Hi I’m the History Guy. I have a degree in history and I love history,
and if you love history too, this is the channel for you.
One of the grim tasks for a historian is accounting for the cost of human endeavors.
The Second World War was the deadliest conflict in human history, killing by some estimates as
much as four percent of the world's population of 1940, or four out of every hundred people alive at
the time. Some people might be surprised to find out that less than a third of those losses were
combatants, the soldiers, sailors and airmen who were fighting the conflict. But there were also
those civilians who were killed as a result of combat, like the forty thousand Britons
that died in the Battle of Britain, the dreaded blitz, or the ten times that number that died in
Europe as a result of allied strategic bombing. A staggering estimated 10 million Russian civilians
died as result of combat activities in the Soviet Union. Then there are those civilians that are
killed by deliberate crimes against humanity, like the five to six million Jews that were killed in
Hitler's Holocaust. But least remembered, are those civilians that died not because of bombs
and bullets, but died of disease and starvation as a result of war. Wars destroy cities, they destroy
factories, farms, homes, they cause mass migration and refugees who lose access to shelter, to food,
to clean water. In the Second World War as many as 28 million civilians died not by bullets and
bombs, but by rot. And a forgotten example of that was the 2 million Indians who died in the
1943 Bengal famine. A part of the world that was barely touched by combat, but devastated by
war. It is not easy history to discuss, but it is history that needs to be remembered.
Famine was not new to the subcontinent, the nature of the soil and land meant that agriculture was
particularly susceptible to climate. Some of the earliest documents of Indian history,
the writing on the Pillars of Ashoka, document famine in writings dating back to more than 200
years BCE. Some estimates suggest that there was a major famine in pre-colonial India,
approximately every 40 years. But famine became more common and more severe in the
period of British rule. There are many reasons for this, largely economic, with the development
of cash crops like indigo and opium pushing out food production being the most common
explanation. The impacts of these famines were greatly exaggerated by failings of government,
sometimes overwhelmed by events, other times the result of apathy, or even antipathy to the
population. Some 60 million Indians died due to famine in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.
But lessons were learned in the 1880s, the British government created famine
codes which were designed to predict, and thus prevent, mass famine events. The system failed,
there were mass famines again in 1897, and then again in 1899, but by the 20th century it seemed
like the government finally had a handle on it. There was a risk of famine in 1901,
but there wasn't another major famine event in the 20th century...until 1943.
The Bengal presidency was the largest colonial subdivision of British India, with its capital
in Calcutta. The population in Bengal was already stressed before the events of the Second World
War. Population had grown but agriculture was stagnant. Agriculture was not modernized,
depending upon regular monsoon rainfall, for example, rather than controlled irrigation,
and the land productivity was among the lowest in the world. In the 20th century
the province had become dependent upon imports of food, mostly rice from Burma,
for a small but necessary part of its diet. In the face of shortage, consumption had decreased,
and by the 1930s, the diet in Bengal was estimated to be amongst the least nutritious
in the world. Simply put the population lived on subsistence, at the very edge of starvation.
While most previous famines have been caused by drought, the climate effect on the crop in 1942
was rain. A particularly long rainy season had resulted an extreme fungal growth during critical
stages of the rice growth cycle, a cyclone, and multiple storm surges, further destroyed
crops and spread the mold spores, as well as destroying food storage, killing thousands and
leaving thousands more homeless. The crop was reduced, there's some disagreement by how much,
maybe as little as 5% or as much as 20%, but it was plenty, given the population on the edge.
The famine was directly impacted by war, the Japanese conquest of Burma in 1942 had caused
a flood of refugees, further stressing food supply and infrastructure, while the Japanese
prevented the importation of rice from Burma. In fear of a Japanese invasion the British
confiscated or destroyed small boats that could be used by the Japanese to invade, taking away
the primary method by which food was distributed in Bengal. The arrival of thousands of soldiers,
for whom resources were prioritized, further stressed the supply. And things like new military
construction and the Japanese bombing raid on Calcutta caused market uncertainty, price shocks,
and inflation. The death came in two great waves, first was the starvation, and then the disease.
