July 13, 2017 • 34 mins
The friendship that changed the course of World War II.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. What was your mother's experience in the family. So
your family is from Bengal. Yeah, my mother was about
twelve years old and she was living in the city.
She saw all of this starvation on the pavements, all
of the people coming into the city from the villages
(00:38):
because there was absolutely nothing left in the villages. And
I had this question that no one seemed to have answered,
which was why is it that no relief was sent?
Modusari Mukijie a writer and historian whose work I came
across not long ago. I wanted you to read a
passage from your book. Can you just read the first paragraph?
(01:02):
I thought it was as a way of communicating to
people what a famine is. In Shahpuraputa, village of the
seventeenth Union of Pashkuratana, a Muslim weaver was unable to
support his family and crazed with hunger, wandered away. His
wife believed that he had drowned himself in the flooded
(01:24):
Kashai River. Being unable to feed her two young sons
for several days, she could no longer endure their suffering.
She dropped the smaller boy, torn from her womb. The
sparkle of her eye into the Kashai's frothing waters. My
(01:50):
name is Malcolm Glaba. You're listening to Revisionist History, my
podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is about
a famine that took place in India in nineteen forty three.
Famines are the immediate result of things like droughts and
crop tailures, hacks of nature, but their cause is invariably
(02:14):
human wars misguided policies. Right now as I'm recording this,
Venezuela is facing a malnutrition crisis. A country with vast
oil wealth in one of the most fertile corners of
the world doesn't have enough food. Humans cause that, not nature.
So what was the human cause of the Bengal famine
(02:34):
of nineteen forty three. I think it was a friendship,
but that's a much more complicated story that begins on
the other side of the world. It is my great
privilege to welcome Sir Charles back to our community and
to present him to the audience in Cambridge tonight, mister
(02:58):
President being Price, ladies and gentlemen. I'm very pleased, I'm
very honored to be here this evening. It's nineteen sixty
Harvard University, one of England's great post war intellectuals, a
scientist named Seep Snow, is giving the Godkin Lecture at
(03:18):
the Sanders Theater. Coming to Harvard, I felt as I
felt before, that in many ways, this is the most
splendid university I ever set foot in, and I don't
feel all the faintly apologetic quiver that I get at
some American institutions, which I can only admire as a
(03:41):
distant spectator, and one for which I feel, sometimes happily
that I have no responsibility. Snow was a physicist by training,
a high ranking scientist in the British government during the
Second World War, then a best selling novelist. Back when
the Nazis thought they were going to win the war,
(04:02):
they made a list of twenty eight hundred people they
were going to hand over to the Gestapo. The minute
they invaded, England was on the list. In the intervening years,
Snow's reputation has grown. The Sanders Theater was packed, his
lecture was so long it had to be broken up
over three days and was broadcast live on television. But
(04:23):
he does something unexpected. He devotes fully half of his
speech to one person, someone whom I'm guessing few Americans
had ever heard of. Frederick A. Lindeman born April fifth,
eighteen eighty six died July third, nineteen fifty seven, otherwise
known as Lord Churwell J. Linderman was by anyone's a
(04:49):
very remarkable and a very strange man. He was a
real heavyweight of personality. Remember Snow as a novelist, a
student of character. Linderman was quite Unenglish. I always thought
if you met him in middle Age would have thought
he was the kind of Central European business man that
(05:09):
when he used to meet him the more expensive hotels
in Italy. He was heavy featured, pallid all, was very
correctly dressed. He spoke German at least as well as
he did English, and indeed under his English there was
a tone of German if you could hear him at all,
because he all was mumbled and an extraordinary constricted fash.
(05:33):
Snow is obsessed with Lindeman. That's the first thing that
comes across in the lecture. Frederick Lindeman was the kind
of man who obsessed people. People talked about Lindeman, gossiped
about him, gave speeches about him. I got obsessed with
him last summer, and by the time my Lindemania was over,
I'd read six books about him, six and I think
(05:54):
I just scratched the surface. Baltam the Harnger kind of
atmosphere of indefinable malaise. You felt that he didn't understand
his own life well, and he wasn't very good at
coping with The major thing family was venimusy wish, harsh tongued.
He had a malicious, sadistic sense of human moment. Nevertheless,
(06:16):
you felt somehow he was lost, and I said he
was a figure I made a novelist. Fingers H. Lindemann
was born in Germany. His father was a wealthy German engineer.
His mother was an American heiress like CP Snow. He
(06:37):
was also a physicist and got his PhD in Berlin
just before the First World War, at a time when
Germany was the center of the world in physics. His
thesis adviser compared his mind to that of Isaac Newton.
He was a captivating conversationalist, a champion tennis player. He
dressed like a nineteenth century count. He was a generalist
(07:00):
who knew more than most specialists. He could demolish anyone
in an argument. Once, after Lindeman had taken a post
at Ox, Albert Einstein came to a faculty dinner and
afterwards all the young physicists gathered around Einstein as you
would expect them to, and their first question was what
do you think of Lindeman? That was what they wanted
(07:22):
to know. Another night, at dinner, Einstein talked about some
mathematical proposition for which he'd never been able to come
up with a proof. The next day Lindeman casually mentioned
that he had the answer. He figured it out in
his bathtub. You can see why everyone was so obsessed
with him. He impressed us immensely, but because he was
(07:46):
very much the man of the world. This is a
friend of his. George Thompson was a striking person to
look at, tall, slim, dark, young kind. People said he
looked like Mephistopheles. I think this is not quite fair
to him. I think he was the most exciting person
to talk physics too, that I have ever talked to.
(08:09):
Even Lindeman's Valet sung his praises when he was interviewed
by the BBC thirty two years, so close to him
with him never once seemed anything slightly even remotely suggesting impropriety.
Who on this occasion, when he was showing some films
to a lady and heaps perspied, he walked behind the
(08:31):
curtain to Moppy's brewo. But Lindeman was also profoundly eccentric.
He played tennis with a shirt buttoned to the neck,
long sleeves fastened to the wrist, thick black rib socks,
and white boots. People who wore shorts disgusted him. Lindeman's
family was eccentric as well. He had a brother named Seppi,
(08:51):
who lived in style on the Riviera with two Rose roycees.
