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.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
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 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
(00:46):
it that no relief was sent?
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Motus read Mukiji, 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? I thought it was as a way of
communicating to people what a famine is.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
In Shahpurabuda, 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 Kashai River. Being unable to
feed her two young sons for several days, she could
(01:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
My name is Malcolm Glabo. 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 failures, packs of nature, but their cause
(02:13):
is invariably 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
(02:33):
Bengal famine 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.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
It is my great privilege to welcome Sir Charles back
to our community to present him to the audience in
Cambridge tonight, mister President bean Price, ladies and gentlemen. I'm
very pleased, I'm very honored to be here this evening.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
It's nineteen sixty Harvard University. One of England's great post
war intellectuals, a scientist named C. P. Snow, is giving
the Godkin Lecture at the Sanders Theater.
Speaker 3 (03:20):
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 the faintly
apologetic quiver that I get at some American institutions, which
I can only admire as a distant spectator, and one
(03:43):
for which I feel, sometimes happily that I have no responsibility.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
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, 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.
(04:14):
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 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. Linderman born April fifth, eighteen eighty six died
(04:39):
July third, nineteen fifty seven, otherwise known as Lord Churwell.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
Lindermann was by ennions a very remarkable and a very
strange man. He was a real heavyweight of personality.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Remember Snow's a novelist, a student of character.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
Linderman was quite un English. I almost thought if you
met him in middle Age, would have thought he was
the kind of Central European business man that when you
used to meet in the more expensive hotels in Italy.
He was heavy featured, pallid all, was very correctly dressed.
(05:20):
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
always mumbled in an extraordinarily constricted fashion.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Snow is obsessed with Linderman. That's the first thing that
comes across in the lecture. Frederick Lindeman was the kind
of man who obsessed people. People talked about Linderman, gossiped
about him, gave speeches about him. I got obsessed with him.
Last summer, and by the time my Lindomania was over,
I'd read six books about him, six and I think
(05:54):
I just scratched the surface about him.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
There hung a 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.
His family was ven a mercy wish, harsh tongue. They
had a malicious, sadistic sense of humor. But nevertheless you
felt that somehow he was lost. And I said he
(06:20):
was a figure and made a novelist.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
Fingers Ith Lindermann was born in Germany. His father was
a wealthy German engineer. His mother was an American heiress
like C. P. Snow. He 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
(06:44):
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 who knew more than most specialists.
He could demolish anyone in an argument. Once, after Lindermann
(07:08):
had taken a post at Oxford, 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 Lindermann. That
was what they wanted to know. Another night, at dinner,
Einstein talked about some mathematical proposition for which he'd never
(07:29):
been able to come up with a proof. The next
day Lindermann casually mentioned that he had the answer. He
figured it out in his bathtub. You can see why
everyone was so obsessed with him.
Speaker 4 (07:43):
He impressed us immensely because he was very much the
man of the world.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
This is a friend of his, George Thompson.
Speaker 4 (07:51):
He was a striking person to look at, tall, slim, dark,
a young kind. People said he looked like Mephistopheles. I
think this is that's quite fair to him. I think
he was the most exciting person to talk physics to
that I have ever talked to.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Even Linderman's valet sung his praises when he was interviewed
by the BBC.
Speaker 5 (08:13):
In thirty two years so closely with him, never once
seen anything slightly even remotely suggesting impropriety. The one was
occasion when he was showing some films to a lady
and he was the spy, and he walked behind the
curtain to mop his brew.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
But Linderman was also profoundly eccentric. He played tennis with
a shirt button to the neck, long sleeves fastened to
the wrist, thick black rib socks, and white boots. People
who wore shorts disgusted him. Linderman's family was eccentric as well.
He had a brother named Seppi, who lived in style
on the Riviera with two Rose royces. One was white
(08:56):
and driven by a black man, the other was black
and chauffeured by an albino. I'm not making that up.
In his lecture, Seep Snow spends an unusual amount of
time just talking about Linderman's diet.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
He was the most cranky of all vegetarians. He wasn't
only 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,
the yoaks being apparently two animal olive oil and rites.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
During the Second World War, there was hardly a drop
of olive oil in England, and Lindenman 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. Lindenman goes ballistic, tell Charles,
(09:59):
I can only suppose that he attaches no value to
what I am 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 than Europe is burning.