Starvation was the biggest killer in 1942, but was overtaken by disease striking those weakened by
the famine in 1943. Malaria was the biggest killer but there was also cholera, smallpox, dysentery,
and the mass migration and dislocation conditions were awful, lacking even basic sanitation. The
exact death count may never be known, records were poorly kept and migration made accounting
nearly impossible. There's no way to know how many hundreds of thousands died on the road seeking
food or assistance. Already impoverished families were destroyed, selling their few valuables first,
and then more necessary items like the doors and roofs of their houses, and finally even selling
their children. Men abandoned their families to join the army, women turned to prostitution to buy
food, families disintegrated. Government attempts at relief were insufficient and misdirected, a
good harvest in 1943 finally started to alleviate the problem, although disease continued to kill
people well into 1943. Estimates vary, but in the end what was a minor crop shortage, that should
have been alleviated, wreaked untold social harm, and killed more than 2 million people.
In the end the great tragedy of the 1943 famine is that it was preventable. The barriers that
were preventing relief for food shortages and inflation were political. The government was
distracted by war, focused on their troops. Afraid that even admitting the problem would
damage morale and pandering to special interests in order to forestall political unrest. Scholars
disagree over things like the extent of the food shortage, and the relative importance of inflation
versus poor distribution, but they generally agreed that the famine could have been prevented
with resources that were available at the time. From 1942 to 1944, the Indian government begged
the British War Cabinet for food assistance, and the cabinet refused all requests, or reduced
them to the point of being insubstantial. The British War Cabinet even refused offers
of aid from foreign governments, arguing that there was a lack of Allied shipping available,
despite the fact that millions of tons of shipping were going by India every day on their way to the
Mediterranean. Even just a few food shipments could have stabilized food prices, but in the
wartime calculations of the British War Cabinet, the starving poor of Bengal province were at the
bottom. There was so much apathy that there's some argument that it might have been antipathy,
that the deaths might have been deliberate. The extent to which the cabinet ignored the problem is
difficult to discount, and certainly the British mistrusted the population of Bengal province,
which they saw as a hotbed of resistance to British rule. Transcripts of cabinet
meetings at the time showed a shocking lack of respect for the Indian people. Ironically,
many scholars argue that it was the famine of 1943 that made the collapse of the Raj inevitable,
as it galvanized the Indian Independence Movement. But other scholars argue that the extent to which
Allied shipping was being sunk by Axis powers in the Indian Ocean explains the lack of action by
the British War Cabinet. And a review afterwards, largely exonerated the War Cabinet and faulted
the government of Bengal province for failure to act at critical points. There are still droughts
in India, and there's a chronic problem with malnutrition, but there hasn't been another
major famine event since 1943. While agriculture and infrastructure had been upgraded in that time,
most observers agree that the reason that there aren't famines anymore in India is
largely political. Simply put, democracy and a Free Press, facilitate better assistance and
have destroyed the barriers that allowed regional food shortages under the British Raj, to turn into
mass famine and death. The more than 2 million Indians that died in the Bengal famine of 1943
are pretty much forgotten in the context of the more than 60 million people who died in the Second
World War. I mean after all people were dying all over people, were starving all over, in Russia,
in China, in French Indochina, in the Dutch East Indies. But that does not make these more than 2
million preventable deaths less important. It is history that needs to be remembered.
I’m the History Guy and I hope you enjoyed this addition to my series, five minutes of history,
short snippets of forgotten history five to ten minutes long. And if you did enjoy it please go
ahead and click that thumbs up button that's there on your left. If you have any questions
or comments, or like to make suggestions for another topic for the History Guy,
feel free to write those in the comment section and I would be happy to respond.
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