One was white and driven by a black man, the
other was black and chauffeured by an albino. I'm not
making that up. In his lecture, Sepe Snow spends an
unusual amount of time just talking about Lindiman's diet. He
was the most cranky of all vegetarians. He wasn't only
(09:13):
a vegetarian, but he would only eat very minute fractions
of what you might regard as a vegetarian diet, and
he lived mainly on cheese, what the whites of eggs
yolks being apparently to animal olive oil and rice. During
(09:36):
the Second World War, there was hardly a drop of
olive oil in England, and Lindiman got his brother, Charles,
who was serving in the British embassy in Washington, to
put a case of olive oil in the diplomatic pouch
at regular intervals to be flown back to London. At
one point, when the war is getting intense, his brother
doesn't send him enough oil. Lindiman goes ballistic, tell Charles,
(09:59):
I can only suppose that he attaches no value to
what I'm trying to do in the war effort, that
he would as soon have me go to bed, and
that is what I shall have to do unless he
sends me more olive oil. Europe is burning. That's what's
on his mind. Lindemann was thin skinned, defensive. He'd never
(10:22):
admit when he was wrong. He'd never change his mind
once it was made up. He thought he was an
expert on everything, even when he wasn't. His friend Roy
Harrod once wrote of him, he would not shrink from
using an argument which he knew to be wrong, if
by so doing he could tie up one of his
professional opponents. That was his friend, saying that seepee snow
(10:49):
remembers one New Year's Day with Lindeman in Oxford. The
British Crown had just published its honors list, people who
were being recognized with knighthoods and ladyships. I remarked innocently
enough that the English honors list must give much more
pain than pleasure, because obvious are the people who were
left out a much greater number than the people who
(11:10):
were in. And Lindeman's face lit up. He got a
very somber, heavy face with very sad brown eyes. Well,
these brown eyes sparkled with savagely, and he said, of
course it is. It wouldn't be any use getting an
award if one didn't think of all the people who
were miserable because they hadn't managed it. Here's what another
(11:32):
friend said of him. He was lacking in the bond
of human sympathy for every chance person who was not
brought into a personal relationship with him. I think that's
the crucial fact about Lindeman. One time he's asked for
his definition and morality, and he answers, I define a
moral action as one that brings advantage to my friends.
(11:55):
Frederick Lindemann was a man who put his friends first
to the exclusion of all other moral considerations. Now why
does that matter? Why would SPI Snow devote three days
to this man whom few people in the audience had
ever heard of? Because of who Frederick Lindemann's best friend was.
The man who defined a moral action as one that
(12:18):
brings advantage to my friends was best friends with Winston Churchill.
We are the masters of our fate. That the task
which han't been set us it's not above our strength,
that its pangs and toils are not beyond our endurance.
I'm guessing you think of Churchill as a hero, the
(12:40):
man who bravely led the fight against Adolph Hitler. But
once I learned about his friend, I don't know. Churchill
will never be the same for me. People have often
speculated on why this Frenchshire I'm an extremely cranky, non smoking,
non drinking vegetarian, doesn't sound the obvious soul mate for
(13:04):
for so Winston. I can only answer that. But to
give any send suggestion, you would have to know both
men not only well, but as well as they knew
each other. One can make guesses, But why any frendship
Lindiman and Churchill met each other in nineteen twenty one
at a dinner in London. It was arranged by the
(13:25):
Duke and Duchess of Westminster. Lindiman would always say that
only two people in the world were smarter than he
was Einstein, of course, and Churchill and Churchill felt the
same way. If you read some of the letters Churchill
writes Lindeman, they're almost worshipful. The psychologist Daniel Wegner has
(13:45):
this beautiful concept called transactive memory, which is the observation
that we don't just store information in our minds or
in specific places. We store memories and understanding in the
minds of the people we love. You don't need to
remember your child's emotional relationship to her teacher because you
know your wife will. You don't have to remember how
(14:07):
to work the remote because you know your daughter will.
That's transactive memory. Little bits of ourselves reside in other
people's minds. You know, when one half of a long
marriage dies and the surviving partner says that some part
of them has died along with their spouse. Wegner has
a heartbreaking riff about how that is actually true. When
(14:31):
your partner dies, everything that you have stored in your
partner's brain dies along with them. Churchill is in a
transactive relationship with Lindemann. Think about it. Churchill is a
man of the big picture, a visionary. He is a
deep intuitive understanding of human psychology and history. But he
(14:51):
struggles with depression. He has mood swings. He's impulsive, He's
a gambler. He has no head for figures. Throughout his
life he's always losing huge amounts of money on foolish investments.
In nineteen thirty five, Churchill spent the modern equivalent of
sixty two thousand dollars on Champagne in one year. Within
(15:12):
a month of becoming Prime Minister, he was broke, literally broke.
Here we have a manner of volatile temperament, with no
way to bring order to his life. So who does
he become best friends with Frederick Lindeman. Somewhat disciplined, almost
fanatically consistent, someone who ate the same three things every
(15:32):
meal of every day, someone so naturally at home in
the world of numbers that even as a child he
would read newspapers and recite back reams and reams of
statistics from memory. When Churchill becomes Prime Minister in nineteen forty,
just after the war breaks out. He takes Lindeman with him,
(15:53):
first as scientific advisor. Then he gets him a job
in the war cabinet as the Paymaster General, and Lindiman
becomes a kind of gate keeper to Churchill's mind. Over
the course of the war. He writes Churchill two thousand memos,
basically one a day, double spaced, large print, no more
than a page or two, reducing some complicated question to
(16:15):
its essence. Lindiman travels with Churchill to international conferences. He
dines with him. Lindiman never drinks unless he's eating with Churchill,
who's a big drinker. Then he drinks. He goes to
Churchill's country house on the weekends. People spot them at
three in the morning sitting by the fire reading the
newspaper together. One time, in Parliament, another MP criticizes Lindiman,
(16:39):
and Churchill goes crazy. He says, love me, love my dog,
and if you don't love my dog, you damn well
can't love me. And that's high praise, because remember, to
an Englishman of that generation, the only living creature you're
allowed to show affection for is your dog. Laurel occurred
(17:02):
in nineteen forty two, and in a curdo of a
strategic bombing. The heart of Snow's lecture is about an
argument that took place at the highest reaches of British government.
