During WWII Great Britain, under the leadership of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, stood up to the Axis and would lead the Allies to victory as its senior statesman. In facing down Hitler and all the resources available to a European continent dominated by the Nazis Churchill had to draw on all the resources of the British Empire. In no small part this included India, whose overseas divisions were critical to the fight in North Africa.
Mukerjee does a good job of explaining how India provided foodstuffs, war material and manpower to the Allied cause. Also, she explains how the war changed the fiscal relationship between India and England, turning India into a lender and England into a debtor. However, from there the book attempts to lay all of India's ills at the feet of Churchill, from Bengal's 1943 famine to India's postwar partition.
CSW fails to take into account the nature of total war. A key part of the thesis that Churchill was responsible for the Bengal Famine lay with the supposition that England would not divert food supplies to India in order to relieve the situation. Mukerjee fails to take into account the sheer distances involved and, of course, wartime hazards. She mentions that the U-boat threat "was defeated in 1943" but that was not necessarily obvious to the Allies. In fact, U-boats would continue to be a threat right up to the end of the war. As a result, supply levels above the actual projected needs of the war fronts in Europe (the primary theater) had to be shipped due to the possibility of the loss of material. Also, ships were still kept in convoys rather than individual sailings, further complicating the shipping situation. On top of THAT shipping had to bring the weapons of war, the munitions, even the fighting men themselves. None of this seems to matter to Mukerjee.
And don't even get me started on the I-boats operating in the Pacific and the Indian Ocean, making it impractical to ship wheat from Canada or Australia in a timely manner.
Mukerjee seems to have no more understanding of military matters than commercial shipping. That the Bengal Famine was triggered by a "scorched earth" policy on the Indian frontier is not arguable. However, this action was strategically sound: Japan's war machine ran with very little in the way of dedicated supplies and would have required the rice in Bengal to launch an offensive from Burma. The fact that no successful Japanese offensive took place is a testament to this plan, especially considering how few Imperial troops were available.
And this despite the British "hiring up to 50,000 soldiers a month."
In the writing of this book the author also tries to rehabilitate Chandra Bose, the Azad Hind leader who worked for Hitler, worked for Tojo and, at the time of his death, was probably on his way to offer his services to Stalin. Mukerjee implies that the Japanese airplane accident which killed Bose was actually an assassination by British agents.
India was not treated as an active belligerent due to a political situation which, at best, made India indifferent to the war. This attitude and India's proximity to Japan's advance certainly colored the PM's attitude towards the colony. Churchill was first and foremost concerned with saving the world from Hitler. To denigrate Churchill's role in winning WWII by focusing on the Bengal Famine is like trying to take away from FDR's presidency by focusing on the Bataan Death March.
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