That's what's on his mind. Lindaman was thin skinned, defensive.
(10:21):
He'd never 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 Harrad 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 CP
(10:49):
snow remembers one New Year's Day with Lindaman in Oxford.
The British Crown had just published its honors list, people
who were being recognized with knighthoods and ladyships.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
I remarked innocently enough that the English honors list must
give much more pain than pleasure, because obvious to the
people who were left out, a much greater number of
the people who were in. And Linderman's face lit up.
He got a very somber, heavy face with very sad
brown eyes. Well, these brown eyes sparkle with savagely, and
(11:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Oh, here's what another 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 Linderman. One time
he's asked for his definition of morality, and he answers,
(11:49):
I define a moral action as one that brings advantage
to my friends. Frederick Linderman was a man who put
his friends first, to the exclusion of all other moral considerations.
Now why does that matter? Why would CP snow devote
three days to this man whom few people in the
audience had ever heard of? Because of who Frederick Lindemann's
(12:13):
best friend was. The man who defined a moral action
as one that brings advantage to my friends was best
friends with Winston Churchill.
Speaker 4 (12:24):
We are the masters of our fate. That the task
which han't been set us is not above our strength,
that it's pangs and toils are.
Speaker 5 (12:34):
Not beyond our endurance.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
I'm guessing you think of Churchill as a hero, the
man who bravely led the fight against Adolf Hitler. But
once I learned about his friend, I don't know. Churchill
will never be the same for me.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
People have often speculated on why this friendship. I mean,
an extremely cranky, non smoking, non drinking vegetarian doesn't sound
the obvious soul mate for also, of course, so Winston.
I can only answer that. But to give any sense suggestion,
and you would have to know both men not only well,
(13:12):
but as well as they knew each other. One can
make guesses, But why any.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Friendship Linderman and Churchill met each other in nineteen twenty
one at a dinner in London. It was arranged by
the Duke and Duchess of Westminster. Linderman would always say
that only two people in the world were smarter than
he was Einstein, of course, and Churchill and Churchill felt
(13:36):
the same way. If you read some of the letters
Churchill writes Linderman, they're almost worshipful. The psychologist Daniel Wegner
has 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
(13:57):
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 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
(14:20):
marriage dies and the surviving partner says that some part
of them has died along with her spouse. Wegner has
a heartbreaking riff about how that is actually true. When
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
(14:43):
man of the big picture, a visionary. He is a
deep intuitive understanding of human psychology and history. But he
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
(15:06):
sixty two thousand dollars on on Champagne in one year.
Within a month of becoming Prime Minister, he was broke,
literally broke. Here we have a man of volatile temperament
with no way to bring order to his life. So
who does he become best friends with? Frederick Lindemann. Someone disciplined,
(15:28):
almost fanatically consistent, someone who ate the same three things
every 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
(15:48):
nineteen forty, just after the war breaks out. He takes
Lindeman with him, first as scientific advisor, then he gets
him a job in the war cabinet as the Paymaster General,
and Lindenman becomes a kind of gatekeeper to Churchill's mind.
Over the course of the war. He writes Churchill two
thousand memos, basically one a day, double spaced, large print,
(16:11):
no more than a page or two, reducing some complicated
question to its essence. Lindenman travels with Churchill to international conferences.
He dines with him. Lindenman 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
(16:32):
reading the newspaper together. One time, in Parliament, another MP
criticizes Lindermann, 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.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
Drew occurred in nineteen forty two, and it occurred over
a strategic bombing.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
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?
Speaker 3 (17:19):
And it was quite right that the leaders of the
West should be looking for anything which would play a
serious part in the war.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
One school of thoughts 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 to Lindenman, of course, and
asked Lindemann 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 Linnemann 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 Lineman's memmo. Investigation seems to show that
having one's house demolished is most dangerous to morale. People
(18:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (19:22):
What our descendants will think of us, I don't know
Will they think, as Roger Williams said of some Indians,
that we were wolves with the minds of men? Will
they think we resigned our humanity?
Speaker 1 (19:38):
Eh? But you won't find any of those kinds of
considerations in Linenman's memo to Churchill. It's very matter of fact.