The question was what was the best use of the
Royal Air Force against the Germans? And it was quite
rough that the leaders of the West should be looking
for anything which would play a serious part in the war.
(17:27):
One school of thought says, let's use our bombers to
support military activities, protecting ships against German U boats, destroying
German factories. The other school of thought argues that bombing
ought to serve a bigger strategic purpose. In other words,
let's use bombing to break the will of the German people.
Let's make their lives so miserable that they give up.
(17:53):
The UK's military leadership was fanatical about the virtues of
strategic bombing, but Churchill was on the fence. So what
did he do? He turned a Lindeman, of course, and
asked Lindeman to do a formal study of strategic bombing's effectiveness.
That's the sort of analytical question Churchill had always turned
over to his best friend, and Lindeman says, let's look
(18:15):
at the English cities of Hull and Birmingham, both of
which were bombed heavily by the Germans. He analyzes the
data then writes one of his famous memos to Churchill.
I'm quoting now from Lindeman's memmo. Investigation seems to show
that having one's house demolished is most dangerous to morrale.
(18:37):
People seem to mind it more than having their friends
or even relatives killed. At Hull, signs of strain were evident.
Though only one tenth of the homes were demolished. On
the above figures, we could do as much harm to
each of the fifty eight principal German towns. There seems
little doubt that this would break the spirit of the
German people. Strategic bombing is about making an all out
(19:03):
assault on the homes and the lives of German civilians,
not soldiers, innocent people. There's a moment in Snow's speech
when he stops because he can't believe, with the benefit
of fifteen years hindsight, that he was part of a
government that thought that this was the right thing to do.
What our descendants will think of us, I don't know
(19:26):
will they think, As Roger Williams said, of some Indians
that we were wolves with the minds of men. Well,
they think we resigned our humanity. But you won't find
any of those kinds of considerations in Lineman's memo to Churchill.
It's very matter of fact. It's all about what the
(19:48):
data says, except for one thing that's not what the
data says. The Birmingham Hall study reached the exact opposite
conclusion that Lineman did. It said that, and I'm quoting
in neither town was there any evidence of panic resulting
from either a series of raids or from a single rate.
(20:14):
Lindeman also makes estimates on how many German homes the
British could destroy. Other experts in the government critics of
strategic bombing point out immediately that Lindeman's numbers are ridiculous,
five or six times too high, based on obvious errors.
Doesn't matter. Remember what one of Lindemann's friends said, he
(20:36):
would not shrink from using an argument which he knew
to be wrong, if by so doing he could tie
up one of his professional opponents. Lindeman wanted strategic bombing,
so Churchill went ahead and ordered the bombing of German
cities no one had ever thought how these bomber forces
were really to be used. It was just an act
(20:56):
of faith. This was a way to fight a war.
And I think it's fair to say that Lindemann was
with as usual extreme intensity, as committed to this faith
as any man in England. So what happened? Most historians
agree that strategic bombing was a disaster. A hundred and
(21:17):
sixty thousand US and English airmen and hundreds of thousands
of German civilians were killed in those bombing campaigns. Many
of Europe's most beautiful cities were destroyed, and German morale
didn't crack. The Germans fought to the bitter end. After
the war. The Nobel Prize winning physicist Patrick Blackett wrote
(21:38):
a devastating essay where he said that the war could
have been won six months or even a year earlier,
if only the British had used their bombers more intelligently.
There should have been a proper debate about strategic bombing
in the British war. Cabinet numbers should have been scrutinized,
hard questions should have been asked. But how can you
(22:00):
have a real debate against Churchill's best friend? Friendship comes first.
That's the thing that makes friendship so powerful and beautiful,
except when your friend is feeding you falsehoods, and your
loyalty to him means that you can't see them. Churwell
was a loner. He had no one in his life
(22:21):
he loved except I think Churchill. Modusrie Mukiji. She's the
voice you heard at the beginning of this episode talking
about a famine in India. She's a historian who wrote
a book a few years ago called Churchill's Secret War.
It's about what happened in the Indian province of Bengal
during the war. The Churwell she's referring to is Frederick Lindemann.
(22:44):
In nineteen forty one, Churchill gave him a peerage, Lord Churwell.
Mukuji prefers to call him by his formal name. When
I got obsessed with Lindeman, Mukuji's book was the last
one I read and maybe the most important. If you
think of CP. Snow's lecture as chapter one in the
Frederick Lindeman Winston Churchill love story, Mukuji's book is the
(23:08):
final pressing chapter. It was clearly the only person he
ever loved in his life. There was no one else.
India was still a British colony during the war, governed
by a viceroy sent from England. Like all British colonial possessions,
India was a major part of the war effort. They
exported food for the Allies. They sent hundreds of thousands
(23:30):
of soldiers to fight the Germans. At the entire industrial production,
the entire cloth production, wool, silk, timber, you name it, it
it was being used for the war. In wartime, countries
operate right at the brink, and in late nineteen forty two,
there's a kind of perfect storm in India's northeastern corner
(23:51):
that pushes the region over the edge. First of all,
the Japanese capture Burma, which sits on India's northeastern border.
India used to import rice from Burma. Now they can't.
The British are terrified that japan will invade India, and
so they order a score earth policy all along the
northeastern border and coast. They destroy stocks of rice, boats, bicycles,
(24:16):
anything they think that might help the Japanese if they invade.
Then there's a cyclone twenty foot storm surge kills thirty
thousand people. The new rice crop is devastated. The government panics.
They don't know how they're going to feed their troops,
so they go into all the towns and start buying
up rice. The price soars, speculators step in and start
(24:38):
hoarding rice. That's exactly how famines start. What you have
is by the end of nineteen forty two you have
the Visor of India making fervent please to the War
Eminent in London for imports wheat. The please go to Lindeman.
He's Paymaster General in the War Cabinet, which means he's
basically the government's logistics man, the one responsible for making
(25:01):
sure there are enough food and supplies for England and
its allies. Lindeman says, no, we're in the middle of
a war. We can't spare the food, and even if
we could, we have no way of getting the food
to India were tapped out throughout the spring of nineteen
forty three. The Viceroy is saying, we absolutely need this,
(25:22):
we absolutely need this food, and Churwollo is saying, we'd
can't spare the ships. We can't spare the ships. But
Mukuji wonders, is that true. Was Lindeman telling another lie?
