regime. His hope was well on the way to fulfillment. The Americans could now be depended upon to finish off the Japanese. And, as an ally, he could demand quantities of arms from Washington, which he would hoard against the coming showdown with the Communists.
Chiang’s strategy may not have been heroic, but it was realistic and practical. And it fitted not only the outlook of the generals and the Kuomintang but also the sentiment of Chinese people who were genuinely warweary. But to the outside world, Chiang’s propagandists represented China as militant and heroic.
Stilwell believed that by bargaining, engaging in a quid pro quo exchange of American military equipment for Chinese offensive action, he might be able to activate the Chiang regime. I was of the same opinion. The General’s control over lend-lease supplies entering China seemingly gave him a strong bargaining counter. But the White House—Roosevelt and his assistants Harry Hopkins and Lauchlin Currie—was early in the war sentimental about China and disinclined to place any conditions on aid to that country. Materiel assistance to China was in any event only a trickle in 1942 and 1943 because of limited production, the competing requests from our fighting allies, the British and the Russians, and after the loss of Burma, the tonnage limitations of what could be airlifted into China.
Unable at this stage to bargain, Stilwell offered inducements to action—he would train, organize, and, as American materiel became available, equip a modern army for the Generalissimo. He persuaded Chiang to let him begin with the Chinese troops which retreated from Burma into India. He also offered a program to bring up to strength, train, and equip 30 reorganized divisions. This was accepted and gotten under way. Whereupon Stilwell presented plans for another 30 divisions, followed late in 1943 by an offer for a third 30 divisions. With 90 such divisions Chiang should be able not only to expel the Japanese but also secure his domestic supremacy after the war.
CHAPTER VI
A MOMENT WITH MR. GANDHI
Writing from New Delhi to the young woman in Washington whom I would later marry, I reported in April 1942 that
Since leaving Chungking I have had trouble with my eyes—infection. So yesterday night after I arrived I went to a specialist recommended by the hotel, Dr. T. K. Uttam Singh, D.O.M.S. (London). First he wanted to sell me spectacles. Then he turned back both my eyelids and announced with profound spiritual detachment that I had trachoma. So I sat down in a rattan chair, tilted my head back and he painted my eyes with 2% silver nitrate caustic solution. That was about 4:40. At 5:30 my eyes ceased to feel as if hot cinders were in them, and I could see.
But in the interim we had a most profitable conversation. It started, of course, on the Cripps-Congress negotiations and ended with the identification of oneself with God through casting out, in the order of increasing difficulty, desire, hate, greed and the sense of personal identity—the ego. En route, we touched upon the cycle through which India has passed and is passing: six thousand years in which she was the most advanced and the dominant nation in the world, then the past two thousand in which she had slept through an evil epoch, and now coming up to a golden age in which India will lead the rest of the world.
Tomorrow morning I’m going to a plain, unimaginative, wicked, whiskey-drinking doctor to find out whether I really have trachoma. In any event, what if I do. We Americans have a health fetish. Disease is like war—it’s normal. It’s a nuisance and uncomfortable and requires a lot of fussing, but it’s good for your character, mellows you. That is, if you get over it.
I got over mine, which was no more than acute conjunctivitis.
India was to me a vast unknown when I had first passed through it a month earlier on my way to Burma and China. To be sure I was acquainted with Mowgli and Gunga Din and had even read E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. But beyond that I was ignorant of this manifold land.
Most Americans were uninterested in India, except as they imagined it—a freakish place inhabited by snake-charmers, practitioners of the rope trick, starving untouchables, bejeweled maharajahs, and widows flinging themselves in suttee on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Even in places where one might expect to encounter a fund of solid information there were some gaps. I remember Dean Rusk saying later that shortly after Pearl Harbor, as an earnest reserve officer at the War Department, he endeavored to learn about India. He asked for the military intelligence files on that country. He was handed a single folder in which reposed one old newspaper clipping and a National Geographic map of that part of the world on which someone had stamped SECRET.
The American high command, however slightly informed about India, came to regard that country as an important factor in the war against Japan. In the spring of 1942, with the defense of Burma collapsing and a powerful Japanese naval task force scudding into the Bay of Bengal, fears arose that the enemy might invade India and turn that base area for the supply of China and reconquest of Burma into a battlefield.
How would the Indian people react to a Japanese invasion? The Burmese people, we were discovering, were so anti-British that, when they did not actively collaborate with the Japanese, they passively accepted the invaders as new conquerors replacing the old. Would this happen in India? And even if the enemy did not invade, how would the anti-British feeling prevalent among Indians develop and affect us Americans? Would we, as allies and guests of the British in India, be enveloped in the hostility of a population hating its waning colonial rulers more than the new imperialism surging out of the east? We did not have the answers.
The salient facts about the India of 1942 were imposing. It was big, including what are now Pakistan and Bangladesh. Larger than Western Europe, it was referred to as a subcontinent. India was also populous, some 350 million inhabitants.
They were remarkably diverse—australoid peoples, such as the Dravidians, mainly in the south; Aryans, mostly in the north; and Mongoloids (my Naga friends, for example, whom we will learn more about later) along the northern frontiers. The diversity was most striking in the language differences, even within ethnic groups. About 1,500 languages and dialects were spoken in India.
Two of the great religions of the world, Hinduism and Buddhism, had originated in India. Islam was introduced by conquerors from the northwest and displaced Buddhism as the second most popular religion. Hindus and Muslims became inter-mingled, although the principal Muslim communities were in the northwest and northeast, while the Hindus were in the majority in the center and heavily so in the south. Other religious communities were much smaller. Among them were Sikhs, Christians, Jains, Zoroastrians, and, on the southern coast, the remnants of a Jewish colony.
It was evident in 1942 that the two major communities did not enjoy an unruffled relationship. Religious animosities sometimes flared into bloody communal rioting. Furthermore, Muslims, who were generally poorer than Hindus, resented what they believed was Hindu economic discrimination against them.
Cleavages also existed within the Hindu community. They were the rigid, hereditary differences among the four principal castes and also between those within the caste system and those outside of it—the untouchables, pariahs.
The paramount authority in India was the Viceroy, representing George VI, who, while only King of England, etc., was Emperor of India. The British wisely had not tried to impose their administration over all of India. They directly governed the 17 provinces of British India. But they allowed a constellation of native states, from tiny to big, varying degrees of autonomy so long as the rajahs, maharajahs, and other princelings, however called, acknowledged the British raj.
The instrument of British rule was the Government of India. It administered British India and supervised, usually lightly, the states. The GOI was run by several hundred Britons who occupied the controlling positions. Nearly all were members of the ICS, the Indian
