| BBC Radio recently recalled the Famine imposed by Britain on Bengal 1942 and the banning of the term “Famine” from the media when the streets of Calcutta and other places were piling up with starving bodies. It is calculated that between 3,000,000 and 5,000,000 “native” human beings perished there in one year of British rule, whereas Britain suffered just under 251,000 fatal casualties, military and civil combined in nearly six years of conflict. |
Total American fatalities in the war were less than 700,000.
The famine was partly a war measure to deny Japanese troops the wherewithal to feed themselves if they invaded from Burma.
However a not inconsiderable factor was the oft expressed contempt and visceral hatred which Winston Churchill had for Indians, and, incidentally those Irish he could not bend to his will. Spitfire Paddies were more to his taste as he memorably declared in his mean-minded broadcast on VE Day!
Irish voters had established a sovereign state at the ballot box, and like most of the states which got embroiled in the war did not only not do so willingly, nor at all, at all. For this the British resolved to punish them if the Germans made any landing in Ireland, North or South. An RAF Squadron at Feltwell in Norfolk was equipped to spray Mustard Gas and another Chemical (Phosgene?) produced by the War Office at Porton Down, on Jew and Gentile, Orange and Green, Infant and Geriatric inflicting a horrible death, of the type gleefully inflicted by Churchill on Bolsheviks in 1919.
The Germans occupied the Atlantic Coast of Europe from the North of Norway to France’s border with Spain, from mid 1940 for nearly five years, and the British had never contemplated using such weapons there.
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