She then does something no historian had ever done before.
She digs into the British shipping archive from the war,
which had just been declassified files that literally hadn't been
(25:44):
opened in sixty years, and she finds out that the
British had lots of food in nineteen forty three, huge stockpiles,
so much that the Americans, who were the source of
a lot of that food, got suspicious that the British
were hoarding surplus week to sell when the war was over.
And what about the UK's supposed shortage of boats. Mukuji says,
(26:05):
there was one at the beginning of nineteen forty three,
when and submarines were still wreaking havoc in the Atlantic,
but not by the end of that year. The US
starts sending over so many ships that by late nineteen
forty three, when the famine in Bengal is at its height,
there's actually a surplus of boats on the Allied side.
In fact, in nineteen forty three, the British actually starts
(26:28):
shipping wheat from Australia up through the Indian Ocean, just
not to India. Let'd be eighteen ships loading with wheat
and wheat flour over in September and October, and not
one of them were going to India, And some of
them were actually going to a stockpile that was being
built up in the Middle East for feeding Europe after liberation.
(26:53):
British ships full of grain are sailing right past India
on the way to the Middle East to be stored
for some future hypothetical need. They might even stop and
refuel the Mumbai but nothing leaves the ship. So you
have a situation in which India is starving. There are
corpses on the streets of Calcutta. So why why is
(27:15):
Lindeman refusing to help? It doesn't even make a logical sense.
Indian soldiers, hundreds of thousands of them, are fighting the
Germans in the Middle East and Africa. When other countries
like Canada and the United States offer to send food
to India, the British say, we don't want it. They
turn down help. Lindeman seems completely unmoved by India's plight.
(27:38):
In my view, the Indians have got themselves into a mess,
very largely through their own fault, he writes, in the
middle of the famine, their own fault. Then he goes
on this shortage of food is likely to be endemic
in a country where the population is always increased until
only bare subsistence is possible. Basically, they have too many babies. Now, remember,
(28:07):
Lindeman's a physicist by training who rides around in a
chauffeur driven limousine and plays tennis in full dress. If
he's thought about India once in his life before the war,
I'd be stunned. Yet here he is with a fully
worked out ideology about Britain's moral obligations to one of
its most important allies. It's tempting to put this down
(28:29):
to another of his idiosyncratic prejudices. He also didn't like
Jews all that much, and black people, according to a friend,
filled him with a physical revulsion which he was unable
to control. But I'm not sure that we're seeing Lindiman here.
I think we're seeing Churchill. Churchill is the one with
an issue about India. He's obsessed with India. In the
(28:52):
years leading up to the war, Gandhi is building his
independence movement within India, and Churchill hates Gandhi. Churchill is
furious about the fact that Britain has to buy raw
materials from India, meaning that the Master is running up
a debt with its supposed subject. The British cabinet minister
in London who's responsible for India is a man named
(29:13):
Leopold Amory. He's the one begging for food for India.
Amory keeps a diary of his interactions with Churchill. At
one point he says, Churchill goes on a rant about
Indians in India, and Amory tells him, you sound like Hitler.
At another point he writes of Churchill, I am by
no means sure that whether on this subject of India,
(29:35):
he is really quite sane. So why was Lindeman so
adamant that England could not help India? Because Churchill was
adamant that England could not help India, and Lindeman was
a loyal friend, Churwell would send Churchill these minutes. They
had to be no longer than ten lines long, and
(29:58):
they would recommend a course of action. And to design
these minutes he actually left out a lot of qualifications,
the bad things that could happen if you did such
and such. For instance, in the shipping cut, the Ministry
of War Transport had warned that there'd be violent cataclysms
in the economies of the Indian Ocean area. None of
(30:21):
these concerns ever made it into a terrible memo. He
actually simply laid out the rationale for doing whatever he
and Churchill wanted to be done. Why don't we spend
more time thinking about friends or politicians? I'll never understand it.
(30:44):
We go through lengthy election seasons where we endlessly scrutinize
all the people running for public office. We look at
the candidates, their beliefs, the background, the clothes they wear.
We look at them. But then after the election is over,
we realize we didn't just elect that candidate. Because no
one governs alone. Eventually, leaders get overwhelmed at a certain point.
(31:07):
They're going to call their closest friend at two in
the morning and say, what do I do? So when
you're voting for someone, you're also voting for that friend
who gets called at two in the morning. That's what's
strange about elections. Friends should be scrutinized, the friends should
all have to debate each other, but they don't. Friends
get a pass. In his lecture, CP snow called this
(31:32):
court politics, the Lindeman Churchill relation is the most fascinating
example of politics that we're likely to see people called
Lindeman the prof. Sometimes that was said with affection, sometimes
with bewilderment. I still can hear friend of mine, man
(31:55):
who's normally veritof and very intelligent, on a black London
wartime night, as we talked about the bombing policy, saying
the Prime Minister and prof have decided. Who are we
to say them? Nay? The best guest of how many
(32:15):
died in the Bengal famine of nineteen forty three is
three million people. Three million. After the war, the British
government held a formal inquiry into what happened, but the
investigation was forbidden to consider and I'm quoting Her Majesty's
(32:37):
government's decision in regard to shipping of imports. In other words,
they were asked to investigate the cause of the famine
without investigating the cause of the famine. Churchill's sixth volume
History of the War was kind of a primary reference
for historians of at least a generation. He made no
(33:00):
mention of the famine. It just sort of got one
mention in an appendix in six volumes. There is one
mention in an appendix in a document that makes it
into the appendix. Yes, there's no mention of it. In fact,
what he says instead is that India was carried through
the struggle on the shoulders of our small island. No
(33:23):
one in London was interested in telling the real story
of what happened, and Churchill and Lindeman had no interest
in talking about it either. They decided to keep it
all between friends. Revisionist History is produced by mil Aabal
(33:48):
and Jacob Smith, with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel and Ciomara
Martinez wife. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is
our engineer. Original music by Luis Guera. Special thanks to
Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberger Panoply. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, YO
(34:20):
M
Pushkin. What was your mother's experience in the family. So
your family is from Bengal. Yeah, my mother was about
twelve years old and she was living in the city.