It's all about what the data says, except for one
thing that's not what the data says. The Birmingham Hall
(19:58):
study reached the exact opposite conclusion that Linnenmann 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. Lindenman also makes estimates
on how many German homes the British could destroy. Other
(20:19):
experts in the government critics of strategic bombing point out
immediately that Lindemann's numbers are ridiculous, five or six times
too high, based on obvious errors. Doesn't matter. Remember what
one of Lindenman's friends said, he would not shrink from
using an argument which he knew to be wrong, if
(20:40):
by so doing he could tie up one of his
professional opponents. Lindenman wanted strategic bombing, so Churchill went ahead
and ordered the bombing of German cities.
Speaker 3 (20:52):
No one had ever thought how these bomber forces were
really to be used. It was just an act of faith.
This was a way to fight a war. And I
think it's fair to say that Lindermann was with as
usual extreme intensity, as committed to this faith as any
men in England.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
So what happened? Most historians agree that strategic bombing was
a disaster. One hundred and 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
(21:32):
to the bitter end. After the war, the Nobel Prize
winning physicist Patrick Blackett wrote a devastating essay where he
said that the war could have been won six months
or even a year earlier, if only the British should
use their bombers more intelligently. There should have been a
proper debate about strategic bombing in the British war. Cabinet
(21:54):
numbers should have been scrutinized, hard questions should have been asked.
But how can you 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
(22:14):
you can't see them.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
Cherwell was a loner. He had no one in his
life he loved except I think Churchill.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Motusary 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 Cherwell she
is referring to is Frederick Lindeman. In nineteen forty one,
(22:46):
Churchill gave him a peerage, Lord Cherwell. Mukuji prefers to
call him by his formal name. When I got obsessed
with Lindenman, Mukujie's book was the last one I read
and maybe the most important. If you think of C. P.
Snow's lecture as chapter one in the Frederick Lindeman Winston
Churchill Love Story, Mukerjee's book is the final pressing chapter
(23:10):
It was.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
Clearly the only person he ever loved in his life.
There was no one else.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
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
of soldiers to fight the Germans.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
At the entire industrial production, the entire cloth production, wool, silk, timber,
you name it, it was being used for the war.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
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 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.
(24:03):
Now they can't. The British are terrified that japan will
invade India until they order a score earth policy. All
along the northeastern border and coast, they destroy stocks of rice, boats, bicycles,
anything they think that might help the Japanese if they invade.
Then there's a cyclone twenty foot storm surge kills thirty
(24:24):
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 sores. Speculators step in and start
hoarding rice. That's exactly how famines start.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
What you have is by the end of nineteen forty
two you have the Vicero of India making fervent pleas
to the wark Eminet in London for imports of wheat.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
The police 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 sure there are enough food
and supplies for England and its allies. Lindemann 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.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Throughout the spring of nineteen forty three. The Viceroy is saying,
we absolutely need this, we absolutely need this food, and
Turwi is saying we can't spare the ships. We can't
spare the ships.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
But Mukuji wonders is that true. Was Lindaman 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
opened in sixty years, and she finds out that the
British had lots of food in nineteen forty three, huge stockpiles,
(25:52):
so much that the Americans, who were the source of
a lot of that food, got suspicious that the British
were hoarding surplus weak to sell when the war was over.
And what about the UK's supposed shortage of boats. Mukuji says,
there was one at the beginning of nineteen forty three,
when German and submarines were still wreaking havoc in the Atlantic,
(26:12):
but not by the end of that year, the US
starts sending over so many ships that by late nineteen
forty three, when the faminin 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
shipping wheat from Australia up through the Indian Ocean, just
(26:33):
not to India.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
There'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.
Speaker 1 (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.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
So you have a situation in which India is starving.
There are corpses on the streets of Calcutta.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
So why why is Lindenmann refusing to help? It doesn't
even make 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. Lindenmann seems completely unmoved
(27:36):
by India's plight. 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
(28:00):
have too many babies. Now, remember Lindaman's a physicists 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
(28:22):
about Britain's moral obligations to one of its most important allies.
It's tempting to put this down 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 lind him in here.
(28:43):
I think we're seeing Churchill. Churchill is the one with
an issue about India. He's obsessed with India. In the
years leading up to the war. Gandhi is building his
independence movement within India, and Churchill hates Gandhy. Churchill is
furious about the fact that Britain has to buy raw
materials from India, meaning that the Master is running up
(29:06):
a debt with its supposed subject. The British cabinet minister
in London who's responsible for India is a man named
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.
