WINSTON CHURCHILL, 1942 SOME STILL DOUBTED THAT THE JAPANESE could pull it off. Nirad Chaudhuri, for example, was now working for All-India Radio in Delhi, as part of the Allied propaganda effort. “Before I left Calcutta I felt sure that the Japanese would not attempt an invasion of eastern India from Burma,” he wrote years later.*112 Even the news of the disastrous sinkings of British ships in the Indian Ocean, which delighted his anti-British Bengali friends, did not faze him. He sensed that a Japanese landing would bring not a massive uprising against the Raj but only more fleeing refugees.1 Since 1940 Chaudhuri had come to admire Winston Churchill for his single-minded and single-handed struggle against the Nazis, whom Chaudhuri saw as genuinely evil compared to India’s British masters, with their relatively mild flaws. But even Chaudhuri had to wonder. “It is not easy,” Churchill had written to FDR, “to assign limits to the Japanese aggression.”2 If the Japanese were free to roam the Indian Ocean at will, how long would it be before the British would have to abandon India in order to protect their interests elsewhere?