She saw all of this starvation on the pavements, all
of the people coming into the city from the villages
(00:38):
because there was absolutely nothing left in the villages. And
I had this question that no one seemed to have answered,
which was why is it that no relief was sent?
Modusari Mukijie a writer and historian whose work I came
across not long ago. I wanted you to read a
passage from your book. Can you just read the first paragraph?
(01:02):
I thought it was as a way of communicating to
people what a famine is. In Shahpuraputa, village of the
seventeenth Union of Pashkuratana, a Muslim weaver was unable to
support his family and crazed with hunger, wandered away. His
wife believed that he had drowned himself in the flooded
(01:24):
Kashai River. Being unable to feed her two young sons
for several days, she could no longer endure their suffering.
She dropped the smaller boy, torn from her womb. The
sparkle of her eye into the Kashai's frothing waters. My
(01:50):
name is Malcolm Glaba. You're listening to Revisionist History, my
podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is about
a famine that took place in India in nineteen forty three.
Famines are the immediate result of things like droughts and
crop tailures, hacks of nature, but their cause is invariably
(02:14):
human wars misguided policies. Right now as I'm recording this,
Venezuela is facing a malnutrition crisis. A country with vast
oil wealth in one of the most fertile corners of
the world doesn't have enough food. Humans cause that, not nature.
So what was the human cause of the Bengal famine
(02:34):
of nineteen forty three. I think it was a friendship,
but that's a much more complicated story that begins on
the other side of the world. It is my great
privilege to welcome Sir Charles back to our community and
to present him to the audience in Cambridge tonight, mister
(02:58):
President being Price, ladies and gentlemen. I'm very pleased, I'm
very honored to be here this evening. It's nineteen sixty
Harvard University, one of England's great post war intellectuals, a
scientist named Seep Snow, is giving the Godkin Lecture at
(03:18):
the Sanders Theater. Coming to Harvard, I felt as I
felt before, that in many ways, this is the most
splendid university I ever set foot in, and I don't
feel all the faintly apologetic quiver that I get at
some American institutions, which I can only admire as a
(03:41):
distant spectator, and one for which I feel, sometimes happily
that I have no responsibility. Snow was a physicist by training,
a high ranking scientist in the British government during the
Second World War, then a best selling novelist. Back when
the Nazis thought they were going to win the war,
(04:02):
they made a list of twenty eight hundred people they
were going to hand over to the Gestapo. The minute
they invaded, England was on the list. In the intervening years,
Snow's reputation has grown. The Sanders Theater was packed, his
lecture was so long it had to be broken up
over three days and was broadcast live on television. But
(04:23):
he does something unexpected. He devotes fully half of his
speech to one person, someone whom I'm guessing few Americans
had ever heard of. Frederick A. Lindeman born April fifth,
eighteen eighty six died July third, nineteen fifty seven, otherwise
known as Lord Churwell J. Linderman was by anyone's a
(04:49):
very remarkable and a very strange man. He was a
real heavyweight of personality. Remember Snow as a novelist, a
student of character. Linderman was quite Unenglish. I always thought
if you met him in middle Age would have thought
he was the kind of Central European business man that
(05:09):
when he used to meet him the more expensive hotels
in Italy. He was heavy featured, pallid all, was very
correctly dressed. He spoke German at least as well as
he did English, and indeed under his English there was
a tone of German if you could hear him at all,
because he all was mumbled and an extraordinary constricted fash.
(05:33):
Snow is obsessed with Lindeman. That's the first thing that
comes across in the lecture. Frederick Lindeman was the kind
of man who obsessed people. People talked about Lindeman, gossiped
about him, gave speeches about him. I got obsessed with
him last summer, and by the time my Lindemania was over,
I'd read six books about him, six and I think
(05:54):
I just scratched the surface. Baltam the Harnger kind of
atmosphere of indefinable malaise. You felt that he didn't understand
his own life well, and he wasn't very good at
coping with The major thing family was venimusy wish, harsh tongued.
He had a malicious, sadistic sense of human moment. Nevertheless,
(06:16):
you felt somehow he was lost, and I said he
was a figure I made a novelist. Fingers H. Lindemann
was born in Germany. His father was a wealthy German engineer.
His mother was an American heiress like CP Snow. He
(06:37):
was also a physicist and got his PhD in Berlin
just before the First World War, at a time when
Germany was the center of the world in physics. His
thesis adviser compared his mind to that of Isaac Newton.
He was a captivating conversationalist, a champion tennis player. He
dressed like a nineteenth century count. He was a generalist
(07:00):
who knew more than most specialists. He could demolish anyone
in an argument. Once, after Lindeman had taken a post
at Ox, Albert Einstein came to a faculty dinner and
afterwards all the young physicists gathered around Einstein as you
would expect them to, and their first question was what
do you think of Lindeman? That was what they wanted
(07:22):
to know. Another night, at dinner, Einstein talked about some
mathematical proposition for which he'd never been able to come
up with a proof. The next day Lindeman casually mentioned
that he had the answer. He figured it out in
his bathtub. You can see why everyone was so obsessed
with him. He impressed us immensely, but because he was
(07:46):
very much the man of the world. This is a
friend of his. George Thompson was a striking person to
look at, tall, slim, dark, young kind. People said he
looked like Mephistopheles. I think this is not quite fair
to him. I think he was the most exciting person
to talk physics too, that I have ever talked to.
(08:09):
Even Lindeman's Valet sung his praises when he was interviewed
by the BBC thirty two years, so close to him
with him never once seemed anything slightly even remotely suggesting impropriety.
Who on this occasion, when he was showing some films
to a lady and heaps perspied, he walked behind the
(08:31):
curtain to Moppy's brewo. But Lindeman was also profoundly eccentric.
He played tennis with a shirt buttoned to the neck,
long sleeves fastened to the wrist, thick black rib socks,
and white boots. People who wore shorts disgusted him. Lindeman's
family was eccentric as well. He had a brother named Seppi,
(08:51):
who lived in style on the Riviera with two Rose roycees.