(29:28):
At another point he writes of Churchill, I am by
no means sure that whether on this subject of India,
he is really quite sane. So why was Lindenman so
adamant that England could not help India? Because Churchill was
adamant that England could not help India, and Lindaman was
(29:49):
a loyal.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Friend, Churwell would send Churchill these minutes. They had to
be no longer than ten lines long, and 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
(30:12):
Transport had warned that they'd be violent cataclysms in the
economies of the Indian Ocean area. None of 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.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
Why don't we spend more time thinking about friends at politicians?
I'll never understand it. We go through lengthy election seasons
where we endlessly scrutinize all the people running for public office.
We look at the candidates, their beliefs, their background, the
clothes they wear. We look at them. But then after
the election is over, we realize we didn't just elect
(31:00):
that candidate. Because no one governs alone. Eventually, leaders get overwhelmed.
At a certain point. 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,
(31:23):
the friends should all have to debate each other, but
they don't. Friends get a pass. In his lecture, CP
Snow called this court politics.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
The Linderman Churchill relation is the most fascinating example of
court politics that we're likely to see.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
People called Linderman the prof. Sometimes that was said with affection,
sometimes with bewilderment.
Speaker 3 (31:52):
I still can hear friend of mine, man who's normally
very tough 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?
Speaker 1 (32:10):
May the best guest of how many 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
(32:33):
to consider and I'm quoting Her Majesty's 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.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Churchill's sixth volume History of the War was kind of
a primary reference for historians of at least a generation.
He made no mention of the famine. It just sort
of got one mention in an appendix.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
In six volumes. There is one mentioned in an appendix of.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
The 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.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
No one in London was interested in telling the real
story of what happened, and Churchill and Lindemann had no
interest in talking about it either. They decided to keep
it all between friends. Revision's History is produced by Miel
(33:47):
LaBelle and Jacob Smith, with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel and
Siomara Martinez White. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flon Williams
is our engineer. Original music by Luis Sciarra. Special thanks
to Andy Bauers and Jacob Weisberger Panople. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
Pushkin. What was your mother's experience in the family. So
your family is from Bengal.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
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 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
(00:46):
it that no relief was sent?
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Motus read Mukiji, 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? I thought it was as a way of
communicating to people what a famine is.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
In Shahpurabuda, 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 Kashai River. Being unable to
feed her two young sons for several days, she could
(01:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
My name is Malcolm Glabo. 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 failures, packs of nature, but their cause
(02:13):
is invariably 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
(02:33):
Bengal famine 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.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
It is my great privilege to welcome Sir Charles back
to our community to present him to the audience in
Cambridge tonight, mister President bean Price, ladies and gentlemen. I'm
very pleased, I'm very honored to be here this evening.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
It's nineteen sixty Harvard University. One of England's great post
war intellectuals, a scientist named C. P. Snow, is giving
the Godkin Lecture at the Sanders Theater.
Speaker 3 (03:20):
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 the faintly
apologetic quiver that I get at some American institutions, which
I can only admire as a distant spectator, and one
(03:43):
for which I feel, sometimes happily that I have no responsibility.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
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, 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.
(04:14):
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 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. Linderman born April fifth, eighteen eighty six died
(04:39):
July third, nineteen fifty seven, otherwise known as Lord Churwell.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
Lindermann was by ennions a very remarkable and a very
strange man. He was a real heavyweight of personality.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Remember Snow's a novelist, a student of character.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
Linderman was quite un English. I almost thought if you
met him in middle Age, would have thought he was
the kind of Central European business man that when you
used to meet in the more expensive hotels in Italy.
He was heavy featured, pallid all, was very correctly dressed.
(05:20):
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
always mumbled in an extraordinarily constricted fashion.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Snow is obsessed with Linderman. That's the first thing that
comes across in the lecture. Frederick Lindeman was the kind
of man who obsessed people. People talked about Linderman, gossiped
about him, gave speeches about him. I got obsessed with him.
Last summer, and by the time my Lindomania was over,
I'd read six books about him, six and I think
(05:54):
I just scratched the surface about him.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
There hung a 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.
