Book Review: Churchill’s Secret War

War II

by Madhusree Mukerjee. 

Published by Basic Books, a member of

the Perseus Book Groups, New York.  319 pages, 2010.

Reviewed by Commander Youssef Aboul-Enein, MSC, USN

I have the great privilege to teach officers selected for the vital Afghanistan-Pakistan

Fellows Program at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces in Washington D.C. 

These men and women spend a year totally immersed in the politics, culture, religions,

and policies of Southwest Asia.  One of my main challenges is to cultivate

empathy and get students to walk in the shoes and emotions of the region. 

Madhursee Mukerjee, a scholar, Guggenheim Fellow, who resides in Germany, had written

an uncomfortable book critical of allied policy towards India that led to the death

of millions.  She opens by introducing a 1943 famine in Bengal that killed

1.5 million people, and which was a result of the British decision to use the resources

of India to fight Germany and Japan.  The economic stressors placed on India

during World War II, led to deprivation and anarchy which tore the fabric of society

leading to independence in 1947.  This is the hidden side of World War II,

and decisions that did not make Winston Churchill’s memoirs. 

The book discusses England’s divide and conquer strategy to govern the subcontinent,

which only perpetuated the partition of India.  In 1943, nationalist Subhas

Chandra Bose headed a liberation army known as the Indian National Army comprised

of Indian laborers and 60,000 captured Indian Prisoners of War (POWs) captured by

the Japanese.  World War II brought calls among India’s intellectual elites

and political activists on whether India should be granted dominion status like

South Africa or Canada or should India be placed on a trajectory towards independence. 

All these policy questions would be deferred or ignored by British policymakers. 

Mahatma Gandhi was appalled by Nazi bloodshed.  Chapters discuss how Hitler’s

racism could not allow the Nazi’s to fully exploit liberation movements, such as

the treatment of Ukrainians, Slavs, and Russia’s ethnic minorities who despised

Stalin.  Bose, the Indian nationalist, asked Hitler, in a face to face meeting,

to repudiate passages in his book “Mein Kampf,” that were contemptuous of Indians. 

The Fuhrer predictably ignored him.  Japanese leaflets were showered over the

Indian metropolis of Calcutta urging Indians to revolt against British colonization. 

In 1944, mass prostitution among village women in Bengal was a result of desperate

food shortages.  A 1944 survey found 90 percent of 30,000 women laborers digging

ditches and building runways had venereal disease, trading sex for rice to feed

their families.  Ms. Mukerjee has written a fresh study of the underside of

World War II, and allows readers to empathize with India’s, Pakistan’s, and Bangladesh’s

sensitivity to its national independence.    

Commander Youssef Aboul-Enein is the author of “Militant

at the Joint Intelligence Task Force for Combating Terrorism.