One was white and driven by a black man, the
other was black and chauffeured by an albino. I'm not
making that up. In his lecture, Sepe Snow spends an
unusual amount of time just talking about Lindiman's diet. He
was the most cranky of all vegetarians. He wasn't only
(09:13):
a vegetarian, but he would only eat very minute fractions
of what you might regard as a vegetarian diet, and
he lived mainly on cheese, what the whites of eggs
yolks being apparently to animal olive oil and rice. During
(09:36):
the Second World War, there was hardly a drop of
olive oil in England, and Lindiman got his brother, Charles,
who was serving in the British embassy in Washington, to
put a case of olive oil in the diplomatic pouch
at regular intervals to be flown back to London. At
one point, when the war is getting intense, his brother
doesn't send him enough oil. Lindiman goes ballistic, tell Charles,
(09:59):
I can only suppose that he attaches no value to
what I'm trying to do in the war effort, that
he would as soon have me go to bed, and
that is what I shall have to do unless he
sends me more olive oil. Europe is burning. That's what's
on his mind. Lindemann was thin skinned, defensive. He'd never
(10:22):
admit when he was wrong. He'd never change his mind
once it was made up. He thought he was an
expert on everything, even when he wasn't. His friend Roy
Harrod once wrote of him, he would not shrink from
using an argument which he knew to be wrong, if
by so doing he could tie up one of his
professional opponents. That was his friend, saying that seepee snow
(10:49):
remembers one New Year's Day with Lindeman in Oxford. The
British Crown had just published its honors list, people who
were being recognized with knighthoods and ladyships. I remarked innocently
enough that the English honors list must give much more
pain than pleasure, because obvious are the people who were
left out a much greater number than the people who
(11:10):
were in. And Lindeman's face lit up. He got a
very somber, heavy face with very sad brown eyes. Well,
these brown eyes sparkled with savagely, and he said, of
course it is. It wouldn't be any use getting an
award if one didn't think of all the people who
were miserable because they hadn't managed it. Here's what another
(11:32):
friend said of him. He was lacking in the bond
of human sympathy for every chance person who was not
brought into a personal relationship with him. I think that's
the crucial fact about Lindeman. One time he's asked for
his definition and morality, and he answers, I define a
moral action as one that brings advantage to my friends.
(11:55):
Frederick Lindemann was a man who put his friends first
to the exclusion of all other moral considerations. Now why
does that matter? Why would SPI Snow devote three days
to this man whom few people in the audience had
ever heard of? Because of who Frederick Lindemann's best friend was.
The man who defined a moral action as one that
(12:18):
brings advantage to my friends was best friends with Winston Churchill.
We are the masters of our fate. That the task
which han't been set us it's not above our strength,
that its pangs and toils are not beyond our endurance.
I'm guessing you think of Churchill as a hero, the
(12:40):
man who bravely led the fight against Adolph Hitler. But
once I learned about his friend, I don't know. Churchill
will never be the same for me. People have often
speculated on why this Frenchshire I'm an extremely cranky, non smoking,
non drinking vegetarian, doesn't sound the obvious soul mate for
(13:04):
for so Winston. I can only answer that. But to
give any send suggestion, you would have to know both
men not only well, but as well as they knew
each other. One can make guesses, But why any frendship
Lindiman and Churchill met each other in nineteen twenty one
at a dinner in London. It was arranged by the
(13:25):
Duke and Duchess of Westminster. Lindiman would always say that
only two people in the world were smarter than he
was Einstein, of course, and Churchill and Churchill felt the
same way. If you read some of the letters Churchill
writes Lindeman, they're almost worshipful. The psychologist Daniel Wegner has
(13:45):
this beautiful concept called transactive memory, which is the observation
that we don't just store information in our minds or
in specific places. We store memories and understanding in the
minds of the people we love. You don't need to
remember your child's emotional relationship to her teacher because you
know your wife will. You don't have to remember how
(14:07):
to work the remote because you know your daughter will.
That's transactive memory. Little bits of ourselves reside in other
people's minds. You know, when one half of a long
marriage dies and the surviving partner says that some part
of them has died along with their spouse. Wegner has
a heartbreaking riff about how that is actually true. When
(14:31):
your partner dies, everything that you have stored in your
partner's brain dies along with them. Churchill is in a
transactive relationship with Lindemann. Think about it. Churchill is a
man of the big picture, a visionary. He is a
deep intuitive understanding of human psychology and history. But he
(14:51):
struggles with depression. He has mood swings. He's impulsive, He's
a gambler. He has no head for figures. Throughout his
life he's always losing huge amounts of money on foolish investments.
In nineteen thirty five, Churchill spent the modern equivalent of
sixty two thousand dollars on Champagne in one year. Within
(15:12):
a month of becoming Prime Minister, he was broke, literally broke.
Here we have a manner of volatile temperament, with no
way to bring order to his life. So who does
he become best friends with Frederick Lindeman. Somewhat disciplined, almost
fanatically consistent, someone who ate the same three things every
(15:32):
meal of every day, someone so naturally at home in
the world of numbers that even as a child he
would read newspapers and recite back reams and reams of
statistics from memory. When Churchill becomes Prime Minister in nineteen forty,
just after the war breaks out. He takes Lindeman with him,
(15:53):
first as scientific advisor. Then he gets him a job
in the war cabinet as the Paymaster General, and Lindiman
becomes a kind of gate keeper to Churchill's mind. Over
the course of the war. He writes Churchill two thousand memos,
basically one a day, double spaced, large print, no more
than a page or two, reducing some complicated question to
(16:15):
its essence. Lindiman travels with Churchill to international conferences. He
dines with him. Lindiman never drinks unless he's eating with Churchill,
who's a big drinker. Then he drinks. He goes to
Churchill's country house on the weekends. People spot them at
three in the morning sitting by the fire reading the
newspaper together. One time, in Parliament, another MP criticizes Lindiman,
(16:39):
and Churchill goes crazy. He says, love me, love my dog,
and if you don't love my dog, you damn well
can't love me. And that's high praise, because remember, to
an Englishman of that generation, the only living creature you're
allowed to show affection for is your dog. Laurel occurred
(17:02):
in nineteen forty two, and in a curdo of a
strategic bombing. The heart of Snow's lecture is about an
argument that took place at the highest reaches of British government.