His family was ven a mercy wish, harsh tongue. They
had a malicious, sadistic sense of humor. But nevertheless you
felt that somehow he was lost. And I said he
(06:20):
was a figure and made a novelist.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
Fingers Ith Lindermann was born in Germany. His father was
a wealthy German engineer. His mother was an American heiress
like C. P. Snow. He 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
(06:44):
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 who knew more than most specialists.
He could demolish anyone in an argument. Once, after Lindermann
(07:08):
had taken a post at Oxford, 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 Lindermann. That
was what they wanted to know. Another night, at dinner,
Einstein talked about some mathematical proposition for which he'd never
(07:29):
been able to come up with a proof. The next
day Lindermann casually mentioned that he had the answer. He
figured it out in his bathtub. You can see why
everyone was so obsessed with him.
Speaker 4 (07:43):
He impressed us immensely because he was very much the
man of the world.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
This is a friend of his, George Thompson.
Speaker 4 (07:51):
He was a striking person to look at, tall, slim, dark,
a young kind. People said he looked like Mephistopheles. I
think this is that's quite fair to him. I think
he was the most exciting person to talk physics to
that I have ever talked to.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Even Linderman's valet sung his praises when he was interviewed
by the BBC.
Speaker 5 (08:13):
In thirty two years so closely with him, never once
seen anything slightly even remotely suggesting impropriety. The one was
occasion when he was showing some films to a lady
and he was the spy, and he walked behind the
curtain to mop his brew.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
But Linderman was also profoundly eccentric. He played tennis with
a shirt button to the neck, long sleeves fastened to
the wrist, thick black rib socks, and white boots. People
who wore shorts disgusted him. Linderman's family was eccentric as well.
He had a brother named Seppi, who lived in style
on the Riviera with two Rose royces. One was white
(08:56):
and driven by a black man, the other was black
and chauffeured by an albino. I'm not making that up.
In his lecture, Seep Snow spends an unusual amount of
time just talking about Linderman's diet.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
He was the most cranky of all vegetarians. He wasn't
only 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,
the yoaks being apparently two animal olive oil and rites.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
During the Second World War, there was hardly a drop
of olive oil in England, and Lindenman 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. Lindenman goes ballistic, tell Charles,
(09:59):
I can only suppose that he attaches no value to
what I am 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 than Europe is burning.
That's what's on his mind. Lindaman was thin skinned, defensive.
(10:21):
He'd never 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 Harrad 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 CP
(10:49):
snow remembers one New Year's Day with Lindaman in Oxford.
The British Crown had just published its honors list, people
who were being recognized with knighthoods and ladyships.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
I remarked innocently enough that the English honors list must
give much more pain than pleasure, because obvious to the
people who were left out, a much greater number of
the people who were in. And Linderman's face lit up.
He got a very somber, heavy face with very sad
brown eyes. Well, these brown eyes sparkle with savagely, and
(11:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Oh, here's what another 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 Linderman. One time
he's asked for his definition of morality, and he answers,
(11:49):
I define a moral action as one that brings advantage
to my friends. Frederick Linderman was a man who put
his friends first, to the exclusion of all other moral considerations.
Now why does that matter? Why would CP snow devote
three days to this man whom few people in the
audience had ever heard of? Because of who Frederick Lindemann's
(12:13):
best friend was. The man who defined a moral action
as one that brings advantage to my friends was best
friends with Winston Churchill.
Speaker 4 (12:24):
We are the masters of our fate. That the task
which han't been set us is not above our strength,
that it's pangs and toils are.
Speaker 5 (12:34):
Not beyond our endurance.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
I'm guessing you think of Churchill as a hero, the
man who bravely led the fight against Adolf Hitler. But
once I learned about his friend, I don't know. Churchill
will never be the same for me.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
People have often speculated on why this friendship. I mean,
an extremely cranky, non smoking, non drinking vegetarian doesn't sound
the obvious soul mate for also, of course, so Winston.
I can only answer that. But to give any sense suggestion,
and you would have to know both men not only well,
(13:12):
but as well as they knew each other. One can
make guesses, But why any.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Friendship Linderman and Churchill met each other in nineteen twenty
one at a dinner in London. It was arranged by
the Duke and Duchess of Westminster. Linderman would always say
that only two people in the world were smarter than
he was Einstein, of course, and Churchill and Churchill felt
(13:36):
the same way. If you read some of the letters
Churchill writes Linderman, they're almost worshipful. The psychologist Daniel Wegner
has 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
(13:57):
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 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
(14:20):
marriage dies and the surviving partner says that some part
of them has died along with her spouse. Wegner has
a heartbreaking riff about how that is actually true. When
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
(14:43):
man of the big picture, a visionary. He is a
deep intuitive understanding of human psychology and history. But he
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
(15:06):
sixty two thousand dollars on on Champagne in one year.
