill wanted to be done. Why don't we spend
Speaker 1: more time thinking about friends or politicians? I'll never understand it.
Speaker 1: We go through lengthy election seasons where we endlessly scrutinize
Speaker 1: all the people running for public office. We look at
Speaker 1: the candidates, their beliefs, the background, the clothes they wear.
Speaker 1: We look at them. But then after the election is over,
Speaker 1: we realize we didn't just elect that candidate. Because no
Speaker 1: one governs alone. Eventually, leaders get overwhelmed at a certain point.
Speaker 1: They're going to call their closest friend at two in
Speaker 1: the morning and say, what do I do? So when
Speaker 1: you're voting for someone, you're also voting for that friend
Speaker 1: who gets called at two in the morning. That's what's
Speaker 1: strange about elections. Friends should be scrutinized, the friends should
Speaker 1: all have to debate each other, but they don't. Friends
Speaker 1: get a pass. In his lecture, CP snow called this
Speaker 1: court politics, the Lindeman Churchill relation is the most fascinating
Speaker 1: example of politics that we're likely to see people called
Speaker 1: Lindeman the prof. Sometimes that was said with affection, sometimes
Speaker 1: with bewilderment. I still can hear friend of mine, man
Speaker 1: who's normally veritof and very intelligent, on a black London
Speaker 1: wartime night, as we talked about the bombing policy, saying
Speaker 1: the Prime Minister and prof have decided. Who are we
Speaker 1: to say them? Nay? The best guest of how many
Speaker 1: died in the Bengal famine of nineteen forty three is
Speaker 1: three million people. Three million. After the war, the British
Speaker 1: government held a formal inquiry into what happened, but the
Speaker 1: investigation was forbidden to consider and I'm quoting Her Majesty's
Speaker 1: government's decision in regard to shipping of imports. In other words,
Speaker 1: they were asked to investigate the cause of the famine
Speaker 1: without investigating the cause of the famine. Churchill's sixth volume
Speaker 1: History of the War was kind of a primary reference
Speaker 1: for historians of at least a generation. He made no
Speaker 1: mention of the famine. It just sort of got one
Speaker 1: mention in an appendix in six volumes. There is one
Speaker 1: mention in an appendix in a document that makes it
Speaker 1: into the appendix. Yes, there's no mention of it. In fact,
Speaker 1: what he says instead is that India was carried through
Speaker 1: the struggle on the shoulders of our small island. No
Speaker 1: one in London was interested in telling the real story
Speaker 1: of what happened, and Churchill and Lindeman had no interest
Speaker 1: in talking about it either. They decided to keep it
Speaker 1: all between friends. Revisionist History is produced by mil Aabal
Speaker 1: and Jacob Smith, with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel and Ciomara
Speaker 1: Martinez wife. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is
Speaker 1: our engineer. Original music by Luis Guera. Special thanks to
Speaker 1: Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberger Panoply. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, YO
Speaker 1: M