The question was what was the best use of the
Royal Air Force against the Germans? And it was quite
rough that the leaders of the West should be looking
for anything which would play a serious part in the war.
(17:27):
One school of thought says, let's use our bombers to
support military activities, protecting ships against German U boats, destroying
German factories. The other school of thought argues that bombing
ought to serve a bigger strategic purpose. In other words,
let's use bombing to break the will of the German people.
Let's make their lives so miserable that they give up.
(17:53):
The UK's military leadership was fanatical about the virtues of
strategic bombing, but Churchill was on the fence. So what
did he do? He turned a Lindeman, of course, and
asked Lindeman to do a formal study of strategic bombing's effectiveness.
That's the sort of analytical question Churchill had always turned
over to his best friend, and Lindeman says, let's look
(18:15):
at the English cities of Hull and Birmingham, both of
which were bombed heavily by the Germans. He analyzes the
data then writes one of his famous memos to Churchill.
I'm quoting now from Lindeman's memmo. Investigation seems to show
that having one's house demolished is most dangerous to morrale.
(18:37):
People seem to mind it more than having their friends
or even relatives killed. At Hull, signs of strain were evident.
Though only one tenth of the homes were demolished. On
the above figures, we could do as much harm to
each of the fifty eight principal German towns. There seems
little doubt that this would break the spirit of the
German people. Strategic bombing is about making an all out
(19:03):
assault on the homes and the lives of German civilians,
not soldiers, innocent people. There's a moment in Snow's speech
when he stops because he can't believe, with the benefit
of fifteen years hindsight, that he was part of a
government that thought that this was the right thing to do.
What our descendants will think of us, I don't know
(19:26):
will they think, As Roger Williams said, of some Indians
that we were wolves with the minds of men. Well,
they think we resigned our humanity. But you won't find
any of those kinds of considerations in Lineman's memo to Churchill.
It's very matter of fact. It's all about what the
(19:48):
data says, except for one thing that's not what the
data says. The Birmingham Hall study reached the exact opposite
conclusion that Lineman did. It said that, and I'm quoting
in neither town was there any evidence of panic resulting
from either a series of raids or from a single rate.
(20:14):
Lindeman also makes estimates on how many German homes the
British could destroy. Other experts in the government critics of
strategic bombing point out immediately that Lindeman's numbers are ridiculous,
five or six times too high, based on obvious errors.
Doesn't matter. Remember what one of Lindemann's friends said, he
(20:36):
would not shrink from using an argument which he knew
to be wrong, if by so doing he could tie
up one of his professional opponents. Lindeman wanted strategic bombing,
so Churchill went ahead and ordered the bombing of German
cities no one had ever thought how these bomber forces
were really to be used. It was just an act
(20:56):
of faith. This was a way to fight a war.
And I think it's fair to say that Lindemann was
with as usual extreme intensity, as committed to this faith
as any man in England. So what happened? Most historians
agree that strategic bombing was a disaster. A hundred and
(21:17):
sixty thousand US and English airmen and hundreds of thousands
of German civilians were killed in those bombing campaigns. Many
of Europe's most beautiful cities were destroyed, and German morale
didn't crack. The Germans fought to the bitter end. After
the war. The Nobel Prize winning physicist Patrick Blackett wrote
(21:38):
a devastating essay where he said that the war could
have been won six months or even a year earlier,
if only the British had used their bombers more intelligently.
There should have been a proper debate about strategic bombing
in the British war. Cabinet numbers should have been scrutinized,
hard questions should have been asked. But how can you
(22:00):
have a real debate against Churchill's best friend? Friendship comes first.
That's the thing that makes friendship so powerful and beautiful,
except when your friend is feeding you falsehoods, and your
loyalty to him means that you can't see them. Churwell
was a loner. He had no one in his life
(22:21):
he loved except I think Churchill. Modusrie Mukiji. She's the
voice you heard at the beginning of this episode talking
about a famine in India. She's a historian who wrote
a book a few years ago called Churchill's Secret War.
It's about what happened in the Indian province of Bengal
during the war. The Churwell she's referring to is Frederick Lindemann.
(22:44):
In nineteen forty one, Churchill gave him a peerage, Lord Churwell.
Mukuji prefers to call him by his formal name. When
I got obsessed with Lindeman, Mukuji's book was the last
one I read and maybe the most important. If you
think of CP. Snow's lecture as chapter one in the
Frederick Lindeman Winston Churchill love story, Mukuji's book is the
(23:08):
final pressing chapter. It was clearly the only person he
ever loved in his life. There was no one else.
India was still a British colony during the war, governed
by a viceroy sent from England. Like all British colonial possessions,
India was a major part of the war effort. They
exported food for the Allies. They sent hundreds of thousands
(23:30):
of soldiers to fight the Germans. At the entire industrial production,
the entire cloth production, wool, silk, timber, you name it, it
it was being used for the war. In wartime, countries
operate right at the brink, and in late nineteen forty two,
there's a kind of perfect storm in India's northeastern corner
(23:51):
that pushes the region over the edge. First of all,
the Japanese capture Burma, which sits on India's northeastern border.
India used to import rice from Burma. Now they can't.
The British are terrified that japan will invade India, and
so they order a score earth policy all along the
northeastern border and coast. They destroy stocks of rice, boats, bicycles,
(24:16):
anything they think that might help the Japanese if they invade.
Then there's a cyclone twenty foot storm surge kills thirty
thousand people. The new rice crop is devastated. The government panics.
They don't know how they're going to feed their troops,
so they go into all the towns and start buying
up rice. The price soars, speculators step in and start
(24:38):
hoarding rice. That's exactly how famines start. What you have
is by the end of nineteen forty two you have
the Visor of India making fervent please to the War
Eminent in London for imports wheat. The please go to Lindeman.
He's Paymaster General in the War Cabinet, which means he's
basically the government's logistics man, the one responsible for making
(25:01):
sure there are enough food and supplies for England and
its allies. Lindeman says, no, we're in the middle of
a war. We can't spare the food, and even if
we could, we have no way of getting the food
to India were tapped out throughout the spring of nineteen
forty three. The Viceroy is saying, we absolutely need this,
(25:22):
we absolutely need this food, and Churwollo is saying, we'd
can't spare the ships. We can't spare the ships. But
Mukuji wonders, is that true. Was Lindeman telling another lie?