Within a month of becoming Prime Minister, he was broke,
literally broke. Here we have a man of volatile temperament
with no way to bring order to his life. So
who does he become best friends with? Frederick Lindemann. Someone disciplined,
(15:28):
almost fanatically consistent, someone who ate the same three things
every 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
(15:48):
nineteen forty, just after the war breaks out. He takes
Lindeman with him, first as scientific advisor, then he gets
him a job in the war cabinet as the Paymaster General,
and Lindenman becomes a kind of gatekeeper to Churchill's mind.
Over the course of the war. He writes Churchill two
thousand memos, basically one a day, double spaced, large print,
(16:11):
no more than a page or two, reducing some complicated
question to its essence. Lindenman travels with Churchill to international conferences.
He dines with him. Lindenman 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
(16:32):
reading the newspaper together. One time, in Parliament, another MP
criticizes Lindermann, 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.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
Drew occurred in nineteen forty two, and it occurred over
a strategic bombing.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
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?
Speaker 3 (17:19):
And it was quite right that the leaders of the
West should be looking for anything which would play a
serious part in the war.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
One school of thoughts 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 to Lindenman, of course, and
asked Lindemann 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 Linnemann 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 Lineman's memmo. Investigation seems to show that
having one's house demolished is most dangerous to morale. People
(18:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (19:22):
What our descendants will think of us, I don't know
Will they think, as Roger Williams said of some Indians,
that we were wolves with the minds of men? Will
they think we resigned our humanity?
Speaker 1 (19:38):
Eh? But you won't find any of those kinds of
considerations in Linenman's memo to Churchill. It's very matter of fact.
It's all about what the data says, except for one
thing that's not what the data says. The Birmingham Hall
(19:58):
study reached the exact opposite conclusion that Linnenmann 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. Lindenman also makes estimates
on how many German homes the British could destroy. Other
(20:19):
experts in the government critics of strategic bombing point out
immediately that Lindemann's numbers are ridiculous, five or six times
too high, based on obvious errors. Doesn't matter. Remember what
one of Lindenman's friends said, he would not shrink from
using an argument which he knew to be wrong, if
(20:40):
by so doing he could tie up one of his
professional opponents. Lindenman wanted strategic bombing, so Churchill went ahead
and ordered the bombing of German cities.
Speaker 3 (20:52):
No one had ever thought how these bomber forces were
really to be used. It was just an act of faith.
This was a way to fight a war. And I
think it's fair to say that Lindermann was with as
usual extreme intensity, as committed to this faith as any
men in England.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
So what happened? Most historians agree that strategic bombing was
a disaster. One hundred and 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
(21:32):
to the bitter end. After the war, the Nobel Prize
winning physicist Patrick Blackett wrote a devastating essay where he
said that the war could have been won six months
or even a year earlier, if only the British should
use their bombers more intelligently. There should have been a
proper debate about strategic bombing in the British war. Cabinet
(21:54):
numbers should have been scrutinized, hard questions should have been asked.
But how can you 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
(22:14):
you can't see them.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
Cherwell was a loner. He had no one in his
life he loved except I think Churchill.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Motusary 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 Cherwell she
is referring to is Frederick Lindeman. In nineteen forty one,
(22:46):
Churchill gave him a peerage, Lord Cherwell. Mukuji prefers to
call him by his formal name. When I got obsessed
with Lindenman, Mukujie's book was the last one I read
and maybe the most important. If you think of C. P.
Snow's lecture as chapter one in the Frederick Lindeman Winston
Churchill Love Story, Mukerjee's book is the final pressing chapter
(23:10):
It was.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
Clearly the only person he ever loved in his life.
There was no one else.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
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
of soldiers to fight the Germans.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
At the entire industrial production, the entire cloth production, wool, silk, timber,
you name it, it was being used for the war.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
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 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.
