Churchill’s Dark Side

[JasonC]

Horsefeathers. There was plenty of grain in North America, and the overall allied constraint on everything was shipping. If they had 500,000 tons more to allocate to hauls out to the Indian ocean there would not have been shortages. They didn't, because the U-boats had shipping on a shoestring until late 1943. The writer quoted above is alleging the pile up of shipping in the north Atlantic in mid to late 1943 as evidence there was no shipping shortage and that more could have been sent to the India and Pacific theater. But no, they could not have - they didn't know those ships would still exist at that point, and the pile up was unavoidable.

Quoting the relevant bits "The War Cabinet stated that ships were not available. In January 1943, Churchill moved most of the merchant ships operating in the Indian Ocean over to the Atlantic, in order to build up the United Kingdom’s stockpile of food and raw materials... Meanwhile, the United Kingdom’s stockpile of food and raw materials, intended for shoring up the postwar British economy, reached 18.5 million tons, the highest ever."

Without a word about the merchant fleet in the north Altantic evaporating on a half life of six months when the January decision referred to occurred, or the stockpiling in England in 1943 being the result of the rate of sinkings falling off first by half by mid summer, and to practically zero later in the year. That is why the fleet that looked barely safe in January, proved over abundant in December.

It is a typical axe grinding slander. The men responsible for the starvation in India were the Japanese in Burma and the Germans in U-boats. But the Hindu nationalist would rather blame the men protecting his ungrateful backside...