She then does something no historian had ever done before.
She digs into the British shipping archive from the war,
which had just been declassified files that literally hadn't been
(25:44):
opened in sixty years, and she finds out that the
British had lots of food in nineteen forty three, huge stockpiles,
so much that the Americans, who were the source of
a lot of that food, got suspicious that the British
were hoarding surplus week to sell when the war was over.
And what about the UK's supposed shortage of boats. Mukuji says,
(26:05):
there was one at the beginning of nineteen forty three,
when and submarines were still wreaking havoc in the Atlantic,
but not by the end of that year. The US
starts sending over so many ships that by late nineteen
forty three, when the famine in Bengal is at its height,
there's actually a surplus of boats on the Allied side.
In fact, in nineteen forty three, the British actually starts
(26:28):
shipping wheat from Australia up through the Indian Ocean, just
not to India. Let'd be eighteen ships loading with wheat
and wheat flour over in September and October, and not
one of them were going to India, And some of
them were actually going to a stockpile that was being
built up in the Middle East for feeding Europe after liberation.
(26:53):
British ships full of grain are sailing right past India
on the way to the Middle East to be stored
for some future hypothetical need. They might even stop and
refuel the Mumbai but nothing leaves the ship. So you
have a situation in which India is starving. There are
corpses on the streets of Calcutta. So why why is
(27:15):
Lindeman refusing to help? It doesn't even make a logical sense.
Indian soldiers, hundreds of thousands of them, are fighting the
Germans in the Middle East and Africa. When other countries
like Canada and the United States offer to send food
to India, the British say, we don't want it. They
turn down help. Lindeman seems completely unmoved by India's plight.
(27:38):
In my view, the Indians have got themselves into a mess,
very largely through their own fault, he writes, in the
middle of the famine, their own fault. Then he goes
on this shortage of food is likely to be endemic
in a country where the population is always increased until
only bare subsistence is possible. Basically, they have too many babies. Now, remember,
(28:07):
Lindeman's a physicist by training who rides around in a
chauffeur driven limousine and plays tennis in full dress. If
he's thought about India once in his life before the war,
I'd be stunned. Yet here he is with a fully
worked out ideology about Britain's moral obligations to one of
its most important allies. It's tempting to put this down
(28:29):
to another of his idiosyncratic prejudices. He also didn't like
Jews all that much, and black people, according to a friend,
filled him with a physical revulsion which he was unable
to control. But I'm not sure that we're seeing Lindiman here.
I think we're seeing Churchill. Churchill is the one with
an issue about India. He's obsessed with India. In the
(28:52):
years leading up to the war, Gandhi is building his
independence movement within India, and Churchill hates Gandhi. Churchill is
furious about the fact that Britain has to buy raw
materials from India, meaning that the Master is running up
a debt with its supposed subject. The British cabinet minister
in London who's responsible for India is a man named
(29:13):
Leopold Amory. He's the one begging for food for India.
Amory keeps a diary of his interactions with Churchill. At
one point he says, Churchill goes on a rant about
Indians in India, and Amory tells him, you sound like Hitler.
At another point he writes of Churchill, I am by
no means sure that whether on this subject of India,
(29:35):
he is really quite sane. So why was Lindeman so
adamant that England could not help India? Because Churchill was
adamant that England could not help India, and Lindeman was
a loyal friend, Churwell would send Churchill these minutes. They
had to be no longer than ten lines long, and
(29:58):
they would recommend a course of action. And to design
these minutes he actually left out a lot of qualifications,
the bad things that could happen if you did such
and such. For instance, in the shipping cut, the Ministry
of War Transport had warned that there'd be violent cataclysms
in the economies of the Indian Ocean area. None of
(30:21):
these concerns ever made it into a terrible memo. He
actually simply laid out the rationale for doing whatever he
and Churchill wanted to be done. Why don't we spend
more time thinking about friends or politicians? I'll never understand it.
(30:44):
We go through lengthy election seasons where we endlessly scrutinize
all the people running for public office. We look at
the candidates, their beliefs, the background, the clothes they wear.
We look at them. But then after the election is over,
we realize we didn't just elect that candidate. Because no
one governs alone. Eventually, leaders get overwhelmed at a certain point.
(31:07):
They're going to call their closest friend at two in
the morning and say, what do I do? So when
you're voting for someone, you're also voting for that friend
who gets called at two in the morning. That's what's
strange about elections. Friends should be scrutinized, the friends should
all have to debate each other, but they don't. Friends
get a pass. In his lecture, CP snow called this
(31:32):
court politics, the Lindeman Churchill relation is the most fascinating
example of politics that we're likely to see people called
Lindeman the prof. Sometimes that was said with affection, sometimes
with bewilderment. I still can hear friend of mine, man
(31:55):
who's normally veritof and very intelligent, on a black London
wartime night, as we talked about the bombing policy, saying
the Prime Minister and prof have decided. Who are we
to say them? Nay? The best guest of how many
(32:15):
died in the Bengal famine of nineteen forty three is
three million people. Three million. After the war, the British
government held a formal inquiry into what happened, but the
investigation was forbidden to consider and I'm quoting Her Majesty's
(32:37):
government's decision in regard to shipping of imports. In other words,
they were asked to investigate the cause of the famine
without investigating the cause of the famine. Churchill's sixth volume
History of the War was kind of a primary reference
for historians of at least a generation. He made no
(33:00):
mention of the famine. It just sort of got one
mention in an appendix in six volumes. There is one
mention in an appendix in a document that makes it
into the appendix. Yes, there's no mention of it. In fact,
what he says instead is that India was carried through
the struggle on the shoulders of our small island. No
(33:23):
one in London was interested in telling the real story
of what happened, and Churchill and Lindeman had no interest
in talking about it either. They decided to keep it
all between friends. Revisionist History is produced by mil Aabal
(33:48):
and Jacob Smith, with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel and Ciomara
Martinez wife. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is
our engineer. Original music by Luis Guera. Special thanks to
Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberger Panoply. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, YO
(34:20):
M
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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