23. The Dark Side of Churchill
The Irish Famine was not the most lethal famine to occur because of the ineptness of British rulers. A deadlier one occurred in India during WWII, thanks in large part to Winston Churchill. Britain’s greatest wartime leader, Churchill was one of the twentieth century’s giants and a hero of the modern era. He is rightly celebrated for his tenacity and steadfastness in the war’s early years, when he rallied a reeling Britain and kept it in the fight against Nazi Germany – the first step in the Third Reich’s defeat.
However, Churchill was a complex man, and there was far more to him than the year or so when he and Britain held the line against the Nazis, until joined by the USSR and USA. The man had a dark side. During a public career that lasted more than half a century, Churchill had no shortage of missteps, or outright villainous misdeeds, that contrast jarringly with the nobility of his heroics against Hitler. One such misdeed was the decisions he took during WWII regarding food distribution in India, which led directly to the deaths of about three million people in Bengal.