More extracts about US "perfidy" over Indian independence and Churchill : (Irving, vol 2).
mahatma gandhi’s coup de théâtre [1943] gave Washington an excuse to resume its interference in the affairs of British India. Once before, in 1942, Roosevelt had told his vice-president that his great ambition was to destroy the British empire, commencing with India. (It was an irony of history that Adolf Hitler, Churchill’s principal enemy, had often expressed the opposite desire.*)
Roosevelt left no doubt of his hostility to any empire other than the burgeoning American one, and Churchill showed little interest in opposing him. Roosevelt never lost sight of his goal. Driving alone and talking politics with George Patton in January 1943, he ‘discussed the P.M. to his disadvantage,’ as the general privately recorded, and gloated that India was all but lost to the British. To speed that process he had sent the Hon. William Phillips to Delhi in November as his personal representative, an officer whose principal qualification appeared to be a barely concealed disdain for Churchill, and who routinely wrote his private letters on the printed letterhead of Roosevelt’s new espionage service, the O.S.S.
Phillips stopped in London before proceeding to India. Both Amery and Cripps met him. He also lunched at No. 10 Downing-street, sending to Washington a dispatch the next day that rather dwelt on the prime minister’s ‘siren zipper-suit’ and boots. During the two-hour luncheon, which had begun at one-thirty, Churchill conducted his guest on a tour of every corner of his world; upon reaching India, he remarked that he was willing to grant Dominion status if the parties there should be in agreement (knowing that they were not). The British, reported Phillips, were saying that if they pulled out a civil war would ensue between Hindu and Moslem.
This was a prediction on which Roosevelt’s agent offered no opinion. Arriving in Delhi, he passed on to the viceroy a request from the president to release Gandhi; it was evidently inspired by that noisome duo, Eleanor Roosevelt and Madame Chiang Kai-shek, who was staying at the White House. Leo Amery reassured the viceroy that they were taking a robust line against American interference. ‘I do hope,’ he also asked Churchill, ‘you will make it quite clear to the president that his people must keep off the grass.’ He had little cause to fear. Churchill did not like Gandhi, that was plain. His views on India, as Amery remarked in private, remained those of the army subaltern Winston Churchill at Poona in 1892.
Interestingly, [Irving, vol2, p 347]
On the same date,[Feb 23] the master Lend–Lease agreement between Britain and the United States was signed. With this ticklish negotiation out of the way, Roosevelt now felt free to intervene directly over India. He sent a highly sensitive message to London for Ambassador Harriman to deliver to the prime minister in person on the morning of February 26. This inquired what steps Churchill proposed by way of conciliating the Indian leaders. The letter was an impertinent demand for Britain to give up India.
Truly it might be said that the empire had more to fear from her allies than from her enemies. ‘States which have no overseas colonies or posses- sions,’ Churchill would write, dipping his pen in the vitriol of sarcasm, ‘are capable of rising to moods of great elevation and detachment about the affairs of those who have.’ He wondered what right a country might assert to take such a lofty view when it had such troubled race relations as the United States.
In fact he had just set up an India Committee to examine this very issue – it was at its first meeting that evening, February 26, that Leo Amery decided that Churchill was on the brink of nervous collapse. The Viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow, objected to Churchill’s plan to promise India Dominion status after the war. He wrote to Amery protesting about ‘these explosions in the prime minister’s mind.’ Amery, the only Conservative on the India Committee, saw three options – to do nothing; to revert to British rule in its most intractable form, or to move onward to an All- Indian Executive Council. Cripps however agreed with Churchill’s scheme, as did Attlee and Sir John Anderson.
Adrift in a rising political tempest, Churchill dragged his anchor. At that India Committee meeting on the twenty-sixth, in one of his more ‘expansive moments,’ as Amery charitably put it, the P.M. suggested that they might just dump India and concentrate on the defence of the British Isles, Africa, and the sea route to Australia.
Note that FDR really did not give up on psychologically keeping the screw tight on Churchill. They were both persistent and stubborn. obviously Churchill was using the threat of painting FDR as thwarting the "war effort", but within that the running battle continued.
[Churchill it appears, wanted to drastically reduce the size of the IA. Amery notes "‘ Winston,...has a curious hatred of India and everything concerned with it, and is convinced that the Indian Army is only waiting to shoot us in the back.’" another pointer to what the Brit tops thought about the prospect of military intervention].
I will finish this sequence off with the "Johnson intervention".
at this time [Cripps mission] there was an unforeseen intervention. Roosevelt had sent Colonel Louis A. Johnson, an American lawyer, out to India as his personal representative, ostensibly heading a mission on munitions; Johnson had arrived in Delhi on April 3, as the negotiations between Cripps and the Indian leaders were at their height. He rapidly established a rapport with Cripps, and together they developed an alternative formula on the tricky question of a native Indian minister of defence. Linlithgow immediately reported this to London. Linlithgow complained that Cripps, ‘presumably’ with Johnson’s assistance, had proposed to Nehru that an Indian would become defence minister. He added that Johnson ‘acts and talks as though he were sent to India as Roosevelt’s personal representative to mediate’ (as indeed he was). From Cripps meanwhile Churchill received a rather naive secret telegram, in their private code, asking him to thank President Roosevelt for Johnson’s ‘very efficient’ help.
Shocked by the scope of the new proposals, Churchill forbade him to proceed, pending the cabinet’s decision. Receiving Harry Hopkins in the cabinet room an hour or two later, at ten-thirty a.m. on April 9 – Hopkins had arrived in London with General Marshall on the day before – Churchill read out the viceroy’s telegram. He protested in vivid language at Roosevelt’s meddling in India, and predicted that his cabinet, meeting at midday, would reject this ‘Cripps–Johnson proposal,’ as he termed it.
Fearing that Roosevelt’s gauche action would set back his own strategic mission in London, Hopkins lied to Churchill: he insisted that Colonel Johnson had had no such instructions from Roosevelt, and that it was Cripps who was dragging Roosevelt’s name into the debate for his own reasons. ‘I told Churchill,’ noted Hopkins afterwards, ‘of the president’s instructions to me, namely that he would not be drawn into the Indian business except at the personal request of the prime minister.’
Churchill saw through Hopkins’s little subterfuge, but he drafted in long-hand a telegram to Cripps and the viceroy exploiting it to the full: ‘Colonel Johnson,’ he wrote, with Harry Hopkins looking over his shoulder, ‘is not President Roosevelt’s personal representative in any matter outside the specific mission dealing with Indian munitions and kindred topics on which he was sent. I feel sure President would be vexed if he, the President, were to seem to be drawn into the Indian constitution issue.’
The war cabinet was also critical of Cripps.They sent him two cables, objecting to the Cripps–Johnson formula, revoking his powers to negotiate, and rebuking him for going behind the viceroy’s back. In a wounded reply, Cripps indicated that he had belatedly found out that the viceroy was going behind his back. ‘ Your telegrams...,’ he wrote to the cabinet, ‘apparently refer to some sent from here which I have not seen.’
Colonel Johnson would report to Roosevelt that Cripps had explained to him, in some embarrassment, that Churchill had now rescinded his powers and would give no approval ‘unless Wavell and [the] Viceroy separately send their own code cables unqualifiedly endorsing any change Cripps wants.’
By skilfully exploiting Roosevelt’s diplomatic bêtise, Churchill had at one stroke thrown Cripps and his mission into promising disarray.
[Irving, vol 2, p 386]
; They probably tried to explain the decade of 1960s as 'atypical' due to 2 wars, famines etc.