(24:03):
Now they can't. The British are terrified that japan will
invade India until they order a score earth policy. All
along the northeastern border and coast, they destroy stocks of rice, boats, bicycles,
anything they think that might help the Japanese if they invade.
Then there's a cyclone twenty foot storm surge kills thirty
(24:24):
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 sores. Speculators step in and start
hoarding rice. That's exactly how famines start.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
What you have is by the end of nineteen forty
two you have the Vicero of India making fervent pleas
to the wark Eminet in London for imports of wheat.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
The police 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 sure there are enough food
and supplies for England and its allies. Lindemann 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.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Throughout the spring of nineteen forty three. The Viceroy is saying,
we absolutely need this, we absolutely need this food, and
Turwi is saying we can't spare the ships. We can't
spare the ships.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
But Mukuji wonders is that true. Was Lindaman 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
opened in sixty years, and she finds out that the
British had lots of food in nineteen forty three, huge stockpiles,
(25:52):
so much that the Americans, who were the source of
a lot of that food, got suspicious that the British
were hoarding surplus weak to sell when the war was over.
And what about the UK's supposed shortage of boats. Mukuji says,
there was one at the beginning of nineteen forty three,
when German and submarines were still wreaking havoc in the Atlantic,
(26:12):
but not by the end of that year, the US
starts sending over so many ships that by late nineteen
forty three, when the faminin 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
shipping wheat from Australia up through the Indian Ocean, just
(26:33):
not to India.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
There'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.
Speaker 1 (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.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
So you have a situation in which India is starving.
There are corpses on the streets of Calcutta.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
So why why is Lindenmann refusing to help? It doesn't
even make 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. Lindenmann seems completely unmoved
(27:36):
by India's plight. 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
(28:00):
have too many babies. Now, remember Lindaman's a physicists 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
(28:22):
about Britain's moral obligations to one of its most important allies.
It's tempting to put this down 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 lind him in here.
(28:43):
I think we're seeing Churchill. Churchill is the one with
an issue about India. He's obsessed with India. In the
years leading up to the war. Gandhi is building his
independence movement within India, and Churchill hates Gandhy. Churchill is
furious about the fact that Britain has to buy raw
materials from India, meaning that the Master is running up
(29:06):
a debt with its supposed subject. The British cabinet minister
in London who's responsible for India is a man named
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.
(29:28):
At another point he writes of Churchill, I am by
no means sure that whether on this subject of India,
he is really quite sane. So why was Lindenman so
adamant that England could not help India? Because Churchill was
adamant that England could not help India, and Lindaman was
(29:49):
a loyal.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Friend, Churwell would send Churchill these minutes. They had to
be no longer than ten lines long, and 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
(30:12):
Transport had warned that they'd be violent cataclysms in the
economies of the Indian Ocean area. None of 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.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
Why don't we spend more time thinking about friends at politicians?
I'll never understand it. We go through lengthy election seasons
where we endlessly scrutinize all the people running for public office.
We look at the candidates, their beliefs, their background, the
clothes they wear. We look at them. But then after
the election is over, we realize we didn't just elect
(31:00):
that candidate. Because no one governs alone. Eventually, leaders get overwhelmed.
At a certain point. 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,
(31:23):
the friends should all have to debate each other, but
they don't. Friends get a pass. In his lecture, CP
Snow called this court politics.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
The Linderman Churchill relation is the most fascinating example of
court politics that we're likely to see.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
People called Linderman the prof. Sometimes that was said with affection,
sometimes with bewilderment.
Speaker 3 (31:52):
I still can hear friend of mine, man who's normally
very tough 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?
Speaker 1 (32:10):
May the best guest of how many 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
(32:33):
to consider and I'm quoting Her Majesty's 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.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Churchill's sixth volume History of the War was kind of
a primary reference for historians of at least a generation.
He made no mention of the famine. It just sort
of got one mention in an appendix.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
In six volumes. There is one mentioned in an appendix of.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
The 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.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
No one in London was interested in telling the real
story of what happened, and Churchill and Lindemann had no
interest in talking about it either. They decided to keep
it all between friends. Revision's History is produced by Miel
(33:47):
LaBelle and Jacob Smith, with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel and
Siomara Martinez White. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flon Williams
is our engineer. Original music by Luis Sciarra. Special thanks
to Andy Bauers and Jacob Weisberger Panople. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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